Fragility
What if this is glory?
One recent morning, I was walking on a favorite section of the towpath, the sun pouring through the familiar trees. This particular morning offered the perfect combination of sunshine, green-leafed limbs swaying in the breeze, and a temperature just a hair below seventy degrees. Bicylcists and other walkers greeted me with smiles and friendly hello’s. One couple approached with the wife praying aloud as they passed by me on the left. Another man guided his young son, who was riding just in front of him with equal parts excitement and fear. An older gentleman gripped a walking stick, slowly taking his next step with cheeks shining back up at the sky.
In those moments as I looked at each passerby, noticing the various paces and postures, I was overcome with deep gratitude. I was struck by something we all had in common. Us humans, in one sense or another, are vulnerable — even fragile. What an endearing quality this is, and yet one we often despise.
These brothers and sisters of God’s beautiful and bountiful earth, meeting my countenance with theirs, reflecting back to me my own. It was as if there was a request in each gaze, to gaze back, offering a witness to our shared image-bearing qualities. Our propensity when we are met with vulnerability, or exposed in our own, is to diminish it, dismiss it, even desecrate it. But what an invitation, as I glanced back at my fellow trail walkers, to extend the tender gaze of a God who looked upon his creation and declared it “very good.”
In recent years, with all the posturing and criticizing over things like “toxic” empathy, or efforts to continually present ourselves as strong and sharp — we rarely find ourselves capable of acknowledging, much less welcoming, vulnerability. Perpetrators cast themselves as victims, powerful leaders refuse to admit when they’re wrong or find the courage to ask for help. No, fragility has become some sort of accusation, something to be ashamed of. But what if this is God’s greatest gift to us?
What if our vulnerability, our fragility, is glory? The very thing that directs our gaze back onto the One we depend to sustain us. For what could be more fragile, more vulnerable, than the mist that appears for a moment and then vanishes?1 When we look upon each other’s faces, when we greet one another with the slightest acknowledgment of our shared vulnerability, we agree together that this fragility is beauty.
Jesus carried his fragility, and ours, to the cross. He bore the shame of our sins, yes, but also of our sorrows and weaknesses.2 Christ’s willingness to come in vulnerability as the God-Man, mystery that it is, is the fulfilled promise that our fragility cannot be used against us. We can receive it, in love and because of love.3 The glory of God is made visible in the vulnerability of his children, as we walk along earthen paths, breathing in and out as he gazes upon us — his “very good” and beloved creation.
James 4:14
Isaiah 53:4
“The single most important thing I have learned in over thirty years of study of how love produces healing is that love is transformational only when it is received in vulnerability” (David Benner, Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality).