Anam Cara

Why Are You So Vulnerable?

Why is the individual so easily a target of suffering and pain? Why are we so exposed and vulnerable? First, we are vulnerable because each of us is housed in a body. This little clay tent is a sacramental place. The body is in constant conversation with creation; it allows us through our senses to smell the roses, to see the waves and stars, and to read forever the hieroglyphics of the human countenance. The body is also very unsheltered. You are surrounded by infinite space without physical shelter. This is why from the very beginning humans have sought secure belonging in caves and then in houses. The desire for strong physical shelters mirrors and reveals how space is open, and anything can approach the temple of your life from any side. Home offers shelter from the threat of contingency. Yet home, too, is vulnerable. No walls are strong enough to keep the destructive visitations abroad. The human body is a fragile home.

Second, you are vulnerable because you are an individual. To be an individual is to be different. Each individual is separate. There is a dark logic to experience which often seems to target individuality. Suffering is suffering because it is an anonymous and destructive force. It has a darkness which vision cannot penetrate. Suffering happens when this bleak and opaque anonymity invades your individuality. A dark force of pain surrounds the unique signature of your presence. Suffering would be more manageable if its pain were restricted merely to the surface of one’s life or at least to some one corner of one’s individuality. Some religious theories suggest that suffering belongs only to the area of the non-self. If this were true, it would lessen the fever of pain that suffering brings. Alas, one’s individuality is not constructed in such convenient compartments. Your heart, mind, and body are a unity, each place within you intimately one with every other. Pain in one part of the body affects every other. Your nervous system is the miracle that makes of all the different parts one living and feeling presence. There is something about pain and suffering that is pervasive. It suffuses your full presence.

Third, we are vulnerable because we live in time. We cannot control time. The tides of time can throw absolutely anything up on the shore of your life. It is amazing how successfully we repress the recognition of our total vulnerability. We have learned to forget that any moment can bring an abrupt and irreversible change of destiny. As you are reading this, there are people who woke up happy this morning and are now receiving news that will utterly change their lives. Suddenly, death is a gathering presence. Others are coming under the blade of disappointment. Forever more, they will remember this day as the day that divided their life in two. The time before will be looked back on as a time of unrealized contentment, the time after as the time of carrying a new loss that turned meadows of possibility into a desert.

Fourth, we are vulnerable because of the destiny that is given to each of us. Each person who walks through this world is called at some time to carry some of the weight of pain that assails the world. To help carry some of this pain a little farther for others is a precious calling, though it is a lonely, sad, and isolating time in one’s life. Yet often, when the suffering has lightened, you may glimpse some of the good that it brought. We are all deeply connected with each other. In some strange way, we all belong with each other in the unfolding and articulation of the one human story. Each of us is secretly active in weaving the tapestry of Spirit. When you see a Persian tapestry, it looks beautiful. Yet underneath, the tapestry is a mesh of various rough threads. Perhaps this is part of our difficulty in understanding the sore weave of pain that often sears our life. In terms of understanding, we remain at the back and see only the raw weave. Perhaps there is something beautiful being woven, but we are unable in this life to see much of the hidden aesthetic of pain.