Strength
in Vulnerability
“Our
strength will continue if we allow ourselves the courage to feel scared, weak
and vulnerable.”
Melody
Beattie
In The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo defines weakness in the spiritual sense as, “any habit of mind or heart that prevents us from seeing things exactly as they are, or in their entirety, or with our entire capacity to feel.” An example would be Americans who see the headline that says, “As of today, 4,500 children have been detained at the border,” and feel nothing. In order to feel that this calamity is justified, we say things like, “their parents should never have come here in the first place—it’s their parents fault they’re there.” We have cut ourselves off from our vulnerable feelings. We don’t take the further step of imagining how we would feel if it were our child, or a beloved sister or brother. It takes a lot of courage to say, even if I’m opposed to illegal immigration, incarcerating children is simply wrong.
If we take that step,
there’s no going back. We know that if this were happening in any other country
on earth, we would be raising all kinds of hell, protesting and sanctioning and
standing up in the United Nations crying foul. But the economy is good, so we
look the other way. We are a nation that’s stopping up its ears, refusing its
vulnerable feelings and is, in fact, scared to death of seeing things exactly
as they are. We’re not the rich and powerful nation, the “light of the world,”
with the white hats and the Christian charity that we imagine. Instead, we are
engaging in the purest form of “spiritual weakness.”
This kind of blindness
underpins every type of cruelty. But, since it’s at a distance, down there on
the border, and hidden from our view, we don’t have to open our eyes and look
at what is being done in our name. Do we imagine that it’s different from what
Hitler did while the German people went about their lives oblivious? Out of
sight, out of mind—and besides the economy is, you know.
The only cure for this,
as we know, is humility; it is owning our responsibility for everything that
happens to those children. It would be a terrible burden if we let ourselves
feel what we should be feeling about it—so we don’t. But until we do, this
nation will be at war with itself. The policies of cruelty and exclusion will
undo every other good thing going on in America. And there are many good things
going on in this country. But we cannot be like Nero and play our fiddle while
our country burns to the ground around us. As Melody Beattie says, (not to
mention, what Jesus said), our strength is in our willingness to be weak. We
must look squarely at what is wrong and take it upon ourselves to make it right.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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