The World of the Weak

Week of Monday, April 8, 2002

In 1985 Henri Nouwen moved from the world of the best and the brightest to the world of the weak. Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest who spent most of his adult life in the United States, had taught pastoral theology at Yale (1971–1981) and then Harvard (1983–1985) when he made what he describes as the most important spiritual choice of his life. He left Harvard and moved to Toronto where for the last eleven years of his life (1985–1996) he served as the residential priest at Daybreak, a home for people with severe physical and mental disabilities.

After twenty-five years in the priesthood, Nouwen recounts that as he was turning fifty he began to experience “a deep inner threat.” He was praying poorly, living in isolation from others, preoccupied with being relevant, and sensing that his success in academia had placed his soul in peril. “I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term ‘burnout’ was a convenient psychological translation for spiritual death.”¹ Living among the weak, and “suddenly faced with my naked self,” was the starting point for Nouwen to discover his “true identity” as a child loved by God: “These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self—the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things—and forced me to claim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.”²

The real story behind Nouwen's story is that of Jean Vanier, who in August 1964 started the first L'Arche (the French word for “shelter”) home for the severely handicapped. Today there are over one hundred L'Arche homes in thirty countries.³ It was through Vanier that God spoke to Nouwen the audacious word, “Go and live among the poor in spirit and they will heal you.”⁴ The purpose of these specifically Christian group homes, says Vanier, is not to “normalize” these people according to the standards of society, or to solve all their problems, which is never likely to happen, but rather to celebrate them as sacred gifts of God who have their own gifts to offer us.

Human weakness can come to us in many guises. Physical weaknesses plague us all at some time or another, whether by injury, illness, accident or simply aging. Paul says that our physical bodies were “sown in weakness” (1 Corinthians 15:43). Growing older forces physical weaknesses upon you no matter what you do, and to live in a culture that glorifies the young and the strong, that can be no small matter. Our world likewise worships wealth, and to be financially weak—to be poor, or to choose to give away your money—makes one vulnerable. Or again, who has not experienced moral or psychological weakness, a sort of weakness that very often disenfranchises one from the religiously strong (cf. Philip Yancey's book What's So Amazing About Grace?).

When you think about it, we spend a large portion of our lives trying to hide, deny, and overcome our weaknesses. We typically do not want to admit our weaknesses, either to ourselves and certainly not to others (especially if they hold power over us). There are reasons for this, some of which are good but many of which are toxic. So much of our society is built upon a compulsive need to compete and succeed, to prove your superiority to yourself and to others. It is a culture that breeds self-importance, elitism, aggressive competition, and the fear of failure. So, in a culture like this that honors the winners and belittles the weak, that defines the ideal human as powerful and beautiful, the weak are pushed aside.⁵ And who wants to be marginalized? One cost of achieving this standard of success is, of course, intense loneliness.

In her book Expecting Adam, Martha Beck explores what it is like to live in a world where being human is defined by being successful, intelligent, and powerful. She and her husband John both had two degrees from Harvard and had, so to speak, accepted the pathological standards of that sub-culture as good and normal. Then Adam was born. Adam was a Down Syndrome baby who, she says, helped them to discover their own disabilities, and that there was a different, better way to live, a way of the heart.

In his correspondence with the Corinthian Christians Paul makes much of this theme of his own many, personal weaknesses. He did not come to them, he says, with superior wisdom or rhetorical eloquence. No, he came “in weakness and fear, and with much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:3). Later, in defending his apostleship, he argued that “if I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness” (2 Cor. 11:30). At least part of this had to do with Paul's thorn in the flesh, some physical ailment, but it was probably more than that. There are some intimations that his physical appearance was less than impressive. At any rate, his point is that it is only in and through his many weaknesses that God's grace is made sufficient and His power is made perfect (2 Cor. 12:9–10).

Paul admits that the Christian gospel of Christ crucified sounds weak by the standards of this world, for admittedly Jesus was “crucified in weakness” (2 Cor. 13:4). To the Jews this was a stumbling block (literally, a “scandal”) and to the Greeks a laughing stock (literally, “moronic”). But, says Paul, “the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength” (1 Cor. 1:25–27).

This loving God is not a God of mere, brute power. The merely powerful inspire fear, not love and affection. Rather, God is a God who in His own incarnation as a human being was “subject to our weaknesses”, and so in turn He empathizes with us in all of our vulnerabilities (Hebrews 4:15, 5:2). As we ourselves “groan inwardly” in awareness that we are weak, the Holy Spirit “helps us in our weakness.” He intercedes for us even, or especially, when we are too weak to pray (Romans 8:23, 26).

If this is how God loves us in our weaknesses and sins (Romans 5:8–10), then surely we must learn to accept ourselves with all our many foibles. We can love ourselves with the realization that it is acceptable to be less than perfect, for to deny our weaknesses is to live an illusion and a lie. “Maturity,” writes Vanier, “is precisely the acceptance of yourself with your own flaws, as well as others with their flaws.”⁶ It is to accept that God loves us without conditions or limits, and to hear His voice that we too, like Jesus, are his “beloved children.” It is to believe the words of the hymn that I can, in fact, come to Him “just as I am.” It is, finally, to hear and believe the words of Jesus, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–29).