Strong and Weak Read online

  And Angela certainly has the other quality that makes us uniquely human, uniquely capable of bearing the divine image. The other thing that is essential for the exercise of true power is our vulnerability.

  Two Kinds of Vulnerability

  The way I will use the word vulnerability in this book is a bit different from its usage in America today, where it is often limited to personal and emotional transparency. We live in an age of oversharing. Ordinary people and celebrities disclose all kinds of seemingly shameful or incriminating details of their lives. Indeed, some people who have become celebrities simply through the sheer volume and extravagance of their self-disclosure are praised for their “vulnerability.”

  But this is not really what I mean by the vulnerability that leads to flourishing. Instead, think of it this way: exposure to meaningful risk. Sometimes emotional transparency is indeed a meaningful risk—but not always. For one thing, what was truly vulnerable and brave in one generation can become a key to success in another. When you can acquire fame, wealth and significant cultural power by frequently appearing on screen physically naked, nakedness can become less about the exposure that human beings fear and more about the “exposure” that every would-be celebrity needs—a currency of power, not of loss.

  The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk.

  The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities, never about certainties. To risk is to open ourselves up to the chance that something will go wrong, that something will be taken from us—without knowing for sure whether that loss will come to pass or not.

  To be vulnerable is to be exposed to the possibility of loss—and not just loss of things or possessions, but loss of our own sense of self. Vulnerable at root means woundable—and any wound deeper than the most superficial scratch injures and limits not just our bodies but our very sense of self. Wounded, we are forced to become careful, tender, tentative in the way we move in the world, if we can still move on our own at all. To be vulnerable is to open oneself up to the possibility—though not the certainty—that the result of our action in the world will be a wound, something lost, potentially never to be gained again.

  Here again we need the word meaningful to do its work. We are not talking about willy-nilly risk, putting ourselves in harm’s way for no good reason. Nor are we talking about risking things we don’t care whether we keep or lose, playing poker with chips that never have to be cashed in. True vulnerability involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value. And like authority, true vulnerability involves a story—a history that shapes why we are choosing to risk and a future that makes the risk worthwhile but also holds the potential of loss coming to pass. When we expose ourselves to meaningful risk, we become vulnerable in the sense I will use the word in this book.

  So emotional transparency can be meaningful risk—or it can be calculated manipulation. An already powerful person can use what seems like emotional honesty, even tears, to win followers, avoid confrontation or sidestep accountability. If you are in a setting where emotional transparency will almost certainly win you a hearing or undermine others’ criticisms, to be emotionally transparent may indeed be the right thing to do. It may even be part of the proper exercise of your authority, a meaningful action that will contribute to your community’s story. But it is not necessarily vulnerable.

  Naked Creatures

  The very first word of Patrick Lencioni’s “business fable” Getting Naked is vulnerability. His fable tells the story of a small but unusually successful consulting firm that is swallowed up by a larger and more conventional company. The secret of the smaller firm’s success, it turns out, is vulnerability. Lencioni applies the vivid phrase “getting naked” to actions consultants can take in front of their clients that directly challenge three fears: fear of losing the business, fear of being embarrassed and fear of feeling inferior. It’s a compact catalogue of the sources of authority in the consulting world: profit, prestige and a reputation for being smarter than anyone else. Even though Lencioni agrees that consultants need to be profitable, be well regarded and bring unusual insight to the table, his fictional narrator Jack discovers that achieving those goals actually requires putting them at risk—“getting naked” by exposing oneself to the possibility of losing them all. Jack learns to make honest but difficult observations about his clients’ businesses—and perhaps more difficult, to be willing to ask “dumb questions” that reveal his own limits or ignorance.

  Nakedness is a funny thing. Of all the creatures in the world, only human beings can be naked. By adulthood, every other creature naturally possesses whatever fur, scales or hide are necessary to protect it from its environment. No other creature—even naked mole rats or Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless feline sidekick of Mike Myers’s movie villain Dr. Evil—shows any sign, in its natural state, of feeling incomplete in the way that human beings consistently do. Only human beings live our whole lives able to return to a state that renders us uniquely vulnerable, not just to nature but to one another.

  The unsettling truth is that just as human beings have more authority than any other creature, we also have more vulnerability than any other creature. We are not just born naked, we are born dependent, exposed in every conceivable way to the possibility of loss. For far longer than even our closest evolutionary relatives, after we are born we are dependent on others to nourish us, clean us and protect us. For many years we remain immature—unable to fully assert our authority competently in the world. (With the extension of adolescence in the modern world, that timespan keeps growing—Joseph and Mary presumably made their trip to Bethlehem when she was a teenager, but it’s not until age twenty-five that you can freely rent a car from most companies in the United States and not until age twenty-six that parents must remove children from their health insurance plan. The length of time you can live in your parents’ basement is continually being renegotiated upward as well!)

  This is the essential human condition: greater authority and greater vulnerability than any other creature under heaven. Indeed, as the scholar Walter Brueggemann pointed out many years ago, the way the original man in Genesis 2 recognizes the original woman as his suitable partner, after seeing so many other creatures that would never suffice, is with this outburst of poetry: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Bones—hard, rigid, strong. Flesh—soft, pliable, vulnerable. We image bearers are bone and flesh—strength and weakness, authority and vulnerability, together.

  The same psalmist who celebrated human dominion over the creatures also was capable of looking up into the heavens and grasping what they meant for the significance, or insignificance, of our small and transitory lives: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, / the moon and the stars that you have established; / what are human beings that you are mindful of them, / mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4). Only a human being can fully grasp the meaning of that canopy of stars, of the infinitude of the Creator’s life before and after our small lives—so only a human being can be so completely exposed to meaningful risk.

  I have come to believe that the image of God is not just evident in our authority over creation—it is also evident in our vulnerability in the midst of creation. The psalm speaks of authority and vulnerability in the same breath—because this is what it means to bear the image of God.

  When the true image bearer came, the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), he came with unparalleled authority—more capacity for meaningful action than any other person who has lived. His actions all took their place within the story of Israel, the greatest of all shared histories, and they decisively changed the path of history and created a new and different shared future. And yet he, too, was born naked, as dependent and therefore vulnerable as any human being; and though the Western artistic tradition has placed lo
incloths over the uncomfortable truth of crucifixion, he died naked as well. He died exposed to the possibility of loss, not just of human life but of his very identity as the divine Son with whom the Father was well pleased. He was laid in the dust of death, the final and full expression of loss. And in all of this, he was not just Very Man but Very God.

  What Love Longs to Be

  As I was writing this chapter the makers of the GoPro line of cameras had their latest viral video hit. A helicopter drops the skier Cody Townsend at the top of a seemingly impossible, nearly vertical crevasse between two rock walls at the top of a snow-covered mountain. Thanks to the head-mounted camera, we follow him off the edge, plunging down through the narrow canyon and out, safely, just barely, onto the gentler slopes below.

  It is terrifying. (One person who shared it online said that as he watched, he “tightened every orifice in sympathy.”) It is also mesmerizing and exhilarating.

  What makes this ninety-second video so compelling and compulsively shareable? It’s the combination of authority and vulnerability—Townsend’s complete command of the sport of skiing plus his willingness to stretch that competence to its absolute limit, to the point where there was the real possibility of loss. A video that showed authority without vulnerability might be impressive, but it would ultimately be boring; a video that showed gratuitous risk-taking without commensurate authority might well be good for a few laughs in the genre of “stupid human tricks,” but it would not provoke astonishment, admiration and awe. What we truly admire in human beings is not authority alone or vulnerability alone—we seek both together.

  What we truly admire in human beings is not authority alone or vulnerability alone—we seek both together.

  When authority and vulnerability are combined, you find true flourishing. Not just the flourishing of the gifted or affluent, but the needy and limited as well. For my niece Angela to flourish, others will have to act meaningfully and place her own actions in a meaningful story. Indeed, if Angela’s condition could be solved with a simple, technical medical procedure, perhaps all it would take to restore her health would be someone with medical authority. But her condition is too comprehensively challenging for that—it will never be “solved.” So Angela’s flourishing also depends on others being willing to put something meaningful at risk—the doctors charting an uncertain and difficult medical treatment, the caregivers who bear the difficulties and indignities of providing for a broken human body, and above all her parents choosing to love sacrificially, day after day, in the face of a most uncertain future.

  In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of meaningful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything meaningful is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

  What we will have to unlearn, and be saved from, are our failures of authority, vulnerability or both—and that is the territory we now must explore.

  3

  Suffering

  When did the topic of justice become important to you?”

  Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us were there because we knew Gideon’s remarkable personal story—growing up Afrikaner in the last years of apartheid South Africa, becoming deeply involved in that country’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Others were interested in his work with the Center for Public Justice, an innovative think tank in Washington, DC.

  From my eleven-year-old daughter—perched on her mother’s lap for lack of chairs—to the gray-haired couple from a nearby suburb, all of us took turns answering Gideon’s question. A few minutes earlier you could have mistaken this gathering for a polite dinner party of reasonably diverse, prosperous professionals. But as we went around the circle, as so often happens, the answers went deeper and deeper, longer and longer.

  Almost every answer to Gideon’s question involved a story of violence.

  In this room of seemingly secure citizens of the United States, there was hardly anyone who had not encountered some kind of forceful violation of dignity that had shaken their world, bruised their innocence and kindled a passion for justice. That word justice, potentially so abstract and distant, was in fact acutely personal. But for me one answer came even closer to home.

  Abby, an Asian American physician a few years younger than me, had been invited by mutual friends. When her turn came to answer Gideon’s question, she began, “When I was a girl my family moved to a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, called Needham.”

  Needham! My family, too, had moved to Needham when I was thirteen years old. I came of age there, and it will always be home for me, though my parents moved away years ago. Abby was from my hometown. I barely restrained a delighted outburst as she continued her story.

  “There was a convenience store named The Little Peach in Needham.”

  Yes, there was—down the street from the high school, right across from the Methodist church where I came to a living faith. My friends and I stopped at The Little Peach countless afternoons in my high school years. I enjoyed a pleasant wave of nostalgia (and a distinct memory of the taste of Orange Crush soda) as Abby went on.

  “One day my dad needed to use the copy machine there, and he brought me along. I must have been seven or eight years old.” I quickly estimated the years—that would have been my sophomore or junior year in high school.

  “My father was born in China, and his English was poor. He had trouble figuring out how to get the copy machine to work. But he couldn’t explain his problem to the owner of the store. The owner became furious with my father. He started mocking my dad’s Chinese accent. Then he grabbed my father’s papers, ripped them up and tossed them on the floor, and told us to get out of his store.”

  Abby paused. “I had always known my father as strong, kind and smart. I had never seen him humiliated like that in front of me. He was so ashamed—I was so ashamed. I didn’t know what racism was before that day and what it could do to someone—but after that, I knew.”

  Vulnerability Without Authority

  I never knew.

  All those years, full of the joyous energy of adolescence, my friends and I—all of us “white” without ever giving it one moment’s thought—had spilled out the doors of that little convenience store, sodas in hand. To us, racism was something that happened long before and far away, not under our noses, not at the copy machine I used a dozen times or more, not at the counter of The Little Peach.

  For me, Needham was always about flourishing—the place where I came of age, discovered talents and ability, learned to pray and fell in love, was granted authority and discovered vulnerability. For Abby, it was the place where the violence of the world burst into the open, where her own father saw his authority ripped into pieces and thrown to the floor, his identity mocked and his weakness exploited. The place where an eight-year-old girl started a journey that would lead her, one day, to a circle of people, bruised by violence, seeking justice.

  That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby discovered what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority.

  That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby discovered what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority. Authority, the capacity for meaningful action, has many sources. It comes from facility in a language—but immigrants trade their native tongue for one they learn with difficulty, if at all. It comes from citizenship in a nation and all the rights that come with citizenship—but many immigrants arrive with only provisional status, at best, in the new land. It comes from membership in an extended family, the deep knowledge of people and place that is only acquired over generations—immigrants give all that up the moment they step on the ship or plane that takes them away from their home. Immigration is such a drastic step that few would take it except in cases where the vulnerability of staying home, whether economic, political or cultural, is even greater than the vulnerability of tryi
ng to make a life and a living in a new home.

  Abby’s parents had taken that step. And one of the most admirable things about the United States is how much authority they had in fact been able to acquire, in the form of economic and educational opportunities, by the time they arrived in Needham. But on that afternoon, Abby was rudely awakened to all the ways her parents lived with ­vulnerabilities she had not seen—how authority could be snatched out of her father’s hand and ground spitefully ­underfoot. She had discovered the reality of life in the corner called Suffering.

  Discovering Suffering

  None of us make it very far in life without spending time in this corner. Suffering can be the result of injustice and evil, but it touches even the most sheltered lives.

  My friends and I in Needham knew little of the worst of the world, but suffering found us all the same. My friend Paul, head over heels in love with a girl named Janet, was summoned to the back of the library stacks junior year, where Janet told him she had tried to commit suicide the previous weekend. She was breaking up with him, she said, so he wouldn’t have to deal with her depression. I knew nothing of this until six years later, when it spilled out in a conversation one summer day back from college, and Paul wept as uncontrollably as if it had happened yesterday. That same summer, one of my best friend’s parents divorced, and I suddenly replayed my memories of their home in high school and realized that all those years his family had lived with toxic bitterness, as corrosive as any acid to the hope and confidence of their children.