What I struggled
with was the idea of power linked to vulnerability. As a disabled
person, and knowing many other disabled people, including all forms
of disability – chronic illness, mental illness, everything – I
have trouble with that. Vulnerability can lead to power, certainly,
but the minutes seemed to suggest that it was a more reliable
consequence than is found in my experience, first- and second-hand.
Vulnerability is often characterised by profound powerlessness.
Yet I see now one
situation in which the link of power and vulnerability is utterly
true, and inescapable. It is not in our interactions with the world
at large, it is not in our ability to make the world a better place
in general. It is not economic or political. It is personal.
There is a case
in life, fairly common as I understand it, in which truly embracing
an opportunity requires one to become utterly vulnerable, and which
gives one great power. This is not vulnerability to the world at
large, however, nor power over it. It is in relation to another
person.
Love between
people, embraced faithfully, the joining of two in spirit, and
perhaps in the Spirit, means opening oneself to the other person, and
them to you, in a way that renders one utterly vulnerable to them.
They can hurt you as no-one not in such a relationship can. You do
this because of trust, and because it is necessary to allow that
relation to bloom and flourish, to develop as it will. They,
likewise, are vulnerable to you, which is the first sort of power it
gives you.
It gives another
power as well, though it is hard to articulate what it is. While
making yourself vulnerable, you gain power over yourself as well. You
become more than you were, and have new resources for directing your
life and your self.
It doesn't matter
how many such relationships a person has in their life, nor how many
they have at one time. That spiritual intimacy is empowering in a way
that is beyond, that is different from, any other thing you will
experience.
Written February 2018
