When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable.
— Madeleine L’Engle
For men, says Brené Brown, vulnerability is defined as being “weak.” Likely, women define it that way as well, but our misunderstandings about what it means to be “vulnerable” in the sense that Madeleine L’Engle uses it above, keeps us mired in a rigid, closed-off response to life.
It would seem that the corollary to “To be alive is to be vulnerable” is the rather somber statement, “To be invulnerable is to be dead.” Or as this favorite line from an e.e. cummings’ poem I’ve been citing recently puts it, “unbeing dead isn’t being alive.”
However, we need a supportive community to allow us to become vulnerable enough to wade through these distorted characterizations and ideas about what becoming truly vulnerable might be as an experience, or even a state of being, a way of being fully alive.
Working on some material for our recent Aging with Intention workshop, I leafed through Bill Plotkin’s comprehensive analysis of the stages of adulthood in Nature and the Human Soul, and the subtitle gets right to the heart of our need: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World. Who wouldn’t come to a workshop with that theme?!
Here’s another good title: “It Will Take a Political Revolution to Cure the Epidemic of Depression”. This is an article by radical psychologist Michael Bader describing Johann Hari’s new book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression. While acknowledging the helpfulness of medication in certain times and instances of depression, Bader notes that “Hari first debunks the ‘received wisdom’ that assumes the jury is in regarding the neurochemical basis of depression and the efficacy of antidepressants.”
“The notion that depression isn’t a disease,” writes Michael Bader, “but a normal response to abnormal life experiences wouldn’t surprise most of us, except for the fact that we live in a culture which pathologizes psychic suffering as a disorder within individuals, rather than as suffering that makes sense given a pathological environment.” Actually, Celtic spiritual teacher John Philip Newell raised that issue, regarding all mental illnesses years ago in a talk here, that there are both social/environmental causes of such symptoms and they require social/environmental solutions, not just pharmaceuticals and “prayer.” I see the attempt to tie mental illness to mass shootings egregious in many ways, but including this attempt to “individualize” pathology, so we can just keep “blaming the victim” rather than looking at our own collective selves and systemic pathologies.
Johann Hari believes that the social and cultural causes of depression all involve some form of “disconnection.” And, writes Bader, “when we privilege explanations of depression and anxiety that emphasize our internal biology, we let society off the hook. We privatize psychological pain even as the role that our culture contributes to that pain goes unchallenged.”
…social and cultural causes of depression all involve some form of “disconnection.”
One of the most powerful movie scenes I ever experienced was the first time I saw “Good Will Hunting.” The story was moving along quite swimmingly for me until the climactic scene when “Will Hunting,” the character portrayed by Matt Damon, finally breaks through to the truth and acceptance of his abusive past with the guidance of his therapist, played by Robin Williams. I haven’t seen that movie for years, probably because that scene shook me to my own precious, vulnerable, core self, the same way Robin Williams grabs Will, and literally shakes him up against the wall, verbally beating in to Will the mantra, “It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault.” It strikes me that it’d almost be worth hiring someone to come over to my house several times a year and throw me up against a wall with that echoing refrain, just to remind my distorted superego of the truth of that statement, and of my own value simply by being incarnated, being born a human of Being.
We need a social web that creates connection—a “community of kinship,” as Father Gregory Boyle calls it–that embraces, and encourages, and establishes full human (and non-human) dignity for all. Bader closes his article with a powerful paragraph from Hari’s final chapter:
You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connection to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.
“It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault.”
“I think it’s fair to say,” writes Michael Bader, “that in order to achieve these things, we need a revolution.” Something akin to Glennon Doyle’s theme: Coffee and a Love Revolution.
Shalom,
David
Rev. David Hett is the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center
