Spiritual Vulnerability
By Charles Rush
September 22, 2013
2 Corinthians 4: 8-10
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.5Mb) ]
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“For we have this treasure in clay lamps, so that it
may become clear that the extraordinary power to bless other belongs to God
and shines through us. We may be afflicted in every way, but we are not
crushed; at times we may become perplexed, but we are not driven to despair;
we may endure persecution, but we are not forsaken. We carry in our very
lives, so to speak, the death of Jesus, so that the life giving wonder of
Jesus might also shine through us… So death is at work all around us and in
the midst of it life also.”
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rmann Hesse wrote an interesting book on the broad spiritual scope of our lives called Siddhartha. We are born into fragility and the earliest phase of our lives is all about developing self-reliance and independence. So children celebrate their every athletic achievement, their every intellectual mastery.
Right now, one
of my granddaughters, Lily, aged under 2, has just
figured out how to put a block into basket. If I take her to the completely messy
basement where her siblings have been playing, she will pick up each and every
block if I applaud. Over and over and over -- because I can.
Shortly after
we've become competent in independence, our spiritual attention is absorbed in
relatedness. We want to become romantically involved. We may have many
identities during adolescence but none is more important than being our sexy
self. We become increasingly absorbed in finding someone to love. Whether we
are successful or not, the quest and our reflection upon it, occupy an
inordinate amount of our time and energy.
I remember one
of our sons wearing a shirt that his mother detested. She commented on it
several times to no avail. One day I notice that it is in the back part of his
closet and I made some remark about it off the cuff. He responds, ‘Well, Rachel
doesn't like it.'
I'm walking
away, ‘Thank you Rachel'. Every couple has the conversation about a couple needed changes in their
children right after they graduate from college, something you wish they would
change about themselves. And one of the two of you say,
“only a spouse will actually be successful at changing this.”
And then, we
become involved in community. We develop our careers. We start families. We
accumulate assets and power. We lead and try to shape our world so that it is a
better place, a place where we can grow and thrive. If we are skillful and
lucky, we extend our scope of significance, like Mayor Bloomberg who turned his
considerable fortune in business into running New York City so that he has a
legacy that will outlive him and impact people way beyond his family. And if
you stumble upon something that turns out to make history like Martin Luther
did, you not only impact your generation, you enter the lexicon of history,
making epochal change in our world.
During this
phase of our lives, we experience contingency from the other side of childhood.
We know success. We have influence. We have people that depend on us. We
experience vulnerability in a new way. I remember being in Italy one summer
when my children had just started college. Kate was in the market and I was
waiting for her in the car, when I became light headed and knew I was going to
faint. In just a second of time, I thought myself, I'm having a heart attack
and I'm trying to figure out how to say ‘take me to the hospital in Italian'. I
only had a few seconds left before I lost consciousness and you know what my
final thought was? So typical of middle age… I said to
myself, “I can't afford to die”. My
obligations outweighed my assets. No ‘Dear Kate, I love you so much…' No
profound reflection as a Man of God. I can't afford this right now.
People depend
upon us. And the more people depend upon us, the more we interiorize this. I
was interested to learn that President Obama makes a habit of reading a few
letters every evening that ordinary citizens write to him. One of the reporters
that covered the story was a little incredulous, a little cynical, how could
the President actually care about a widow in Spokane, Washington. It's funny. I
thought to myself, “I bet that is right.” I bet that when you become President
of the United States, you actually start to care more about that widow in
Spokane. I bet that the human side of the President feels more responsible for ordinary
people and he should. I bet that a thoughtful staff works at it to keep him in
touch with the humane part of himself in the midst of a whirl of meetings and
competing agendas among the powerful in Washington.
In mid-life, we
start to come into regular contact with vulnerability, the broader and deeper
our sense of impact, the more richly we probably interiorize it, reflect on it,
even if with only a couple other people in our lives, at least we reflect on it
with ourselves.
Marcus Aurelius
actually reflected on it because he wrote a diary regularly. His reflections
are interesting, partly because he wrote them when he was the Emperor of Rome.
He was a fantastically successful General and became Emperor right
when Rome was at the height of its power and world influence. Up to that point
in history, he had the biggest, best job in human history and commanded more
power than anyone ever had.
He would
intentionally take some time in the early mornings on a regular basis, withdraw
from the public and write, so that he could think about his life and what was
important. What he keeps coming back to in his meditations is how fleeting
power, fame and influence really are in his life.
This is a man
that routinely attended banquets with the finest catering and wine that the
Empire could offer. He personally possessed more money than anyone else in the
world. He was surrounded by beauty and could indulge any of his lusty
appetites. Because he was so successful as a General
and then as Emperor, he could exercise power and almost literally do anything
that he wanted to do.
And when he
reflected on it, he would say to himself, none of this is really real. In a
short amount of time, I will retire from this whole world and it will all disappear,
the country estates, the sychophants around me that
answer my beck and call, the intoxicating sense of power that comes from
victory. All of it has been great and obviously he wanted to be there because
that is where he carefully positioned himself to be. But even as he was in the
midst of it, spiritually speaking, he was reflecting on the fact that it
doesn't last. It is not an end in itself.
What he
recognized. What will last is his character. What he will have to live with is
himself. He realized that all of our life, spiritually speaking, is about us
growing and realizing our character. We may have influence over the wide world
or we might find ourselves with a fairly modest range of influence over just
our extended families in the remote village where we were born. But what binds
us all together is the spiritual quest we have to become integrated people,
substantive people with sturdy character.
He loved the
finer things that this world has to offer but he knew that they could easily
distract him from what is really real. The private jet will do just that. The
trophy boyfriend will do just that. Being surrounded with people that tell you you are awesome will do that. We are just more
sophisticated versions of those lab rats that keep hitting the bar in their
cage to give them a jolt of ecstasy so that they keep hitting bar over and over
until they are soaked with sweat, strained from fatigue, with blood shot eyes.
We are capable of becoming completely absorbed in our indulgences and
functionally distracted from what is real for years unto decades in the middle
part of our life.
But not forever… Because eventually, we are forced, if we
live long enough, to enter the next phase of our life, closer to retirement
age… We enter the season of life when people around us start to die. I was
talking to a friend recently, aged 70 or so, a physician in town. I asked him
how he was doing and he started off with the polite, “Good, Chuck… every thing is well… except I, I, I spend too much time
going to funerals.
It is no longer
that you might lose something. You do lose something. Spiritually, you
interiorize this in a different way. It is one thing, when you hear prayer
concerns about people with cancer. It is another thing altogether when your
sister has it. Those health bombs start exploding too close to home for you to
ignore them. Now you start to celebrate the wonder and mystery of our precious
life right in the midst of suffering and death.
When we started
asking people about when they felt vulnerable, they didn't answer with situations
in their lives when they felt precarious like the year they didn't have enough
money to cover taxes and tuition or taking a job that was really over their
heads or buying a house they weren't sure they could afford.
Mostly, they
described the times in their lives when they were spiritually vulnerable. One
woman said, “I feel vulnerable standing over my children while they are
sleeping.”
One man said,
“It was when I told my wife just how much I loved her.”
Another man
said, “When I start counting my blessings and realize just how great my life
has been to live.”
A woman said, “I
struggled with my career for quite a while and when I finally found the job I
was meant to do, when it was really the perfect fit for me and I looked forward
to showing up each and every day.”
Another man
said, “I felt the most vulnerable leaving my doctors office after a prolonged
series of treatments for cancer. The Doctor was looking at a handful of paper
sheets with tests on them and he said to me, ‘you are in remission'. It didn't
hit me at first, but walking away after my prayers came true and I got the
answer I hoped for, I felt like light headed and vulnerable like it swept over
me and I couldn't keep my tears away.”[i]
Another woman
said, “I was watching my father play with my children. He was so happy, a kind
of joy that in his face that I don't think I had ever really seen him express
before that. He didn't know I was watching and my kids were just being
unabashedly children. It was sort of a perfect moment and I suddenly felt
overwhelmed with gratitude and fragility at the same time. I loved it and it
scared me too.
It is the moments of our lives
when we feel most ‘alive', when grace kind of pours over us and we realize that
we are in the midst of a blessing and that our lives have become this great
blessing. Our souls are becoming more concentrated in love and for a moment we
radiate grace. It is a quiet, personal “Aha, this is what my life is really
about after all.”
It was said of
Moses that his face shined because he had been in the presence of God. It was
said of the Buddha that he appeared to have attained peaceful serenity. It was
said of Mohammed that he was completely surrendered to God. It was said of
Jesus that he was God's Son. What they shared in common was this radiance from
the center of their lives, what Gandhi described as the ‘soul force'.
And that is what
I hope for you. I hope that your outer skin will only be as thick as it is
necessary for you be to negotiate the threats and negativity that we must engage
in this world. I hope for you the ability to let your character strengthen, for
your soul to become concentrated with divine love. I hope for you that you will
be able to radiate to others that your life will become an effulgent blessing
and that you will heal those around you. I hope that as you grow in
authenticity, you will become thin and transparent. “For we have this treasure
in clay lamps, so that it may become clear that the extraordinary power to
bless other belongs to God and shines through us. We may be afflicted in every
way, but we are not crushed; at times we may become perplexed, but we are not
driven to despair; we may endure persecution, but we are not forsaken. We carry
in our very lives, so to speak, the death of Jesus, so that the life giving
wonder of Jesus might also shine through us… So death is at work all around us
and in the midst of it life also.”
