From Your Minister
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Over ten million people have now watched online a 20-minute talk called “The Power of Vulnerability.” It’s a talk by Brené Brown, a researcher on the topic.
Brown’s book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead is also a mega-bestseller. The huge number of us clamoring to learn from her indicates that she has hit a deep vein of longing, both for reliable data and for help with an unavoidable fact that we all figure out sooner or later: despite all our efforts to deny and ignore it, we are vulnerable.
As system after system fails us and this planet, I think we’re coming to the end of our rope trying to be—or at least pretending to be—invulnerable.
Brown defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” Her research shows that in order to live a whole-hearted life, people must embrace their own vulnerability. And, further, that the most courageous, compassionate, loving people are also the most conscious of their own vulnerability.
What is it about genuine vulnerability in others that opens our hearts? And why does our own vulnerability terrify us so much? Again, to quote Brown, the crux of the problem is this posture: “I want to experience your vulnerability but I don’t want to be vulnerable.”
As I’ve lived through more and less vulnerable seasons in my life, I know that my greatest growth and spiritual strength has been when I am a front row witness to my own vulnerability. These times have not been easy ones, but I continue to draw from them over the years. Being my own witness has not come easily; no one taught me how to stay with my vulnerability in healthy ways back in childhood when I was most vulnerable. I’ve had to piece the ability together with help from friends, professional healers, the earth, prayer, and duct tape.
What’s interesting to me is how vulnerability might reveal itself differently for each of us. We all have unique vulnerability spectrums. For instance, public speaking is the #1 fear identified by people in survey after survey about what terrifies them. It ranks ahead of death! For me, speaking publicly—after all these years of doing it—is not super frightening. Particular situations evoke fear that I won’t have anything to say, or that I’ll botch it up somehow, but the actual act of speaking no longer brings me to my knees. (Believe me, it used to!) Over time, I’ve developed confidence there.
But to be stranded with a tech issue? That leaves me terrified! My confidence is low, and then I start to hear the mean voices in my head, voices that shame me about my vulnerability, voices that say, “You are a fraud. How can you head up an online sanctuary and be such a technological klutz?”
One of my favorite pieces of Brené Brown’s research is her data that shows how to climb out of such pits of self-loathing, comparison, or fear. She says that people who allow vulnerability to serve them as a gift learn to cultivate the conscious practice of gratitude in those vulnerable moments. I, for instance, might stop calling myself names long enough to remember how lucky I am that CLF employs a Minister of Technology, Linda Berez, to help me out, or that problems with gadgets and devices are problems of the privileged, indeed. Or remember gratefully how generous most people usually are about tech problems.
Practicing gratitude unlocks the stuck door and gets me back into life.
I’ve always intuited that gratitude is the path toward a fulfilling life, but having research documenting it makes me feel less alone in my vulnerability. As I cultivate the ability to bear sitting in the front row for my own difficult and vulnerable moments, I want to know that you are there beside me, sharing your own vulnerable and courageous journeys! To know that we are accompanying each other on journeys of vulnerability—whether from prison cell, school campus, military base, suburban home, urban loft, or mountain top—develops courage in me which is not possible to develop alone.
I see in our community, every day, your courage to live authentic, imperfect, “good enough” lives. I see your courage to risk loving what you love; to risk making mistakes and then getting back up; to risk blessing the world, when so many voices tell us nothing we do really matters. I see you making these choices and it gives me more courage to do the same myself.
So, above all, in those moments I am stuck, I call up my very deep and real gratitude for your companionship, for your care for each other and for me, for this spiritual community quilted together with scraps and fragments of daring, vulnerability, mutual care, and—despite loss, fear, grief and pain—abiding faith that we will go on.
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