To Be Alive is to Be Vulnerable ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 5, 2023
We have learned a lot these past three years. We’ve learned some science, and some medicine. We’ve learned a lot about our economy, and how dependent we are on the global supply chain. We learned how to Zoom! And we have learned, sadly, that not everyone is willing to put other peoples’ needs ahead of their own. We have witnessed anger boiling over into the streets, some of it justified; some of it demanding justice for the marginalized, and some of it demanding getting our own way.
As these years of the pandemic have unfolded, we have been required to adapt, to do things differently, to think about our way of life differently. And we have been called upon, over and over, to assess the most mundane aspects of our lives, to decide whether or not daily activities are too risky for us.
Three years ago this month it became unsafe to do virtually anything. I had a sudden memory of being out for a walk, which felt like one of the only safe things we could do, and suddenly veering up someone’s driveway to make room on the sidewalk for another walker. It didn’t feel safe to pass others on the sidewalk.
Much of our lives was governed by fear, and that is never a healthy response. Fear, after all, is what leads us to hatred.
As time has passed, we have been required to consider the risk of just about everything we’ve had to do, from attending worship, to buying groceries to eating in restaurants. One of the things we discovered was that we are wildly different in our tolerance of risks. There was very little consensus about what is safe, what should be allowed. Should people be forced to receive vaccinations? When is it OK to travel? Life became, and remains, a daily question mark, a series of important decisions, of trying to find facts to guide us, but often having to move forward based solely on our instincts.
We have been constantly aware of risk, and as a result, aware every day of our vulnerability.
Maybe some of us discovered that we could tolerate more risk than we realized. Maybe some of us found we could tolerate less.
Perhaps the only thing that unites us across this spectrum of risk tolerance is that each and every one of us has been forced to confront these questions, and to respond to the situation. We have all been changing, evolving, forced to adapt to even the most basic things. And there have been many times when we wished that it would all stop. It would have been so nice to be turtles, to be able to pull our heads into our shells and wait for the danger to pass over us, wait for life to return to normal, to not have to change or adapt, but simply to wait.
But circumstances these past three years have called us to be more nimble than that, to be agile. In other words, to find our way by acting more like the octopus – hiding when necessary, using our large brains, solving problems, even though we were vulnerable daily, at risk.
The turtle response is governed by fear. The octopus response; the more open and challenging response, is governed by love. When I call this love, I mean the force of life that is generative, nourishing, that calls us forward and encourages us to grow.
The response guided by love calls us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. One of the great paradoxes of life is that in vulnerability there is protection. Our sense of vulnerability forced us in these past few years to change and to grow, to respond to the force of love. Had we acted like turtles we may never have been able to evolve, to find new ways of living our lives. And that would have weakened us. As an example, I’m thinking of churches I have heard about that held no Sunday services for two years, because they didn’t think they could figure out Zoom.
This paradox of vulnerability holds true in many aspects of our lives; in our community lives and in our emotional lives.
I have found myself thinking a great deal in recent days about risk and vulnerability in community life. Public life can feel dangerous these days, between the openly expressed hatred aimed at people of color, at LGBTQ+ people, especially lately, transgender people, and at Jewish people, to name three groups. There is a large segment of society that fears change, that wants to cling to their view of normal, of what they find comfortable.
Recently white supremacist hate groups declared Saturday, February 25 to be a National Day of Hate. This was shocking to me; first, because of the boldness with which it was announced, and second, because I had heard nothing about it. It apparently didn’t amount to much, thankfully, but the very act of announcing it is deeply troubling. I found it frightening. Actions such as this make us worried, and afraid for our safety.
Even more troubling, though, is that four days beforehand, in the early morning hours of February 21, a vandal attacked the synagogue and a number of businesses owned by people of color and LGBTQ + people in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Yes, that Portsmouth – only 33 miles from here. People awoke that day to see hate graffiti and swastika symbols spray painted on the temple and shop windows. If you’ve wondered about the existence of evil, and whether it’s active in our midst, wonder no longer. It is here. It’s emboldened.
What happened next? Well, on Friday, February 24, 10 days ago, people in the city responded with an event called “Love Blooms Here.” This was spearheaded by the assistant mayor, who happened to own one of the businesses sprayed with hate graffiti. She enlisted local florists to bring flowers to her coffee shop, Cup of Joe, and invited the public to come in, take some flowers, and deliver them to the targeted temple and businesses. Love bloomed. A line formed outside the coffee shop of people looking for flowers. The stock of flowers ran out fast, and organizers had to ask florists to bring in more. Bouquets bloomed outside the temple and the affected businesses. One of the business owners, Jen Sweatt, said, “Hate’s not going to win. Love is going to conquer over hate.” (Love Blooms in Portsmouth, February 24, 2023. https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/2023/02/24/love-blooms-in-portsmouth-after-hate-graffiti-police-warning/69935710007/)
People could have been intimidated. That, after all, is what perpetrators of these displays of hatred are trying to achieve. People could have stayed home, pulled their curtains, worried about whether it would be safe to buy coffee from Cup of Joe any more. Maybe we’d be safer driving to Starbucks at the mall. And that’s what the hatemongers want. We are meant to feel afraid, to feel vulnerable. We might decide that we are stronger if we pull our heads into our shells; stay home, stay silent. But instead, the community stepped outside, outside of their houses, outside of their comfort zones, and brought the city to life with flowers. The people formed a line down the street waiting for flowers. They let themselves become vulnerable, and as a result the community became stronger.
Our instincts might try to tell us that safety is best found in our own homes, minding our own business. But that kind of safety is illusory, just as a turtle with its head pulled into its shell might feel safe in the moment because it cannot see danger approaching. But we know better. We know now that silence is complicit, that hiding might make us feel safe in the moment, but that bit by bit, one can of spray paint at a time, our safety is being eroded. Our community life, our care of our neighbors, is where our true strength and safety lie. And if we allow that to be eaten away, we become less and less safe. And so, to protect ourselves, we step out of our comfort zones. We step toward the perceived danger.
The paradox of risk and vulnerability is present in our personal and emotional lives as well. The theologian Howard Thurman, author of this morning’s reading, put it this way:
“But I think that if you were stripped to whatever there is in you that is literal and irreducible, and you tried to answer that question, (of what is most important in your life) the answer may be something like this: I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.”
To let our guard down. To feel completely vulnerable, completely exposed…
Loving other people creates great risk in our lives. We have to step outside of our comfort zone, to lay ourselves bare. We have to offer our hearts, knowing that there is always a risk that our hearts may be broken. We might feel that we are safer alone, more in control, less likely to be hurt or exposed to grief and loss. But then, there we are, alone, closing ourselves off from new ways of being, new ways of thinking, and feeling. We might feel safe. But are we growing, and opening our hearts, and becoming who we are truly meant to be? If we ever live like that, can we ever let our guard down?
To grow, to love, to reach our human potential, we must take risks. We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to expose our hearts to others. The harder we try to protect our emotional lives, to tuck our hearts away for safekeeping, the weaker we become. We stop growing spiritually and emotionally. The more we try to protect our individual safety, the weaker the community becomes.
The question each of us has to ask ourselves, over and over, is this: is it worth it to open ourselves up, in order to be seen and understood for who we truly are, to live lives of integrity and clarity?
As we have been doing all our lives, and especially in the past three years, we are constantly assessing the risks to our physical and emotional safety. We balance fear with our human drive to grow and achieve our potential. This is the work of our lives; lifetimes of balancing, assessing, wondering what we are capable of, sometimes reaching outward, and sometimes pulling back.
Much as we have done in confronting the pandemic, we are each called to make these decisions for ourselves. No one can really answer these questions for another. But here are the questions we should always ask ourselves to guide us:
– am I able to look forward, or do I want life to return to the way it was?
– am I responding to fear, or to love?
– do I want to grow, or do I mainly want to keep myself safe?
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it this way: “let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” (Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Belonging, from the Book of Hours, I 59.)
The world needs us now more than ever. We are needed, not with our hard shells on, moving slowly around the same old pond. We are needed to be willing to be vulnerable, to be exposed, to widen our horizons and to share ourselves and our love for one another and for the world.
Just keep going, my friends, and let yourselves be guided by love.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
