From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:44 — 6.2MB)
Subscribe: More
Who are the most vulnerable people you know—both individually and because they hold identities which are marginalized and dismissed by powers and principalities? In the current state of world affairs, the number of communities which are vulnerable to mistreatment and disrespect—if not violence and oppression—seems to grow daily. I’m not even going to start the list because I fear it will never end.
Instead, I’ll say what may be obvious: living in a constant state of physical and emotional vulnerability is exhausting, and at some point becomes traumatic.
The kind of vulnerability that is popular to lift up in sermons and spiritual writing is individualistic: we want to embrace this vulnerability, welcoming it as a teacher and friend so that our lives can be more authentic. But it’s one thing to embrace episodic vulnerability as a choice, to be authentic with our feelings and take risks in situations that will eventually change when circumstances change.
But some people are born into and constantly live with vulnerability, steeped in the cruelty that often comes with power imbalances, wherein powerful ones deny the very humanity of vulnerable ones. For marginalized groups, another wise and self-protective choice is to do what is possible to contain the awareness of vulnerability, and go on with life despite vulnerability’s relentless presence.
In the areas of my life where I am most vulnerable, when people who live outside of my sphere of risk speak to me about my vulnerability it’s been clear that we might feel things very differently. For instance, after Matthew Shepard was violently murdered in a homophobic hate crime, a heterosexual friend came to me with tears in her eyes and said, “This is horrible! We can never let this happen again! Are you afraid? How do you do the public work you do for GLBT rights? I’m scared for you!”
All I could do was smile and awkwardly pat her arm. I was glad my friend was upset, and that she wanted to try to stop such things from happening again, but I could not allow myself to feel the pain she felt about it. If I opened to that pain, it would have been difficult to deal with it day after day. From my vantage point, Shepard’s gender/race/class privilege was central to the story, because for me the only new part of this story was that this murder got media attention when so many others I knew about did not.
For my friend, none of that was even visible, because my daily context of violence was invisible to her.
One of the ways in which power imbalances become clear in groups is when privileged individuals expect our vulnerabilities, real as they might be, to be central to what must be discussed when we are in rooms full of people living with systemic, daily, life-threatening vulnerabilities. We’ve all been in that room. A man begins to cry because women have shared that we look at every man on the street as a potential rapist. He wants us to stop and pay attention because he is feeling hurt. His individuality is not being seen; he is not a rapist. But women have just shared the life-threatening terror of walking on the street every day, and instead the room is talking about his hurt feelings.
As a white person, I often feel sensitive in rooms where we are talking about race and racism and its impact. I’ve learned, though, that in multicultural groups it’s a betrayal of the profound vulnerability of others in the room to share my pain. People of color, who have inherited the traumas of historic oppression, continue to suffer because of systemic racism daily. It betrays our collective humanity to centralize my own pain and ask people of color to help me take care of it.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t feel my own pain. It means that I look around the room and see who else is there and what they are dealing with. It means that we focus on those who are most vulnerable, whose truths are least witnessed in the world. I may not have owned slaves, or stolen land, but I have inherited the worldview of those who did, in a country where all laws, customs, and economics were created to benefit people like me.
I swim in a sea of white supremacy that is so vast and pervasive and cunning that I will never fully comprehend its grip on me and on the world. It’s important for me to have white people with whom to wrestle with my own thoughts and feelings as I try to be a little more conscious, even as I acknowledge that people of color are the experts on the subject and the ones I can learn most from.
It’s just plain hard to be a human being and live a human life. Can we just agree on that? All of us are vulnerable to illness, and loss, and being hurt by people we thought we could trust. All of us do things we wish we wouldn’t, and have things happen to us that aren’t our fault, but which impact our lives. All of us will disappoint the people we love, and betray our own deepest values.
Life is hard. Part of trying not to make anyone else’s life any harder is being conscious of the ways in which our collective identities intersect with our individual ones; and sometimes, for those of us with privilege, saving our feelings for later.
- From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - June 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - May 1, 2020
