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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 18, 2021
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We live in a culture that often encourages 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 whole-heartedly. 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.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
No vulnerability – no empathy. In a culture where people are afraid to be vulnerable, you can’t have empathy. If you share something with me that’s difficult, in order for me to be truly empathic, I have to step into what your feeling, and that’s vulnerable. So there can be no empathy without vulnerability…. …Vulnerability is the path.
– Dr Brene Brown
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Learn more about Beloved Community at this link. – The King Center
Meditation Reading
I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more…. …Live your life. Live your life. Live your life. And that is my attempt to do so.
– Maurice Sendak
Sermon
Dr. Brene Brown, whose words we heard in our Call to Worship earlier has a lot more to say that I really love. She says, “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.”
She defines vulnerability as “exposure, uncertainty, and emotional risk”.
Here is one of my favorite findings from her social science research on vulnerability.
She discusses people she 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 Spiritual Practice for the Ages”.
Now, I want to be clear that she is not talking about suffering vulnerability at the hands of racism and other forms of oppression, health issues, abusive relationships and the like.
And certainly, we have all felt some very scary vulnerability due to the pandemic.
What she IS saying is 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 can often encourage us to project a false sense of invincibility.
The prior Presidential administration downplaying a pandemic, for instance.
But, cultivating this false sense of invincibility can drain our courage for loving and accepting being loved – rob of us of the belonging and connection that are at the center of what it means to be fully human.
Now, I have struggled with all of this at times.
Right after I started with the church as a new minister, I helped teach 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 with these activities and decided they would turn me into an indoor jungle gym instead.
Soon, I found myself under siege by a group of five- and six-year-olds.
I was outnumbered, out maneuvered and outlandishly on the verge of experiencing pure joy – if only I would let myself give in to it.
But I found myself resisting it instead.
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 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.
That doesn’t work.
So, here are all the foreboding and shaming thoughts I was having as I resisted joy:
“Oh my God, I have to keep them on the carpeted area or one of them will get hurt 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 of energy and determination.
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 then it was pure joy.
In addition to the foreboding joy I have been discussing, Dr. Brown outlines a number of other ways that we avoid vulnerability and that ultimately rob of us of living fully.
Here are a few of the major ones. See if you recognize any of them.
“Perpetual disappointment” – you may know folks who do this – these are the Eeyores of our world. “Oh well, it’s never really as great as it seems. In fact, it’s usually worse.”
“Numbing” – These are the ways that we avoid feeling at all or at least dull our emotions to the point of becoming unrecognizable.
Numbing includes 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.
Recent research says that all of this increased exponentially during the pandemic.
“Perfectionism” – She calls this the “20-Ton shield” when it comes to avoiding vulnerability.
Perfectionism is a trap though because we can’t be perfect all the time and for everything.
Thus, perfectionism can actually 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 used to be 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. We start trying to take care of everything and everyone, whether they want us to or not Ñ a form of perfectionism.
My mom was single, so I got a very strong dose of this.
Some of you may have heard me mention before that my maternal grandparents were like a second set of parents to me.
My Grandfather became my father figure, and I pretty much idolized them both.
They were my role models.
So, when I got the call one day, many 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 started making plans to make the drive over to take care of my family.
I was going to handle this situation 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, nor after we got back home.
I was too busy “functioning”.
And then, I think it was maybe a couple of days 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.
And suddenly, sitting there alone in the car, clutching his map, 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 this:
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 many 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.
Their old phone number, 409-962-2010 pops into my head, but, of course it is someone else’s number now.
The thing is, somehow because this happens, the joy of the experience is also deeper, greater, more complex.
It helps keep their memory alive in my heart.
It is a way in which I can at least somewhat re- experience their love.
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.
I think as the church and our world begin to deal with whatever the next phase of the pandemic may bring in the coming months, we will need to be willing to be vulnerable with one another, we will need honesty Ñ a willingness to share our emotions.
And I think we create in this church a space where we can bring our vulnerabilities and our whole selves, and that then can help us be more wholehearted in our larger worlds also.
I think it starts by being willing to ask for the space to be vulnerable and by being willing risk it – to reach out and say, “I have been trying to take care of my family, but I am emotionally exhausted myself”, or “I have been afraid about going back to work in person at my office because what if the vaccines start to fail? I don’t have anywhere else where it feels safe to share this fear.”
We work to create in this religious community a space where we can do that – a church where we can practice living authentically.
A place where we are allowed to be vulnerable and imperfect – 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 love and accept love and radiate that love out into our larger world.
A community where life’s hallowed sorrows and aching joys can be sung into the rafters and held by beloved community.
A community that I love with my whole heart.
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