Sacred Vulnerability

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 15, 2015

We live in a culture that often values a kind of hyper-individualism and self-reliance, which can lead us to project an air of invincibility. Yet research by Brene Brown and others in the social sciences indicates that the opposite may be the key to living wholeheartedly. Being willing to embrace and express our vulnerability may be the source of authenticity, human connection, and empathy, as well as the ability to both love and accept being loved.

Call to Worship

Put Away the Pressures of the World
By Erika A. Hewitt

As we enter into worship, put away the pressures of the world
that ask us to perform, to take up masks, to put on brave fronts.

Silence the voices that ask you to be perfect.

This is a community of compassion and welcoming.
You do not have to do anything to earn the love contained within these walls.

You do not have to be braver, smarter, stronger, better
than you are in this moment to belong here, with us.

You only have to bring the gift of your body,
no matter how able;
your seeking mind, no matter how busy;
your animal heart, no matter how broken.

Bring all that you are, and all that you love, to this hour together.
Let us worship together.

Reading
From Brené Brown

No vulnerability, No empathy.

In a culture where people are afraid to vulnerable, you can’t have empathy.

If you share something with me something that’s difficult, in order for me to be truly empathetic, I have to step into what you’re feeling, and that’s vulnerable. So there can be no empathy without vulnerability…

You can’t access empathy if you’re not willing to be vulnerable…

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

Sermon

Here’s a quote that I really love, “Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness. To foreclose on our emotional life out of a fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living.”

That’s from a series of online lectures by Dr. Brené Brown, a well know researcher, author and speaker from the University of Houston School of Social Work. She defines vulnerability as “exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk”. I watched her lectures as a part of preparing for this sermon.

Dr. Brown says something else that I SO wish I had seen before I submitted the short description and title of this sermon for our newsletter.

While discussing people she has identified through her research that she calls the “wholehearted”, by which she means people who have embraced and can express their own vulnerability, and thereby are living more authentic, loving and connected lives, Dr. Brown says that embracing vulnerability doesn’t mean never complaining about the bad things that happen in life – the things that hurt. In fact, the wholehearted can complain as much as anyone else. They just do it in a specific and more life fulfilling way.

She says that they “piss and moan with perspective.” “Dang,” I thought, when I heard her say that, “Now that would have made a great sermon title”.

“Pissing and Moaning with Perspective” “A Unitarian Universalist take on the Problem of Suffering and Evil.” Actually, I think she’s Methodist or something.

Anyway, Dr. Brown goes on to say that while embracing our vulnerability is not weakness, neither does it mean we will never have problems, make mistakes or suffer. It is recognizing that we will, and loving ourselves and other people, not in spite of these things, but because of them.

To be alive is to be vulnerable. And yet our cultural norms favor extreme individualism and self-reliance that can strongly encourage us to attempt to a false sense of invincibility.

Paradoxically, cultivating this false sense of invincibility and certainty can drain our courage for loving and accepting being loved. It can lead to shaming and rob of us of the belonging and connection that are at the center of what it means to be fully human.

Now, I still struggle with all of this sometimes. A couple of Sundays ago, I had the pleasure of teaching one of our Sunday morning religious education classes for kindergarten and first grade children. After the lesson, it was too cold and rainy to let them go outside and play, so we had to come up with activities that they could do inside.

A few of them got bored and decided they would turn me into an indoor jungle gym. Soon, I found myself under siege by a group of five and six year olds demanding that I play with them by being their climbing, swinging and seesaw apparatus. I was outnumbered, out maneuvered and outlandishly on the verge of experiencing pure joy – if only I would let myself give in to it. And I resisted it.

Dr. Brown calls this resistance, “foreboding joy” – when we won’t let ourselves fully experience joyful moments because we start to project what can go wrong. We fear the joy because we know it will end. We start imagining all the sorrow that may come. It’s like we try to ward off the sorrow in our lives by stifling the joy. Yeah, that’ll work.

So, here’s all the foreboding and shaming thoughts I was having: “Oh my God, I have to keep them on the carpeted area or one of them will get hurt and it’ll all be my fault and the church will get sued and I’ll never get to work within Unitarian Universalism ever again.”

– and –

“What will their parents think if they come to pick them up and find that they’ve tackled their Sunday school teacher and taken over the classroom?”

– and –

“Good golly man, you have Reverend in front of your name now, you can’t be seen acting the fool with a bunch of first graders.”

Sometimes my shaming thoughts have a British accent. Luckily for me, the more I resisted, the more they upped the ante. Five and six year olds have a lot more energy and determination than me. So, I discovered that if I gave in and joined in the fun, they would actually more easily accept some parameters like staying on the carpeted area.

And it was pure joy.

Why do we adults so often experience shame around playfulness?

Here’s another Brené Brown quote, “Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of joy and creativity, of belonging, and of love.”

I went through all of that in a matter of just a few minutes. Plus, luckily, my back had healed enough by the following weekend that I was able to attend the 50th anniversary commemorative march in Selma.

Research conducted after the 1966 mass shooting from the U.T. tower here in Austin, as well as other such research, has found that one of the things people who commit such crimes tend to have in common is that they were not allowed to engage in play as children.

Some of the other research I looked at said that for adults to engage in playful activity is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because in our culture we are often taught a very strong work ethic that shames such activities. To play, we also give up a sense of control and propriety and allow ourselves to lose our sense of time and place.

And yet, the research also shows that play is one of the ways we get in touch with our deeper and more authentic selves and risk allowing others to see us more deeply. One of the many wise things I think our senior minister, Meg Barnhouse, has done for First UU Austin has been to infuse our spirituality and religious practice with a sense of fun and playfulness.

In addition to the foreboding joy I mentioned earlier, Dr. Brown outlines a number of other ways that we avoid vulnerability and that ultimately rob of us of living fully. I don’t have time to go through all of them today but here are a few of the major ones that I think you’ll probably recognize.

“Perpetual disappointment” – you know folks who do this – these are the Eeyores of our world. “Oh well, best not get too excited because something’s gonna go wrong eventually.” Always the life of the party.

“Numbing” – These are the ways that we avoid feeling at all or at least dull our emotions to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Numbing include the things we normally think of as addictions such as alcohol and drugs, but also includes things like excessive television, eating, video games, smart phone use; working too much; buying too much, etc. After 911, we were told to all go shopping, right? Brown notes that “we are the most obese, in debt, addicted and medicated adult cohort in known human history. We numb.”

“Perfectionism” – She calls this the “20-Ton shield” when it comes to avoiding vulnerability, and of course, it is a trap because we can never be perfect, and perfectionism can stifle our internal drive to strive for excellence because even excellent will not be perfect, so why take any real risks at all? For me, it has some times been a way of sort of super-numbing.

I was the oldest child in my family growing up. Now, you may have heard about the oldest sibling syndrome wherein under stress, we can become over-functioning, something very closely related to perfectionism. Especially in anxious situations, over-functioners tend to try take care of everyone else – and maybe even micromanage a little: know what best for everyone, which is usually some level of perfection that’s impossible. My parents divorced when I was twelve and so I got an especially strong case of oldest child syndrome. It is something I still have to watch out for.

The other thing that happened after the divorce is that my grandparents on my mother’s side became like a second set of parents to me. They helped raise us. We spent as much time at their house as at our own. My Grandfather became my father figure, and I pretty much idolized them both. They became role models for me.

So when I got the call one day, about 17 years ago now, that my grandfather was in the hospital and it did not look good, I went into sort of an overfunctioner’s perfect storm. I didn’t stop to cry or grieve or feel anything. I called Wayne and started making plans to make the drive over to take care of my family. I was going to do this grieving thing perfectly!

And when we got to the hospital, and he was no longer conscious so that I did not even get to say goodbye, I didn’t cry or grieve. I took care of everyone else.

And when I got the call the next morning that he had died, I didn’t cry. I got up, got dressed and started planning and taking care of things. And even when I gave the eulogy at his funeral, I still didn’t cry, nor at the reception afterwards, nor on the drive back home when it was all done, nor after we got back home. I was too busy “functioning”.

And then, I think it was maybe a day later, I couldn’t find my glasses, and so I went out to our car, thinking maybe they had fallen under a seat or something and started searching for them. I didn’t find them, but I did find a map my grandfather had given me – he was a traveler and big on maps – and he had written his name on it. My grandfather had this habit of writing his name on all his belongings. Someone gave him one of those noisy, obnoxious, electronic engraving pens one time. Big mistake.

And suddenly, sitting there alone on the floorboard of the car, with no one left to take care of anymore but me, I ran out of ways to avoid it.

I started crying. And for a while it felt as if I might never stop.

A friend of mine who’s a playwright once had one of his characters, after having just lost her family in a car wreck, say, “I don’t have to cry now. I can cry tomorrow, or next week or next month or next year, because it’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop hurting.”

I guess that was kind of what I had been doing – trying to put off feeling the hurt. It doesn’t work eventually, but his character was right about one thing. It never really does completely stop hurting. We just learn to carry it with us. And I think maybe that’s as it should be because for me it is also carrying them with us.

My grandparents are the people who taught me to have a love of nature. To this day, even though they have both been gone over 15 years now, I will be on a nature hike and see something so beautiful that it fills me with joy, and I will think that I have to call them and tell them about it and their old phone number, 409-962-2010 will still come into my head, and then I will remember that I can’t and it stings.

The thing is, somehow because of this, the joy of the experience is also deeper, greater, more complex. I call it a joy so full that it is an aching joy, rather than that foreboding joy we talked about earlier.

Writer and poet Kahlil Gibran said it like this, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

And that’s why numbing robs us of living fully. That’s the reason to seek lives of vulnerability and authenticity. If we refuse to allow sorrow to carve into our being, we will also never experience the fullness of that aching joy. The thing is, living vulnerably is hard, especially when we live in culture that often values the opposite, so if you work for a high-powered law firm or in a cutthroat corporate office, I don’t recommend starting there with practicing vulnerability.

But I do think we can start in our personal lives – with our families and friends. And I think that we can create in this church a space where we can bring our vulnerabilities and our whole selves, and eventually maybe it does spread to those more tougher, more difficult environments.

To do this, I think we have to understand not only what expressing vulnerability is, as I’ve been discussing, but we also have to also know what it is not.

It is not sympathy seeking or sharing every thought that comes into our heads. It is not expressing our feelings in a way that is harmful or shaming to others. It is not monitoring every conversation or lurking on email lists, online groups or at the back of meetings just looking for something to be hurt or offended by. That’s not practicing vulnerability, it’s just drama trolling.

I think maybe we start by being willing to ask for the space to be vulnerable and by being willing risk it – to reach out and say, “My son is in the hospital and I could use some help”, or “I just got that promotion I have been wanting at work, and I am thrilled and at the same time terrified over whether I am really capable of it, and I don’t have any where else to share it.” Too often in our culture of self-reliance, we do not ask for help even from our church.

I think, though, that we are creating in this congregation, a place where we can practice living authentically.

A place where we are allowed to be vulnerable and imperfect and to make mistakes and be forgiven for them rather than shamed for them.

A place where we are courageous enough for empathy to thrive. A place where we sometimes play with the spontaneity and abandon of young children. A place where we love and accept love and radiate that love out into our larger world.

I think we can create a space where life’s hallowed sorrows and aching joys can be sung into the rafters and held by beloved community.

What if we make that church?

In our increasingly individualistic, disengaged and power-centered world, wouldn’t creating “the church of sacred vulnerability” be subversive?

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