Everyone's Vulnerable or Joy and Woe are Woven Fine

 

Tim and his parents and I frequently play bridge together.  His mother keeps score and finds occasion to announce, a few times an evening: "Everyone's vulnerable!"  This means everyone has made points and gains in the game, and is vulnerable to losing it all if the opposing team wins the next hand.  It's a ritual meant to remind us where we stand in the game, in case that will affect our bidding or choices as we play.  And boy does it work.  Every time she says that: "Everyone's vulnerable" I always think "That is SO true."  But of course, right away, I'm not thinking of bridge any more.  I am thinking of how vulnerable we all are, all the time, to illness, ill luck, being hurt emotionally or physically - and how we really ignore this in the way we live our lives.  I look around the table at those people I love and think someday I'll look back on these precious, ordinary nights and miss them and want them back. I've begun to look forward to her vulnerability updates from this completely different perspective, and to reflect on it each time I hear them - which is not advantageous for my bridge game, but certainly is for life, and the purposes of this sermon.

 

As the saying goes, joy and woe are woven fine.  As Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies wrote: "Life is a chance to grow a soul." These axioms are true because though we are conditioned to ignore the truth that our lives will not work out entirely as we wish - sometimes not even largely as we wished, even in basic, ordinary ways, that is the truth nonetheless.  Working towards our hopes is important but as important  or even more important is what we do when our dreams are denied or killed or lost.  How will we live then?  Can we be happy again?  How?

 

The answers to these questions are not about what we each need to do alone to ourselves to make ourselves strong enough, happy enough, accepting enough. because fundamentally the real solutions are not for solitary, independent creatures. It is community and relationship that offer the deep help - and community and relationship that create much of the risk as well.  And that is why 'everyone's vulnerable' even though we don't talk about it much and we're not supposed to show vulnerability.  It's no doubt evolutionary: never expose your throat; when cornered, fight;  and so on.  We're even wired so that feeling fear often sparks a secondary emotion: anger, which quickly subsumes the fear.  Something happens that makes us afraid, our response is quick: anger and hostility.   Most of us are all too familiar with this dance of defense.  This is unquestionably critical strategy in the animal kingdom, but human civilization is another thing entirely - or so we homo sapiens tell ourselves.  In which case, we really need to change how we deal with the uncomfortable truth about universal vulnerability.

 

And it is universal, let's not kid ourselves.  Even the 'toughest' have reasons for being tough - reasons that are rooted, one way or another, in an earlier experience of vulnerability.   They were hurt, or they saw someone else being hurt, and some part of them resolved never to go through that again - to insulate or develop themselves in such a way that they wouldn't, couldn't be hurt.  This is an okay strategy if you don't wish to have deep connections or relationships, with anyone or anything, even with yourself.  If you believe, however, that connections and deepening are critical to life and living, that life is precious and not to be wasted, that profound experiences of relationship and transcendence are what helps us balance the existential loneliness of life as an individual who will someday come to die, then these are gifts not to be spurned and you need a different strategy.

 

But it's not just our individual unwillingness to live with vulnerability that we need to change, it's our whole society that looks down on dependence.  Remember the utter pitifulness of the trademark line uttered by Blanche DuBois in the famous play Streetcar Named Desire, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."  She says it with a genteel helplessness because her wilting Southern lily ways often get her what she wants.  Depending upon the kindness of strangers: against the make-do abilities of her sister or her brother-in-law Stanley's brute - and unkind - strength, it's weak, it's pitiful, it's dangerous - and yet the truth is we all are, all the time, everywhere we go.   Driving in cars, crossing streets, alone in a city, asking for directions, alone in the country we are dependent upon the kindness of strangers.  Even together we are dependent upon kindness and goodwill as the terrible events at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Tennessee Valley showed us this summer.  We depend on each other to help each other.  And we depend on a larger 'each other' not to react to their own despair or madness by taking it out on others which is not always the way it goes.

 

UU minister Robert Walsh wrote, in 1992:
"Did you ever think there might be a fault line passing underneath your living room:  a place in which your life is lived in meeting and in separating, wondering and telling, unaware that just beneath you is the unseen seam of great plates that strain through time?  And that your life, already spilling over the brim, could be invaded, sent off in a new direction, turned aside by forces you were warned about but not prepared for?  Shelves could be spilled out, the level floor set at an angle in some seconds' shaking.  You would have to take your losses, do whatever must be done next.
 
When the great plates slip and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen to lie in what you trusted most, look not to more solidity, to weighty slabs of concrete poured, or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order.  Trust more the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch to hold you in the web of life that's often torn, but always healing.  There's your strength.  The shifting plates, the restive earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together."

 

I got a call from the Montgomery County police department, in the wake of the shooting in Tennessee, asking if we would like any help, or a police detail, as we began our own new church year here in Silver Spring.  I told them no, I believed we would be alright, even though bad things are done to UU churches, and to others.  If things develop such that it looks like I am wrong, then of course I would rather invoke such protections than risk us all.  But we cannot live as though we need police details to go peacefully about our liberal religious business. Which means I also depend upon the kindness of strangers, a kindness that makes our continued vulnerable existences possible, a mutual deal that most of society shares in, and far more often than not, that is a reasonable belief, and the deal is holds. 

 

But even that mercurial deal with each other, all the other human beings, does not hold with life itself.  And that's another way we often feel ambushed.  We try to live well, and honorably, and we work hard, and love thoughtfully.  We do this because we believe in it, and we wish to - but we also find a virtue in it.  And somehow, we have a larger, usually implicit sense that virtue is an investment that will pay off.  We accumulate virtue - or consider we do - as if stockpiling it will yield a life-dividend of insulation from bad things.  Or as if we know there is a god that balances us all on the scales of just desserts, and the good receive good and the bad receive bad.  Either way, we are still left with the question of why bad things happen to good people.   They do, they just do.  We ought not be surprised;  it has been ever thus.

 

A minister I know was having a conversation with a parishioner some years ago, and she was in the middle of a hard time. Her mother's health was failing, and she had had to quit her job and take care of her mother daily.  This was a painful struggle on every possible level, and the parishioner was really feeling it.  She met with her minister to talk about it, and said what any of us might say: "I can't wait to just get back to my life, to get my life back."  And what the minister thought, far more bluntly than he said, was "This is your life." 

 

This is life. This is life.  The range of what can happen to us, from wonderful to terrible, will never change, and ultimately we couldn't have it any other way if we wish to live with freedom to make choices.  There is no purely beneficent and conservationist system in the universe, there is always, everywhere, life and death, creation and destruction, grace and poison, fulfillment and void, as much in the farthest-flung galaxies as in our brief, brilliant lives. Life's rich melody is a bittersweet symphony. 

 

The universe will not change, and we cannot exit the pattern.  When our human ability to create safety and reward for virtue runs dry, then we realize we need to dig deeper, and work to rebalance our own nature.   We must not live in denial, nor in fear, nor in false security.  We must live knowing life's vagaries and unpredictability, and live finely, with joy and woe.  We will not surround ourselves with police details, nor regard the stranger with suspicion.  We will fight created injustice, and succor creation's injustice.  This is life; everyone is vulnerable, we are all dependent upon the kindness of strangers, and even that will not always be enough.  In the end, as Bob Walsh points out, it will not be the thick concrete slabs that save us, it will be the tensile strands of love, of relationship and community, that will catch us and hold us when we are falling.  And sometimes it will be our love, the tensile strands we weave, that will hold another in turn.  That is life and that is living.  Amen.