Vulnerable Enough

I love to wander the stacks of the public library, browsing without agenda and waiting for those books that call out, "Read me!  Read me!"  Ori and Rom Brafman, brothers who work as a psychologist and an organizational consultant, have written one of those books.  It's called Click: The Magic of Instant Connections (2010).

They discuss, for example, relationships that really are "love at first sight" and then last a lifetime.  So that's attractive to Brenda and me for further exploration.  They use such discussions (and the work, for example, of a police hostage negotiator) to explore the nature of immediate and deep connections.  The brothers Brafman suggest five elements necessary to these immediate and lasting emotional bonds:

• vulnerability
• proximity
• resonance
• similarity, and
• a safe place.

They refer to these five elements as "click accelerators," and they discuss each in turn.

I was intrigued by their discussion of the power of vulnerability to engage others in immediate and deep emotional connections.  They write,

"Allowing yourself to be vulnerable helps the other person to trust you, precisely because you are putting yourself at emotional, psychological, or physical risk.  Other people tend to react by being more open and vulnerable themselves." (page 32)

My first interim assignment was, in retrospect, an exercise in extreme vulnerability.  I didn't intend it, but I also couldn't really help it.  The sermons I preached all spoke in one way or another to the issues I faced less than six months after Anne's death.  I dealt with my own grief as much as that of others when I officiated at funerals.  Ash Wednesday worship nearly did me in with the intoning over and over of "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

I feared that such emotional displays would put people off.  I had been taught that pastors should not work out their own emotional stuff on the parishioner's dime.  I assumed people would tire quickly of my grief.  

Quite the opposite happened.  I really did "click" with the folks in those congregations in ways that surprised me.  As I look back, I see now that it was that vulnerability itself that opened the door to such quick and deep connections.

My response was not all I might have hoped for.  I was exhausted by how the emotions simply leaked and sometimes poured out of me all the time in that setting.  At that time, being alone did not recharge me but rather left me even more depleted.  For the first time in my life my introvert habits did not serve me well.  In a month I simply collapsed from emotional exhaustion.

In those days I said I needed a life before I could have a ministry again.  That part was right for me, but it is all so complicated.  I think that I moved a bit too far in the other direction when I returned to another parish.  I was tired of the "you poor man" looks I got from people when I told my story.  I was weary of the incessant vulnerability and the sense of exposure that went with it (I really am an introvert, after all).  I still engaged in that process of vulnerable self-revelation in smaller settings--classes, counseling, meetings, etc.  But in my big public activities I began to shut it down.

That was not helpful.  Between my introvert habits and my desire to appear somehow "normal," I became for some people aloof and unapproachable.  They were folks who did not interact with me in the smaller settings.  So their assessment, in hindsight, is not surprising and probably not far off from the truth.

Now I have hopes to find some balance between public vulnerability and managing my own emotional resources.  I know that being vulnerable is the most powerful and liberating model for ministry that is available to us humans.  It is, after all, the model of ministry that Jesus himself has chosen (see Philippians 2, for example).  I think I am ready to engage in healthy vulnerability, but I am nervous about how that will work out in the future.

Is that vulnerable enough for now?