Lady Godiva the Social Justice Advocate and other Journeys with Vulnerability

To prepare for sharing with my men's group my "Journey with Vulnerability," I talked with my spiritual director Dennis about being led to organize a campaign to house homeless people at a city-owned property in Northwest Pasadena. I felt I needed to do something dramatic to get media attention. “I slept at Memorial park to see what it felt like to be homeless and wrote about it on my blog,” I said. “I got a terrific response. I am wondering if I should do something more dramatic, like fast or get arrested.” God, it turned out, may have an even more dramatic idea, one that would make me extremely vulnerable.

After my session with Dennis, I took part in Vespers at the little chapel where the Community of Divine Love holds worship services. There Dennis read from the daily readings from a book called “Peacemakers.” This week the Peacemaker was none other than Lady Godiva.

I never imagined that Lady Godiva was a social justice advocate. I thought of her more as an exhibitionist, or the patron saint of chocolate. But her story is fascinating. She lived in England during the 11^th century, right after the Norman Conquest, and her husband was a greedy landlord who was taxing his people beyond their endurance. Not unlike some of the landlords in Pasadena. The peasants protested and she sympathized with them, begging her husband to lower their taxes. He refused and she persisted, until finally he said, “OK, I’ll lower the taxes if you ride naked on your horse at high noon through the village.” He never imagined a noble woman would do such a thing, but for the sake of the poor she “made herself vulnerable”—those were the exact words in this reading—and went through the village naked on her horse. Her husband finally got the message and lowered the taxes.

This story may lack an historical basis, but it contains a nugget of profound truth. If you want to serve God and help the poor, you sometimes need to make yourself vulnerable. You need to put aside your privilege and be real and take risks. It’s not easy.

I told this story to my wife and explained that some Quakers in the early days went naked “for a sign” However, I reassured her that I don’t feel led to follow their example, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

I am grateful that members of my men's groups isl willing to take the risk of sharing their journey with vulnerability. Many have talked about painful and difficult times in their life, times when they felt vulnerable and broken and somehow survived and rebounded. Resilience seems to be the watchword of this amazing group of brothers. As a result of this honesty, I feel I know them better and feel closer to them.  According to psychologists, vulnerability refers to a person's openness and willingness to risk being hurt emotionally, a willingness that enables us to love and be loved and to accept the emotional risks that go with it.

As someone who has survived a painful divorce and the death of a spouse, and yet is still willing to accept the risks of being married a third, and I hope, final time, this description of vulnerability speaks to my condition. Reflecting on the death of his dearest friend, the poet Tennyson penned the immortal line, "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." As finite human beings, we are all vulnerable, whether we acknowledge it or not. By confessing our vulnerability, we also affirm our humanity. The poet David Whyte (2015) captures this existential truth compellingly:

"VULNERABILITY is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding under-current of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to be something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.”

To be human is to be vulnerable, to swim in an ocean of darkness hoping against hope for a glimpse of light or dry land, but why confess the times when we have felt most vulnerable? Why does this make us feel better and closer to one another? 

All my life I’ve loved and studied the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and I can assure you that ancient Greeks and Romans did not spend time talking about their vulnerability. This would not have made sense to Plato or Aristotle or a Roman stoic like Epictetus.  The first instance I can find of someone confessing his vulnerability is the apostle Paul. He calls himself the "chief of sinners" and the "least of the apostles."  He confesses that he is unable to control his worst impulses. "The good  I would do, I don't do, and the evil I don't want to do, I do." He admits that he persecuted Christians and was even complicit in the death of an innocent, godly man, the martyr Stephen. Finally, he reveals that he had a blazing vision and heard the voice of Christ on the road to Damascus and was blinded and incapacitated for several days. Talk about vulnerability! But it was through this painful experience of being blinded by the Light that he finally broke through his self-righteous shell of invulnerability and became a loving human being, broken and recognizing his need for God's grace.

Augustine of Hippo

Paul's confession became a model that Christians have followed ever since. Augustine of Hippo, a city in North Africa, wrote one of the great masterpieces of spiritual literature, his confessions, as if he were speaking directly to God and we are overhearing this intimate and revealing dialogue. A compulsive womanizer before becoming a Christian, he is perhaps best known for his line: "Give me chastity, O Lord, but not yet." I know that feeling very well! I also resonate with Augustine's realization that "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Augustine confesses his vulnerability before God and before us, how in his blindness and weakness he hurt himself and others, how he was deceived by vain philosophies and pride, and how he was finally redeemed by God's love and grace.

Quakers and others confessed their weaknesses and shortcomings in spiritual journals, some of which, like John Woolman's Journal, have become classics. In the twentieth century, Thomas Merton's "Seven Story Mountain" carried on the tradition of Christian confessional autobiographies, revealing in intimate detail his spiritual journey with vulnerability. 

Not all confessional writing is religious. The French philosophe Jacques Rousseau wrote his "Confessions" not so much to express his religious faith, but to explore his complicated personality and life. Rousseau was keenly aware of, and interested in, his inner contradictions: He wrote: "it is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person."  I can relate to that! Since Rousseau, many secular writers have also written their autobiographies in the confessional mode, sharing dark secrets in creative ways. My teacher Anne Sexton made a literary career out of describing the most vulnerable times in her life, such as her attempts at suicide, and was part of a group of New England poets that are sometimes called "Confessional."

It has not been easy for me to confess my vulnerability in my writing or in my personal life until recently. I grew up in an immigrant family where we acted out our feelings, but didn't reflect on them in healthy ways. In my teenage and college years, I expressed my complicated feelings mainly in my poetry and other writings. 

I am grateful to be part of a men's group where I feel it's safe to share my journey with vulnerability. I decided to explore some times in my life when I felt vulnerable and open to the Spirit. I am in part inspired by the intriguing theme of this year's annual Quaker gathering: being vulnerable to the Spirit. What does it mean to be "vulnerable to the Spirit"? What times in our lives have we felt most vulnerable and open to the Spirit? How were we changed by these experiences?

These are questions I think well are worth pondering and meditating on.