Archive for the ‘weakness’ Category

The Weak and the Strong

Posted: September 23, 2020 in weakness
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Life teaches you to make friends friends with grammar, especiallythe adversative conjunction, “but.”

Example: I’m confident, but also easily bumfuzzled. That’s true. Bifurcated realities.

My core emotions dive into the deep, the abyssopelagic, but I have had jumps out of the water, like the Exocoetidae, the flying fish.

This is human, this but that.

I think of the painter Frida Kahlo. So beautiful. So much emotion in her self-portraits. So much pain there too. She ranks, a renown Mexican painter, but she suffered terribly. She was weak but strong, disappointed but fulfilled, hopeful but despairing.

There are conflictories for all who work hard and hope for much. Lots of “buts.”

Paul Tournier was a Swiss physician and author who parsed two kinds of humans, strong and weak. He clarifies the characteristics. But truthfully we are all some of both — especially when it comes to the inner life. Especially over the long haul.

The low country of emotion — sadness, disillusionment and doubt — they can easily follow the Himalayas of excitement, hope and belief.

My first teaching job was at Lincoln High School in San Diego. I began weak, unsure of myself as I navigated the deep waters of class management and curriculums that would empower our racially mixed student body. It was a rough start for me. For some classes we failed over 50% of the students — simply for non-attendance. But as the years went on I strengthened, inspired students, they did better too. Strong helped. I eventually became a mentor teacher. But by my last year there, I was burned out. Weak again. Interesting.

When we think of the strong we picture a person who is fired up. They’re on vision steroids, courage adrenaline. But not always. Remember Sampson. Strong, weak, strong.

Humans range, vary, run the gamut, ply the spectrum. An emotional dualism is endemic to us.

Thought: Letting people see our weakness can be a way to bond with them.

Here is my area of weakness at the present time. Chronic pain. It sucks! Sometimes I’m strong. I take it. Other times it just crushes me. I’m weak. Ugg.

Being open about such things is healthy. Think of the opposite, hiding behind a strong-only image — name dropping, credit taking, FaceBook swaggering, snoutbanding, gasconading. But all that is a bulky backpack. It’s a heavy load to keep carrying a fake face.

A thought: Don’t hide your weaknesses. Unpack the pack. Take off the mask. Let your whole self shine!

Don’t hide your strengths either, your toughness. Help people. Be authentic. People like that.

Another thought: Be gentle with yourself. Strong, weak — ahh, you’re normal.

Endarkenment

Posted: March 29, 2020 in becoming, weakness
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During this time of loss and fear we have a great opportunity to feel with the rest of our world.

Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan says that our own painful emotions might help us discover a close relationship between our “heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world.”

If today you were sad, know that millions were sad today too. If today you felt fear, know then that you are confederate in this emotions with billions of others around the globe, especially those who have lost their loved ones, those who have lost jobs, especially those in Third World countries.

We may want to be rid of our darker emotions, but they are a part of us and part of our world and they have the potential to bind us together. It has been my observation that we bond over our weaknesses even more than over our strengths.

The moments when I have felt closest to other human beings are the moments where we have both taken off our masks and shared our hurts or our weaknesses without embarrassment or constraint.

Richard Rohr says “that in a whole lifetime spent with seekers of enlightenment, I have never once heard anyone speak in hushed tones about the value of endarkenment.”

But soul darkening has value. The endarkenment of our souls creates an opportunity to rely on God and to connect with others, to text, write, call and pray for them.

This is what it means to be human. It means to be happy and sad, full and empty, to be at peace and anxious along with the rest of our world.

“Weep with those who weep,” command Paul.

Romans 12:15

If you have any of the dark emotions during this time of social distancing, don’t deny those. Sit with them. Learn from them. I speak to you in hushed tones, the hushed and healing tones of tender honesty, compassionate transparency, reciprocal disclosure, unguarded openness and loving candor.

It’s okay to have dark moments. Don’t be embarrassed. We all have them. Your feelings will come and go, but your empathy — practice that and it will come and stay.

Weak Waiting: Strong Trusting

Posted: March 24, 2020 in god, weakness
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Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you;I will sustain you and I will rescue you.

Isaiah 46:4

God promises his people three things here in Isaiah.

First, he will sustain them to the end of their lives. To sustain is to strengthen or support physically or mentally. And note the logical corollary to this: We will need the most sustaining when we are the weakest.

At one point in my life I lost a precious job and in the interim, before finding another one, I was afraid. I felt emotionally weak, vulnerable. I didn’t like it. I’m not particularly fond of feeling vulnerable. Few of us are. I’ve often played the strongman, the teacher, the leader, the writer but clearly I haven’t always been the strong man.

Secondly, in Isaiah 46 we are told that because God made us and feels intimately connected to us as family, he will carry us. To carry someone is to support and move them from one place to another. Again, this carrying implies a position of weakness: A person only needs to be carried when they cannot carry themselves. It can feel quite undignified to be carried.

I once sprained my ankle playing soccer in Brazil. The soccer field had holes in it. I was wheeled through the airport by my teenage team for the plane ride home in a wheelchair. I felt both privileged and slightly embarrassed. It’s true. Sometimes I find my weakness embarrassing.

Thirdly, in Isaiah, God repeats the first point, that he will sustain and he adds one more thing: He will rescue us. To rescue someone is to save someone from a dangerous or distressing situation that they can’t save themselves from. It is also to keep something from being lost or abandoned by retrieval. Again, dangling from a rescuing helicopter or laying on a gurney is hardly a bragging point for most of us. “I had to be rescued!”

At two points in my life I have been significantly sick, recovering from surgery, dealing with chronic pain. During these times I’ve had to wait on rescue, wait on doctors, wait on appointments, wait on surgeries, wait on a gurney, wait on God. I’m not that good at waiting, particularly when there is a high degree of uncertainty and uncomfortability. 

What can we take from all this? First, that we will at times be weak, embarrassed, at times need to be carried and that sometimes we will not be able to rescue ourselves from loss, deprivation, failure, need.

Let’s be honest. None of us like to be weak, dependent, helpless, sick and needy, and yet sometimes we will be. One of the great steps of maturity in life is to realize and accept our own vulnerability. All are subject to financial, health, material, relational, physical and situational loss and and its attendant emotion — vulnerability. We are realizing this acutely during the coronavirus pandemic. How insecure we are, practically spending the entire families savings on toilet paper!

But it is in such times of personal need that we can discover our humanity that includes our vulnerability — which by the way was always there even when we didn’t know it or denied it. How much we are all alike, strong, yes, and also all sometimes indisputably, intrinsically afraid, dependent and weak.

And here’s the thing; this weakness is most hard on us at the emotional level. The emotional power position is to save; the affectively weak position is to be saved. To be the one who needs to be rescued; we must be okay with being and feeling weak, even embarrassed; we must be okay with waiting until we are sustained and rescued by another; we must be okay with not being the hero, the driver, the solution and we must be okay with letting others shine and do the saving.

Ah, needy, waiting for help to come. The help seems slow. As time passes we wonder, will it come? We may grow angry over our loss of control or we may become sad.

What else can we do?

We can accept reality, accept both our strength and our weakness and we can work on not being so embarrassed by it so that it doesn’t become impedimenta to us that we drag along with us. Note that Betty Ford was praised for raising breast cancer awareness following her 1974 mastectomy. So many women have been helped and encouraged by her model of openness. We help ourselves and others by normalizing sickness and weakness. It is strong to accept that we are weak.

And we can learn to hold on to hope. That means we can trust that God will come through when he decides to come through and not when we tell him to come through.

We can lean into our difficulty and see what it has to teach us as we wait. That too is a form of strength. Waiting and watching can teach us that we are alternately weak and strong, that life is up and down and that God will come through in his own time and way and not ours.

Finally, it has been my experience — and I know many of you have experienced this too — that the promises of God do not always come to us when and how we want. Then we trust. Then we wait. Then we mature into those who are not afraid to be what we sometimes are — the strong-weak. Then we experience latency, a normal stage of life, the state of existing but not yet being developed or manifest.

Weak-waiting —- today it occurs to me that this can be a beautiful form of strong-trusting, and that this can set up a working relationship with God, one that preps us for future times of strength and weakness, one that finds a way to deeply liaise with the God who rescues.