The secret to flourishing
A slick of snow lines the length of my driveway. White flakes twirl on the sharp air. The January sky hangs so low, maybe I could reach up and touch it. What could winter possibly offer in the hibernating months that follow Christmas? Advent is a season of waiting, but so too is winter, generally.
I’ve been thinking about the rush that is Christmas. I’ve been wondering what more can be experienced in its wake. What lessons does it offer as we wait for spring? I think about the days that followed a miraculous birth—the onlookers gone home, the holy family falling into routine. In my imagination, the God-baby grows, the mother tending to his every need. Do either of them fully understand he is God—yet?
Though the Gospels recount Jesus’ brief ministry, we read little of his youth. We forget the toddler, the boy. We briefly glimpse the tween in a moment of rebellion—leaving his parents’ side, frightening them, meeting their worry with a steady insistence that he was exactly where he needed to be, “in my Father’s house.” We forget the teen, the man in his twenties. And then. There he is again. Strong and bold and full of miracles.
The years the Bible writers seem to miss are the years of need. The ones that required the guidance and shelter of two parents, of a family, of community education. I wonder now, do we lose something as Jesus followers in those silent years?
What is the silent season after Christmas, but a season of need? A season of dependency?
We need shelter. We need warmth. We need light. Jesus needed these things, too. Even if we don’t read much about it. Even if we forget.
If the post-Christmas doldrums—enduring the dark, waiting for spring—hold anything special, it’s this: a reminder of our basic needfulness as creatures of this messy place.
That’s right—of (not in). When I was a girl, I remember hearing the adage, based in John’s gospel, that we are in the world, but not of the world. I didn’t like that. Not because I wanted to do all the bad things, but because I was, by nature, deeply attuned to my world. I loved the way earth smelled and flowers waved, the way the blue sky swallowed me as I lay on the grass looking up at it, the way the ocean erased and held me. I wanted to be of the world. It was beautiful, and curious, and wild. “In, not of” did not fit. I kept this a secret. I did not protest.
To separate ourselves from our creatureliness is to divorce ourselves from something essential we were made for. Dependence.
Perhaps the great collective sin of our post-Enlightenment, digitalized, western culture is that we have banked our lives on a myth of self-sufficiency so powerful we forget dependency is a natural state of the human condition, of the condition of all living things. We have literally driven ourselves to distraction attempting to avoid the reality of weakness in our systems, in our beliefs, in our bodies.
Please know, I do not mean to cheapen or romanticize pain, suffering, sickness, or death. No one wants or wishes for these things. I speak only of need. All suffering is a kind of need, but not all need is suffering. I know that sometimes the difference is difficult to define. And yet.
Disability is the gift that has reoriented me to that beautiful, basic and essential concept of what it means to be human, of what it means to be a living thing. And if you ask a host of parents in the same boat with me, they will tell you the same. Needfulness, says artist, designer, writer, and mother Sara Hendren, is wonder and urgency capable of bringing us to deep awe. We recognize, “I, too, am a body that needs.” What if our needs are an invitation?
Try a little exercise:
I am prone to_____. I am not able to______.
Don’t be embarrassed. Our foibles, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities are an invitation to meaningful dependency on those around us.
Now try this:
I am strong for_____.
Our strengths are an invitation to generosity.
Together, the give and take of our need and of our strength equal what modern philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “human flourishing.” Sometimes, he says, we need our friends to tell us who we really are. Sometimes we need them to carry us. Sometimes you are the befriended, and sometimes you are the friend.
Circle back to Jesus’ ministry. What was it about if not meeting and welcoming human need? What happened in those formative years that taught him this? Was it a mother who met each need in turn? A father who embraced a son whose origin story had the potential to make him an outcast? A community that loved and taught him? His own hands that, with practiced trial and error, knew how to take a rough block of wood and turn it until it became something lovely and useful?
My needfulness is a gift that leads to flourishing. I need more than grace in another life. In this life, I need the people around me, the community around me, the family around me, the strangers around me to tell me who I am when I forget and to carry me when I am weak.
You do, too, thank God.
If we shifted our paradigm in this way, perhaps we would stop attempting to fix or erase disability, and instead collaborate, becoming communities that stopped isolating and pathologizing divergence and, instead, focus our energies toward the center of our collective dependency on one another. We might generate real and simple ways to support each other, ways that lead to our shared flourishing.
Case in point: Last Friday, I watched a grainy video of my son, whose speech is a challenge to understand, give a presentation about the parable of the lost son and his prodigal father (that’s us, by the way—a son in need and utterly spent, and the extravagant, joyful grace of the father receiving him with open arms). K stood at the front of the class with a poster he drew and colored himself. His teacher held the poster for him, so he could look at it from time-to-time to remember what he wanted to say. Occasionally, she made the tiniest gesture to remind him to look at his audience and make eye contact with them—so tiny, it took me awhile to see what she was doing. It was such a simple “fix.” The kid who needs visual aids and cues to remember, had exactly what he needed in the hands of his teacher. It wasn’t remarkable or hard or expensive. There were no tools or technology involved. Only her gift meeting his need in order for everyone to participate. His classmates, who understand him pretty well, sat so quietly (Sixth graders! Quiet!) so that what he said had the best chance of being received. They offered their attention and he offered his story. Do you see? Need is everywhere. Dependency everywhere. And in it, from it—not despite it—we give each other the gift of our presence. The gift of ourselves.
One voice. One set of strong hands. And a collective willingness to listen. That was all.
Snow falls heavy now. And I remember the way this cold and frosty blanket, this silent and brooding sky, readies the ground for the riotous abundance of spring. In the same way all living things need all the seasons in order to flourish, we humans need all the gifts and all the “weaknesses” to flourish, too. The abundant life takes many forms.
