Vulnerability
An online dictionary says that vulnerability is the quality of being easily hurt or attacked. I’d venture to say that both you and I feel vulnerable often. As children, we were easy targets. As adults, we’re still sorting through what is actual harm that may come to us and what is trigger or perceived harm rooted in past experiences.
Someone gave me a poem last week that began:
All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do
was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered
to the four corners or swept away by the smallest breath
as insubstantial —
and I immediately related to the times when parts of me felt like dust, like dirt, like a speck on the floor without worth or power, like the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable, like the unseen and unknown, like nothing. How diminishing to live as dust and to believe oneself as worthless.
It may not surprise you that even people whose minds were not fragmented as children experience vulnerability. War, domestic violence, bigotry, and racism all set the stage for potential harm in the strongest and most cohesive minds. Being human makes us vulnerable. Our physical bodies, our psyches, even our very lives are prone to harm. All of us are part of a community of vulnerable people who struggle each day to stay safe, find worth, and become whole.
Yes, in spite of our vulnerabilities, we become something, we become someone(s), we make a difference. We wake up each morning, tend to a family, or go to work. We write in our journal, paint a picture, or dance a dance. We lay ourselves before a therapist, or wade through a trigger, or plumb the depths of a memory. We learn how to help ourselves, then to help someone else, and maybe to work for something we’re passionate about. Likewise, we come to love ourselves, then love another, and maybe to love the whole world. Vulnerability not withstanding, we become something!
Christians who celebrate Ash Wednesday ritualize vulnerability through the image of dust. I might suggest that we “come from dust” as the ritual says, but we are NOT dust. In spite of our vulnerabilities, we rise above and we claim our worth.
The closing of the poem above offers an alternative to vulnerability that I offer to you:
So let us be marked not for sorrow,
And let us be marked not for shame.
Let us be marked not for false humility
or for thinking we are less than we are
but for claiming what God* can do
within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff
of which the world is made
and the stars that blaze in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.**
* If the word God doesn’t work for you, insert another word like “higher power,” “my healing,” or simply “I”.
** “Blessing the Dust” from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons.
🕊️
Vulnerability is not weakeness.
~ Brene Brown
Lyn