The Slow Way Newsletter: The Vulnerability of Love
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
On Being Vulnerable to the Requirements of Love
I spent yesterday alone in the garden. Chris was away for work all week, and the boys and I made it to all the therapies, practices, and school events required of one week. I managed to work on my current writing project, walk the dog, snuggle the cat, show up to the school bus and the pick up line on time, make progress on Ace’s more intensive communication goals, and even feed my children(!), but every night I was exhausted. Parenting is equal parts emotional care, awareness of need, and physical presence. Doing it alone is hard, and I say that recognizing my own privilege to have an equal and faithfully present parenting partner.
So, when that partner asked me what he could do to give me a little break on Saturday, my answer was a wholehearted request for time to garden and to write. He took the boys to his mom’s house, where they helped close up her pool, officially ending the glory days of summer. I took the dog for a two mile walk to pick up veggies from the local urban farm, and came back to a garden in desperate need of some attention. I cleared out the remnants of the wildflowers whose seeds I sprinkled back in early June. I moved one of the Mandevillas from the front to the backyard, stringing it across the new trellis that I nailed onto the fence.
At 9 am the Catholic church behind my backyard’s fence held a small outdoor service, which culminated in the small crowd singing happy birthday. On my walk to the urban farm I talked to other people with dogs, passed a crowd of protestors on a women’s march, and longingly considered stopping by the book festival at the local library. (I decided I’d stop by on my way back, but promptly forgot and stopped at Starbucks instead, in case you wonder about my priorities.)
I’ve been reading A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, and by reading I mean listening to it on Audible while walking the dog, doing the dishes, brushing my teeth, and clearing out the garden. In it, Maitland is on a quest for more silence in her life. And she considers silence from a religious, biologic, societal, and historical lens. And as I walked through my town, fed my pets, and cleared out a dead bush in the corner of the yard, I thought about how little silence I pursue in my own life. I thought about the earbuds that keep me company on my long walks, or while I clean or plant and harvest the compost. For a bit of my walk, I took the ear buds out and let myself be present with Richmond the Pup, listening to every sound that went past: the cars, the voices, the music rising out of open windows, the laughter. Then I turned the book about silence back on. In it, Sara Maitland is talking about how the “thinness of relationships” in our culture is actually a result of our addiction to noise.
She says it has led to “the creation of an increasing number of lightweight relationships, relationships that appear to connect people but are not vulnerable to the requirements of love. And therefore tends to lack endurance and discipline.”
What does it mean to be vulnerable to the requirements of love? I thought about that while I cleared out my garden. My dad loves to garden, and he likes to talk about gardening with me when he’s feeling well. But his illness is making that more and more difficult for him. I sent him pictures of my Nippon daisies, finally making their bloom right now. And I harvested my compost thinking of his compost, and how I wish I were there to turn it for him. Mom says the okra he planted is ready, and I wished I were there to coat it in batter and fry it up for him, just the way we ate it when I was a kid.
This week I studied a sermon of Stanley Hauerwas’ on The Sermon on the Mount. In it, he considers the Beatitudes from the perspective of community, that the only way we can come close to living out the sort of lives that hold the “blessing” Jesus describes in Matthew 5 is by “depending on the support and trust of others.”
Hauerwas says it this way: “the fundamental presupposition of the Sermon, which is that individuals divorced from this community of the new age made possible by Christ are, of course, incapable of living the life the Sermon depicts.” The Beatitudes only make sense when, to use Maitland’s language, we are “vulnerable to the requirements of love,” a sort of love that requires endurance and discipline.
The Beatitudes are deeply about vulnerability. It’s our weakness that cracks us open to the work of God individually and in community. So it makes a lot of sense that Jesus would start his sermon by blessing the “poor in spirit,” the spiritually and physically poor, whom he names the ultimate winners, the receivers of eternity.
As I type this my hands are sore from digging out the dead bush in the corner of my yard, piles and piles of brush and dead sticks that I tied together with twine and walked to the street for the trash collectors to pick up on Monday. I’ve been trying to understand how we make this our lives. How we live into the vulnerability of the Beatitudes. How we settle into this strange set of praises that Jesus gives. To become people impoverished of spirit, to become merciful, pure in heart, hungry for rightness and wisdom, in service of peace, willing to be mocked and rejected because we’ve chosen this strange way. Hauerwas says it can only happen in community. And Maitland says true community, as opposed to “lightweight relationships” means we are vulnerable to love’s endurance, love’s discipline.
I’m starting to think that I might be in the middle of love’s endurance. This week I’ll get on another airplane so I can spend time with my dad, whose brain cancer is relentless and unflinching. I’ll remind myself about the poor in spirit and maybe dad and I will be able to chat about our gardens. Maybe I'll talk to him about my reading on the Beatitudes and the requirements of love. Maybe I'll fry him up some okra.
I hope you’ll find spaces where you are vulnerable to love this week, where silence and solitude can remind you that you are not simply an individual, but a needed and beautiful part of an interconnected system of vulnerability we call community. And when you are connected, you are somehow becoming yourself, which is God's dream coming true.
a slow practice
How are you living "vulnerable to the requirements of love"? Let's take a little time to consider that question this week. For this practice it might be helpful to go for a walk, to have some movement while you consider your relationships. Try to silence the world around you if you can. If you're on a walk, no music, just listening to the sounds around you. Or, if you're extremely lucky, the silence around you! As you walk, imagine your life as the center of a web of relationships, or spiral of relationships. Consider the relationships closest to you, not simply the ones you interact with daily, but the people you feel know you and love you most deeply. Then move the spiral out in your imagination, possibly to those you love but aren't in touch with daily, and further out towards those you are least vulnerable among.
Consider your spiral of relationships and what it looks like. This is not a categorizing of your besties versus your acquaintances, but more a reflection on who you choose to reveal yourself to most fully. Who are the people who know you most deeply? Why have you chosen to give them that privilege?
Now think of a few moments in this past year when you have allowed a person in your life to see you at your most vulnerable. What happened when you revealed that part of yourself? Did it heal you or hurt you? Or did it somehow result in a little of both? What do you believe about vulnerability? What do you think God wants you to believe about vulnerability?
My new pastor, Michael Rudzena, quotes the priest and theologian Stephanie Spellers when she uses the phrase "God's dream for the world" to describe what the scriptures call "The Kingdom of God." I keep thinking of that in terms of our own relationships, our own becoming. When we are vulnerable to one another, when we live out true community in love, we are part of God's dream for the world coming true.
Take some time to invite God's spirit to lead you into God's dream for the world. Do you believe you and your relationships could be part of that dream? Where are you being invited into more vulnerability in your relationships? Where are you being invited to welcome the vulnerability of others?
As you close your time of prayer, ask God to give you vision for a good and flourishing dream for the world, ask God to help you see yourself in that dream.