O Come, Incarnate Neediness and teach

The strategic insight and spiritual wisdom behind naming our need

Mama want ice pack?

My two-year-old daughter gingerly touches my leg, avoiding the splint bandaged around my foot. I cannot walk post-bunionectomy. The first couple of days post-surgery, I barely got off the couch.

Sure, honey, that would be great.

As she hustles to the freezer, her twin sister wants to know if I would like a refill of my water. She is delighted when I nod assent.

The glass she brings back is filled to overflowing. As I carefully raise it to my lips, I take a deep breath, giving my body permission to release control and be cared for in my time of need. The physical inability to do basic daily tasks on my own has made these acts of love as wholly necessary as they have been humbling to receive.

It is hard to be needy.

And yet, if we are to stay human — and potentially collectively survive an accelerating necrocapitalism that negates all human needs — it is necessary that we remember our need. That we name it aloud. That we allow ourselves to receive care, connection, nourishment from others, with humility and gratitude.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

“Vulnerable we are, like infants,” wrote St. Catherine of Siena. “We need each other’s care, or we suffer.”

We show up needy, and if we’re lucky enough to live long lives, we will leave this terrestrial plane as needy people too. In the space between, neoliberal capitalism convinces many of us that we can care for our needs ourselves. Food, drink, sleep aids and sex toys can be ordered by app and delivered to our doors within days or even minutes. A need makes itself known and then, voilà, it is met as if by magic. It becomes entirely too easy to forget — as so often happened during the pandemic with “essential workers” who were treated as disposable — that we still depend on other people to help meet our needs. Relationship is at the heart of wholeness.

Instant gratification disrupts our relationship with our own embodied neediness. It may temporarily numb its gnawing. But neediness has a way of making itself known.

I once visited a woman recovering from surgery who lived alone with her dog. She had no friends, having alienated everyone in her life with her demanding demeanor and ungrateful attitude (which, to be fair, were likely lingering effects of unhealed trauma). She relied on Meals on Wheels to bring her food, but there was no one to take out the trash that piled up in the apartment, which reeked of dog urine. During my ministry, I have met many people in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But I have met few people quite so insistent that they could take care of themselves, thankyouverymuch, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Her basic needs were provided for — she could pay for a roof over her head, she had food to eat and water to drink — but she was terribly lonely, and angry at the world because of it. Her unacknowledged needs were eating her alive.

It is prudent to prepare for precarity. Because one way or another, we will all find ourselves face to face with our neediness.

For many, this comes by way of disability: One in four adults in the US is living with a disability, and one in four 20-year-olds can expect to be out of work for at least a year because of a disabling condition before they reach retirement age. As disability advocates remind us, it is the systems that are broken, not the people. But when society does not create safety nets of healthcare, economic and social support, need is exacerbated.

We can make a start by simply being honesty about our neediness, and the ways in which the society we inhabit enhances and exploits this aspect of the human condition.

In his latest essay, “Humans of New York: Fighting dehumanization on all fronts,”

J. P. Hill

writes:

I want us to know that we are, by and large, ourselves on the precipice of vulnerability. An accident, the loss of a job, a pandemic; we can easily be rendered vulnerable. A climate disaster can render us migrants and refugees in the blink of an eye. But beyond seeing ourselves in those we are told to disdain, we should see the society we hope to build take shape when we reject dehumanization. What would a world look like if we insisted on seeing everyone as just as human as ourselves?

Contrary to popular belief, neediness is not a bad word. To have needs does not render a person morally deficient. Having needs is human. Neediness is a state of human being. We all exist in this state, albeit to different degrees at different times and with varying levels of awareness.

Our posture toward neediness — our own and others’ — matters. We can try to stave it off — which will always prove unsuccessful in the end. Or we can practice a posture of openhandedness, receiving and offering mutual aid with hearts wide open.

Photo by McKenna Phillips on Unsplash

This posture is strategic in terms of our collective survival. But before I get into that, I want to talk about the sacredness of this posture.

A theology of neediness

There are plenty of christofascistic theobros out there jabbering on about a god who has no need of us, who doesn’t much like us and would just as soon do away with us and our pesky human neediness. But the Christian scriptures themselves offer a radically different vision of divine need.

One of the oldest known Christian hymns is quoted by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Philippi. Known as the “Christological Hymn” or the “Song of Christ’s Humility,” the hymn celebrates the divine embrace of fleshy neediness:

Though [Christ] was in the form of God, 
   he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. 
But he emptied himself 
   by taking the form of a slave
   and becoming like human beings. 
When he found himself in the form of a human, 
   he humbled himself…

In theological terms, this divine pattern is known as kenosis, or “emptying.” In loving humility, God makes room for hunger, for want, for need, in order to become human with us. This divine disposition toward neediness is at the heart of the salvation story.

And the first thing God needs in order to join this human experience is a womb. Is there any aspect of life more marked by need than gestation? The fetus in utero is wholly dependent upon the mother’s body for its safety and nourishment. The current season of Advent anticipates the coming of Christ, who has known the need for human nurture and care in the intimate experience of Their own body being knit together in Mary’s womb. This sacred story renders neediness good, necessary and holy. Neediness is not a quality to be denied, hidden or numbed. Rather it is the tender, connective tissue between humans and the Holy.

Since it is Advent, I can’t resist adding a new verse to my favorite hymn of the season:

O Come, Incarnate Neediness and teach 
Our bodies how to practice what we preach 
With open hands to humbly receive 
The offering of love that we all need

To acknowledge our own neediness is to mirror this divine pattern of humility, vulnerability, and acceptance of nurture and care. Divine solidarity with us in our neediness can help us to see the neediness of others with eyes of compassionate solidarity.

How neediness strengthens our movements

Mindful of the sacredness of our neediness, we can also recognize it as a vital strategic aspect of our resistance to authoritarianism for three reasons:

1. Getting acquainted with your true needs frees you to reject the needs that others attempt to impose. Authoritarians do not want people who know their own needs. They prefer people who do not know what they need, because such people can be told that what they need is what the rulers are providing (namely, the illusion of safety maintained through violence). Rejecting the needs they say you have denies them power over you.

2. Authoritarians need to be needed. That’s their whole thing. They want to be seen as swooping in to save the day. They do not want to admit that they are needy people too. In fact, they are in denial of their neediness – they need us more than we need them, to keep the economy going with our labor. Authoritarians need people who pay taxes, pave roads, transport goods, go out to eat, buy tech, obey laws (however unjust they may be), and generally don’t get in the way of the wheels of the status quo rolling along. Refusing to cooperate with authoritarians becomes easier when we remember that all people are needy — especially the people at the top.

3. Our neediness connects us to one another. Out of an acute sense of shared need, we can build networks of mutual aid — alternatives to the systems that keep us in ruthless competition with one another. Isolated in our need for the stuff of basic survival, we can be easily picked off. But united by our need for human connection in the cause to respond to human need, we can come together to resist those who make scapegoats of the most needy amongst us.

We need to know we are needy. This spiritual wisdom and strategic insight can heighten our sense of connection to the divine, while keeping us close to our humanity and that of others. To know our neediness is to know our strength, when we allow our need to propel us toward solidarity with one another.