Choosing Vulnerability

Today was our last Sunday with  Michael Angell as Assistant Rector at our church.  (Cool name for a man of God, wouldn't you say?) Michael has been very special in my personal spiritual development, and I will miss him terribly.  Although he is just a man in his twenties, he has the wisdom of an old soul.  His sermons have often touched me profoundly, sending me home to meditate on a thought or phrase.  So, it seems appropriate that his last sermon as Assistant Rector should have sent me pondering deeply.

Although his overall message was something different, as he often does, Michael buried a provoking thought in his homily.  "We don't find God from being perfect," he said.  "We find God by being vulnerable."  Vulnerability.  Much of what our popular culture teaches us about life is how to keep ourselves from being vulnerable--how we can protect ourselves from every possible thing that might make us helpless physically, emotionally, spiritually, and financially. "How do we armor ourselves from being hurt?" is shouted to us almost from birth.

I wrote a book on transforming fear, yet I find myself imprisoned by fear of vulnerability.  Yesterday, I told me friend that until recent years I'd never made a decision, based on money.  Yet, I continued, facing retirement was few assets and a long life expectancy, I have been increasingly paralyzed from doing what I know is right in my heart for fear of financial vulnerability.

My heart has been seriously broken several times, and this month it will be 20 years that I have been grieving the end of my marriage.  I say I would really like to have someone else in my life.  But would I?  Would I be willing to be vulnerable to the potential pain, in exchange for the gifts that come with love? Even if I would allow myself to be so emotionally vulnerable, would I even know how?  I am not sure after so many years of guarding my heart that I would know how.

Over the last year, I've slowly been losing the short-range functionality of my right eye.  For all intents and purposes, it is now gone.  There is a surgery that could restore my vision. The success rate is 99%, but if the surgery is not successful, I will lose my vision in that eye.  I am skittish.  Really!? I've lost functionality. Could losing my sight in that eye be so much worse? And, of course, the surgeons are really frightened of being legally vulnerable if I lose my sight.  It is like we are pulling each other back in the face of all reason.

So, if we find God in vulnerability, I have more than enough opportunity to have a really first-rate encounter with the divine.  What is the problem here, Kay? 

Two days before I withdrew from the world to begin writing Leading from the Heart was my birthday.  I had a party with all my closest friends to wrap myself in their love as I went into a truly vulnerable spot--allowing God to use me to share a message with the world.  I didn't know if I'd be successful, or how it would work, but I had to try.  At that party, my niece gave me a birthday card that said, "If we are forced to leap off a cliff, either a bridge will appear or we will learn to fly." 

I think this may be how vulnerability works.  If I am willing to leap off the vulnerability cliff, either God will catch me or I will learn to fly.  Neither of those seems like such a bad option. As I stand at the precipice of vulnerability, I feel myself wrapped in the love of friends and angels cheering me and ready to meet God in the vulnerability. And, so I send Michael off on his own spiritual adventure, knowing that his parting gift to me has been my wings of vulnerability.