WHAT is vulnerability? There is a Latin word in there, "vulnus," which means wound.
All of us people are vulnerable and wounded and we are in need of God’s help.
If I look at what happened in our subdivision during the last weeks: a teacher in our elementary school was killed by one of her students because the boy got angry when the teacher scolded him because he was always absent from his class.
Another student got killed because some rocks fell down from a mountain while he was working down below in that area where he was living. These are tragic and unexpected incidents and these people and their families are in need of God’s help and mercy.
According to the Gospels, Jesus after his suffering and death stood up from the death and on the third day he was resurrected from the death by God his father. Before he died he was hanging on the cross and he had to face his vulnerability.
Such is the reality of our life here on earth. We are vulnerable. We have many questions in our life that have no direct answer: questions about the meaning of life, why is this happening and why are we here on earth.
We need a spirituality that is realistic, that does not avoid to answer these questions. We have to sit down and reflect deeper on all these questions. That is what the Carmelites call an "open space" in our midst.
There are questions today about sustainability, aggression and violence, confusion and disorientation. We have to face these questions. Our life is vulnerable, our peace is vulnerable, our orientation is vulnerable.
Since I got an infection at my leg which the doctor called cellulitis, I lost my memory and my orientation. My nerve-system is affected. I forget the names of my friends, I forget what happened yesterday. But the strange thing is that I still remember the names of my friends when I was still young. And so, many situations from the past, from my youth come automatically up in my mind. For me it is clear that the spirit of God is alive in me, that God is in control of everything and I can rely on Him during all the problems I encounter in my daily life.
How do you deal with all this? How do you stay alive? What is the right answer? Resistance, anger? Is the answer not more in the fact that you are vulnerable, in humility and accepting the reality? That may give us a revealing strength. It teaches us much about ourselves and about others, about how we are people, what lives in us people on hope and doubts, foolishness, anger, pleasure, uncertainty.
We can say that in everything there is a split through which the light comes in. The splits in our life let light come through.
Vulnerability can say something to us, can show us something.
Many people have experiences of vulnerability, healthy people who all of a sudden become sick and become dependent on others, of loved ones who become estranged and grow away from each other, of communities which seem to have no future, of doctors who discover their own vulnerability.
Another incident that happened to me. I was driving a car early in the morning and I fell asleep behind the steering wheel. I went off the road and ended up at a dirty kitchen of a house somewhere in the meadow. The people brought me to a hospital nearby and so, I survived. How vulnerable we are!
All this has to do with a lived spirituality.
(For your comment email: nolvanvugt.gmail.com)