Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

by Andy Crouch

“Gloria Dei vivens homo,” Irenaeus wrote. A loose—but by no means inaccurate—translation of those words has become popular: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

To flourish is to be fully alive, and when we read or hear those words something in us wakes up, sits up a bit straighter, leans ever so slightly forward. To be fully alive would connect us not just to our own proper human purpose but to the very heights and depths of divine glory. To live fully, in these transitory lives on this fragile earth, in such a way that we somehow participate in the glory of God—that would be flourishing. And that is what we are meant to do.

There’s nothing I find quite as satisfying as a 2x2 chart at the right time. The 2x2 helps us grasp the nature of paradox. When used properly, the 2x2 can take two ideas we thought were opposed to one another and show how they complement one another.

“Life holds only one tragedy,” the French Catholic Léon Bloy wrote, “not to have been a saint.”

Flourishing is not actually the property of an individual at all, no matter how able or disabled. It describes a community.

Think of authority this way: the capacity for meaningful action.

The way I will use the word vulnerability in this book is a bit different from its usage in America today, where it is often limited to personal and emotional transparency.

this is not really what I mean by the vulnerability that leads to flourishing. Instead, think of it this way: exposure to meaningful risk. Sometimes emotional transparency is indeed a meaningful risk—but not always.

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities, never about certainties. To risk is to open ourselves up to the chance that something will go wrong, that something will be taken from us—without knowing for sure whether that loss will come to pass or not.

To be vulnerable is to be exposed to the possibility of loss—and not just loss of things or possessions, but loss of our own sense of self. Vulnerable at root means woundable—and any wound deeper than the most superficial scratch injures and limits not just our bodies but our very sense of self. Wounded, we are forced to become careful, tender, tentative in the way we move in the world, if we can still move on our own at all. To be vulnerable is to open oneself up to the possibility—though not the certainty—that the result of our action in the world will be a wound, something lost, potentially never to be gained again.

True vulnerability involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value. And like authority, true vulnerability involves a story—a history that shapes why we are choosing to risk and a future that makes the risk worthwhile but also holds the potential of loss coming to pass.

have come to believe that the image of God is not just evident in our authority over creation—it is also evident in our vulnerability in the midst of creation. The psalm speaks of authority and vulnerability in the same breath—because this is what it means to bear the image of God.

the gospel restores hope and dignity, meaningful action and meaningful risk.

“If you look in the book of Genesis, in the beginning, the world is in darkness,” Isabel said. “There is no order. God is a God of order—he orders every single life, changes every life from darkness to light in Jesus. And that is my motivation as I work. Everything I do is from God, not from man. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, and we are to do the same: be a servant with love. If I am cleaning a toilet—well, that is something that needs to be done to order the world and to wash the feet of others. There is no sadness about that; it’s a joy. The greatest example of servanthood in my life is the Holy Spirit, because he guides me. I listen to his voice, and I say, ‘Yes, sir.’” Just to make sure you understand the significance of this near-verbatim transcript from her interview: in a few sentences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.

The real temptation for most of us is not complete apathy but activities that simulate meaningful action and meaningful risk without actually asking much of us or transforming much in us.

In social media, you can engage in nearly friction-free experiences of activism, expressing enthusiasm, solidarity or outrage (all powerful sensations of authority) for your chosen cause with the click of a few buttons.

When media are tools that help those who have lacked the capacity for action take action, and bring them together to bear risk together rather than be paralyzed in Suffering, they can lead to real change. But when the residents of the comfortable affluence of Withdrawing use media to simulate engagement, to give ourselves a sense of making a personal investment when in fact our activity risks nothing and forms nothing new in our characters, then “virtual activism” is in fact a way of doubling down on withdrawing, holding on to one’s invulnerability and incapacity while creating a sensation of involvement. Only when technology serves a genuine, embodied, risky move toward flourishing is it something other than an opiate for the mass elite—the drug that leaves us mired in our apathy and our neighbors in their need.

Our affluence has left us unready for the tragedy and danger of the world. But what we cannot see when we are caught in Withdrawing is that there is something far better ahead, pleasures which we must be made strong enough to bear. We will only discover them if someone unwraps us and calls us forth. And the great glad news of the gospel is that someone has.

Authority corresponds to the ability to add something to the world—the possibility of gain. Vulnerability corresponds to the possibility—though only the possibility—of loss.

While some of us, by the sheer grace of God, manage to escape the lure of the most powerful idols, not one of us does not have some habit, some recurring pattern of thought, substance or device that we turn to when we are feeling vulnerable—something that assuages our vulnerability and elevates our sense of capacity to act. They offer us, in a word, control—for the very essence of control is authority without vulnerability, the ability to act without the possibility of loss. Control is the dream of the risk- and loss-averse, the promise of every idol and the quest of every person who has tasted vulnerability and vowed never to be exposed in that way again.

I am not sure there is a “law of conservation of vulnerability” in the same strict sense, but it is still a general rule: vulnerability shed by one group of people is inevitably borne by others’ suffering.

The first things any idol takes from its worshipers are their relationships. Idols know and care nothing for the exchange of authority and vulnerability that happens in the context of love—and the demonic powers that lurk behind them, and lure us to them, despise love. So the best early warning sign that you are drifting toward Exploiting—seeking authority without vulnerability in your work, in your entertainment, in alcohol or coffee or chocolate (or whatever may be your drug of choice, in pornography or in romance novels)—is that your closest relationships begin to decay.

It is those relationships, after all, that could grant you the greatest real capacity for meaningful action. But they also demand of you the greatest personal risk.

Leadership does not begin with a title or a position. It begins the moment you are concerned more about others’ flourishing than you are about your own.

It begins when you start to ask how you might help create and sustain the conditions for others to increase their authority and vulnerability together.

This does not mean they neglect personal growth—quite the opposite. Personal growth becomes more and more important as we realize how easily we get stuck in Suffering, Withdrawing or Exploiting and how little we contribute to Flourishing when we are mired in those corners.

personal growth now serves a different end—not our own satisfaction or fulfillment, but becoming the kind of people who could actually help others flourish.

When the deepest truth of your life is quadrant I, but others assume you are in quadrant IV, you are probably, like it or not, a leader.

What if leaders are perceived as more vulnerable, more exposed to meaningful risk, than they actually are? This is the essence of manipulation (see figure 6.2).

The most important thing we are called to do is help our communities meet their deepest vulnerability with appropriate authority—to help our communities live in the full authority and full vulnerability of Flourishing.

There are two kinds of vulnerability that must remain hidden if we are to lead others toward Flourishing. First, the leader’s own personal exposure to risk must often remain unspoken, unseen and indeed unimagined by others. And second, the leader must bear the shared vulnerabilities that the community does not currently have the authority to address. Revealing either of these kinds of vulnerability will at best distract, and at worst paralyze, the community we are responsible for, robbing them of the opportunity for real flourishing.

This leads to a paradox that is often hard for privileged people to understand. The more a community experiences shared vulnerability without authority—the more that poverty and oppression have shaped a community’s experience—the more likely that transformative leadership from within that community needs to bear hidden vulnerability.

the appropriate response to this hidden vulnerability is in fact public dignity—representing the community not just in its vulnerability but in its God-given, image-bearing authority.

Were I to offer every audience a full accounting of the present, past and future exposure to loss in my life, I would be nothing but a distraction. For one thing, these audiences have no authority in these vulnerabilities—no capacity for meaningful action to address them. Others in my life do have that authority—my supervisor, my friends, my confessors, my wife. But a hall full of strangers could only listen, with sympathy or alarm, to the reality of my—or anyone’s—broken life.

there is another, deeper reason that an endless parade of personal vulnerability would be the opposite of leadership at these times. When I am speaking, my deepest calling is to help a community bear the community’s vulnerability. Every person in the room has their own litany of difficulties, dangers and doubts, and to serve them well is to directly or indirectly address those realities, not whatever may be preoccupying me on that particular day.

when leaders take risks, including the risks of personal disclosure, they do so for the sake of others’ authority and proper vulnerability.

This is one sense in which leadership is always servanthood—it is always about others’ flourishing, not our own, and it is always directed toward others’ authority, not our own.

our job is often to increase others’ authority while gradually, in a measured and intentional way, alerting them to vulnerabilities (including our own limitations, foibles and blindness).

Or as Max De Pree likes to say, “Bad leaders inflict pain. Good leaders bear it.”

When our perceived authority is completely out of step with our actual vulnerability—when there is no one who knows the true reality of our private life of suffering or flourishing—we are at the edge of burnout.

the transfiguration reveals the absolute necessity of communion with others to sustain a life of flourishing.

no one survives hidden vulnerability without companions who understand.

No one can turn hidden vulnerability into flourishing without friends.

We are called to risk hidden vulnerability, finding a way to bear authority without becoming an idol or tyrant. But we are also called to very visible suffering, to journey to the quadrant down and to the right—to descend to the dead.

idols are all the forces that whisper the promises of control, invulnerable power and independence—and then, having seduced us with those promises, enslave us to their demands and blind us with their distorted view of the world.

Something is warped in the grain of the universe, something that prevents us from turning authority into flourishing—we are bent in the direction of exploitation, privilege and safety. Such is the power of the lies that have insinuated themselves into the human story from the very beginning.

The most transformative acts of our lives are likely to be the moments when we radically empty ourselves, in the very settings where we would normally be expected to exercise authority. As Jim has discovered, his competence is helpful—but his vulnerability is transformative.

(Regular viewers of TED talks can judge for themselves whether the touching personal disclosure at the ten-minute mark has, since Brené Brown’s talk went viral, become an expected cliché rather than a genuine sacrifice.) The kind of vulnerability we are called to on a day-to-day basis is far more prosaic—and in its way more demanding—and we will examine it in the next chapter.

you only get to be assassinated once. So as far as possible, the ultimate responsibility of a leader is to choose wisely and well the form and timing of that descent. Indeed, someone who is not ready to descend to the dead—to hand over all authority and embrace maximum vulnerability—is almost certainly in the grip of idolatry.

the primary responsibility of every leader is to prepare and plan for their descent to the dead.