We all live with insecurity. Some try to disguise it by avoiding others and retiring into themselves or by a compensatory brashness. Others seek to overcome it by scrambling to the top of the pile, by ensuring that they are in control of their circumstances and of others or by surrounding themselves with material possessions in a vain attempt to convince themselves that they are invulnerable.

It is not easy to acknowledge that insecurity is a fact of life and to live with it with some degree of comfort. However, if we are going to grow and to be able to benefit others and to minister to them, we need to learn to tolerate a measure of insecurity. One of the ways in which this capacity will be evident will be in our ability to live vulnerably.

The importance of vulnerability, a positive vulnerability, is evident in a number of areas.

Spiritual Growth

Sustained spiritual growth is only possible when we are willing to live vulnerably. The need for vulnerability is evident in at least two areas of our growing, in our mapping of reality and in developing self-understanding and self-management.

Mapping Reality

We map reality because we crave the security of a world-taken for granted. However, reality is beyond our capacity to exhaustively explore and order. Our maps are only ever tentative and approximate. They are constantly challenged by new learning, by life-experience, by encounter with others and by suffering. To accommodate fresh insights, we need to allow for a degree of flexibility. This flexibility requires us to be vulnerable.

If God is central to our understanding of reality, then it is likely that our perceptions about God will be the source of our security. However, if we remain open to life, its complexity, ambiguity and paradoxical core will constantly challenge our view of God. Where our security is rooted in our cognitive understanding of God, rather than in God herself, the expanding of our understanding of God will be arrested. To grow in our understanding of and relationship to God, we will need to live with a view of God that is capable of being modified, which will require a trustfulness that falls short of the assurance of a complete knowing. We will need to live with an element of vulnerability.

Where we are not secure enough to live with the recognition that our view of God is tentative, we may well find that a disjunction will develop between [70] our perception of God, or our faith stance, and the way we live the rest of our lives. For example, we will be blind to the fact that we have created a view of God that pictures him treating us in ways we would consider reprehensible if we acted this way towards our children. This fissure in our consciousness, if unrecognized and exaggerated, could result in double-think, inconsistency, and, perhaps, in extreme cases, in a form of dissociation. The later could have fatal repercussions, particularly if the shadow aspect of the unconscious, which we have draped over our demonised God image, took us over.

Doubt

There are few experiences more healthy than doubt. Doubt is not necessarily unbelief. Christians who are growing live perpetually in the shadow of doubt. When people are not permitted to doubt, their faith is eaten away from within. If they possess intellectual integrity, and they are challenged to desist from their doubting by others who have substituted their perception of God for God himself, they will have no other option than to abandon the faith. Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of this century, was nurtured as a boy in a Unitarian congregation. He was told that he should not question his faith and, as a consequence, was lost to the church.¹ When theology becomes ideology, and when trust in God is reduced to an unquestioning adherence to propositional dogma, we have been seduced by the demonic.

At an even more profound level, it needs to be recognized that we do not believe and doubt in sequence, but in parallel. We believe against a background of doubt. Doubt requires a structure of faith. Therefore, to believe, with honesty and integrity, requires us to engage doubt. For this a considerable degree of vulnerability is demanded.

Self-understanding and Self-management

If we need the vulnerability that will allow us, while rooted in the being of God, to hold our view of reality and of God loosely, recognizing that we will never have it all together, a similar vulnerability is essential to our developing greater self-understanding and self-management.

There is a certain pseudo-security in being unreflective, in refusing to face our real selves. However, this pseudo-security plays us false. It increases the repression of unacceptable material, which increases the energy of what is repressed and removes it further from our control. In the end, we are dominated by our fear of the inner demon. In other words, by refusing to look closely at ourselves, we repress awareness of the shadow side of our reality and attempt to silence the fears that shadow personalities evoke during our waking reflections and our dreams. [71]

Paralysed by the fear of the Loch Ness monster, that occasionally surfaces from the turbulent waters of the unconscious, we have no energy to concentrate on others, except where our contact with them promises to satisfy our need for distraction, our need for completeness or our need to be needed, to be saviours.

Helping Others

If vulnerability is essential to personal growth, to our re-mapping of reality and to our self-understanding and self-management, it is also necessary in our attempts at attending to and helping others.

If we appear to have it all together, we will alienate others. They can read us and know that we are either attempting to hoodwink them or else we are self-deceived.

What is even more significant is the fact that others relate to our weaknesses more than they do to our strengths. Our successes alienate them. They will either dismiss us, because they imagine that we are worlds distant from where they are, or else they will envy us. In either case, we bungle the prospect of relating to them. Our vaunted "strengths" depress them, whereas they will relate to our wounds.

If we are vulnerable, if we are able to be honest about ourselves to ourselves and to others, in ways that are healthy and appropriate, we will be up front about our weaknesses and ego needs. This will help us avoid intruding our personal agenda into our communication with others, which would otherwise be jammed with unhelpful static. It will help us avoid using others manipulatively to meet our unrequited ego needs.

If we can be honest about ourselves, others will not be intimidated by us. Observing that we are self-accepting, despite the fact that we do not have it all together, they will be encouraged to be self-accepting, especially as we accept them in their brokenness and do not stand in judgement on them. As Jesus encounter with Zacchaeus illustrated, others are changed when we accept them.²

We can only accept others to the extent that we are able to accept ourselves, in all of our incompleteness and with all of our distortions. It is when we are non-judgemental with ourselves, when we can accept ourselves with all of our weaknesses, that we can avoid judging others.

We need to be able to live with a fair degree of vulnerability in attending to and helping others. [72]

Communication

Vulnerability is also essential to effective communication. I am not referring here to communication of information, but to communication of feelings, of our personal essence.

Friendship requires mutuality, mutual self-disclosure in the context of heart hospitality. Love is the most effective medium of communication. It involves giving and receiving. Genuine self-giving is difficult and genuine receiving is even more so. It requires an even stronger sense of self-acceptance, where we can receive without feeling that we are obliged to repay the favour. Giving and receiving involve openness and commitment, which are unrealisable in the absence of vulnerability. Openness and commitment are reflected in sexual intimacy, though for many they are experienced in a consciousness of their absence rather than in an awareness of their presence.

Some people have trouble opening themselves to the love of Christ because love is an unfamiliar experience, because on previous occasions their trust has been betrayed or because of problems with commitment. They may pull back from commitment because they have never previously considered needs other than their own, because they have been seduced in the past by a challenge to their commitment which they have discovered to be manipulative or because this challenge demands more then they are able to give. It is difficult for them to be vulnerable. However, we cannot respond to Christ in openness and commitment unless we are able to be vulnerable.

Extending Ourselves

Vulnerability is also essential if we are to attempt anything that will stretch us.

When we are stretched, when we are challenged to extend ourselves beyond our competencies or past experience, we confront an element of risk. This risk is associated with fear of failure and the sting of failure is its threat to our acceptability.

Ministering to Others

Vulnerability is also important in ministering to others.

For us to effectively minister to others it is important that they feel that they are in contact with the real us, the vulnerable us, in our preaching, in our pastoral work, in our counselling, in our conduct of worship, in our organization and leadership and in our community involvement. This vulnerability, arising from our self-acceptance, is a strength rather than a weakness.

Responding to the Will of God

Vulnerability is also critical in discerning and responding to the will of God. [73]

We are responding to the divine initiative in all that we have already considered, that is, in self-discovery, in helping others, in developing friendships, in giving and receiving love, in stretching ourselves and in giving ourselves in ministry.

In venturing into all of these areas we can never be sure of the outcome. Like Abraham, we are called to go, but without clear directions on the way ahead. We are not guaranteed protection against pain and suffering, but we are assured that God's presence will always be with us.

Dealing with Insecurity

If we need to be vulnerable, and our capacity for vulnerability is undercut by our insecurity, how do we deal with our insecurity so that we are able to be vulnerable?

In essence it is a matter of our accepting God's acceptance of us at ever deeper levels of our body-selves. It involves relinquishing ourselves into the flow of a supportive, loving grace, a grace that Jesus embodied and which he helps us access through encouraging us to enter into a relationship with him. [74]

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