"Worth The Risk": A Reflection on The Second Reading for July 8, 2018: Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

2 Corinthians 12:7-10

7 And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. 8 Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; 9 but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

Most of my thinking seems to happen while I’m driving; when I’m betwixt and between two parts of my life.  Sometimes in silence—with just the rhythms of the road—an idea sneaks up on me.  Other times I’ll have the radio on, thinking my own thoughts, and suddenly I’ll notice what I’m hearing and somebody else’s idea sneaks up on me.

It was like that last week.  I had the CBC Halifax morning show on in the car, and heard a man being interviewed who was advocating for mental health support among immigrants and 1st and 2nd generation Canadians.  Especially Asian ones.  He shared that, in his experience, people from his background have difficulty being treated for anxiety or depression because of the high value they traditionally place on ‘face’.  Never show weakness.  His thinking had snuck up on me and linked up to a thought that had been burbling away in me as I drove.  The strength in vulnerability.

In this letter that we are bringing before us this Sunday at mass, St. Paul really did something astonishingly powerful.  It’s not just that he had this weakness in his life, it’s that he showed it.  He lay it out there before the world.  I hadn’t really thought about that part of it before. I’d always focused on the weakness itself and what this ‘thorn in the flesh’ could be. The intersection of my thoughts and the thoughts of the man on CBC, helped me notice that Paul was exposing his ‘face’. This could not have been an easy choice.  He was writing to people who were doubting his leadership as it was.  He was having to write to them about things they didn’t want to hear about themselves.  But laying down his own mask was the only way through to God’s power being made perfect.

Showing our weaknesses can be a risky choice. It takes trusting the other person with a part of us that we’re not even comfortable with ourselves.  But it changes things spiritually.  Whenever we lay down a mask, whenever we hand over the power we think we have, then we allow the power of our perfect Father to move freely between us.  I pulled down a mask when I met with a priest this spring to receive the sacrament of reconciliation for the first time in a very long time.  And since then, I have seen the power of Christ through my weakness. Again and again. Painful and incredible.

All this reminded me of part of a Richard Rohr book I was reading a couple of months ago:

    “Yet it is a risky position to live undefended, in a kind of constant openness to the other — because it would mean others could sometimes actually wound you (from vulnus, ‘wound’).  But only if we choose to take this risk do we also allow the exact opposite possibility: the other might also gift you, free you, and even love you.
    
    But it is a felt risk every time.


    Every time.”1


Even still, I will choose it.  Vulnerability.  With my Lord.  And with the people he puts in my path.

Noreen Smith


1  Rohr, Richard and Morrell, Mike, Divine Dance. New Kensington:  Whitaker House, 2016:  57

"Whenever we lay down a mask, whenever we hand over the power we think we have, then we allow the power of our perfect Father to move freely between us." 
​- Noreen Smith (Ora Reflections)