On fierce vulnerability

And other paradoxical prayers for people in process

A decade ago, during a season of discernment — aka wandering and wondering in hopes of learning something new, and maybe even bumping into the Divine along the way — I wrote this prayer:

God, give me a fierce and tender heart

to love and serve you 

with compassion and boldness.

Praying those words together, fierce and tender, helped carve out vital new neural pathways in my brain. At the time, my horizons were rapidly expanding — I’d been accustomed to being told in countless implicit and explicit ways by evangelicalism and wider US society that my job as a woman was to smile and be “nice.” But I’d known since I was 14 that I did not want to grow up to be nice.

I wanted to be loving.

Loving in that relentlessly agitative way that people love who refuse to live quietly within bullshit, human-made systems that hurt people. The sort of loving that doesn’t make you friends with everyone, yet does open channels of deep trust and solidarity with others who are committed to living in our wounded world with this sort of out-loud love. Loving like your soul — and the soul of the world — depends on it.

Loving like God loves.

At 22, I couldn’t have explained all this to you. But I had this earnest prayer — my intuitive attempt to name a growing yearning to be faithful to the Love within me.

I have always been a passionate person — embracing causes, uplifting others, and championing them like the world is on fire (because, like, it is). It doesn’t take more than a glimpse of injustice to stir up a fire in my soul, a fire ready to consume any and everything that is destroying life or keeping life from flourishing. Yet, even fresh out of college, I knew that fierceness alone was a quick burn. I was learning that it needed to be tempered by tenderness.

Tenderness toward myself (I am my own worst critic).

Tenderness toward others (self-righteousness kicks trust in the shins, hard).

Tenderness toward the Spirit that is always inviting transformation within us.

Because if change is to endure, it must grow deep roots in our souls — the kind of roots that utterly alter our surface-level expressions. The kind of roots we will trip over when we are inclined to quickly react from our fears, rather than first drawing nourishment from Love.

If fierceness is burn it down energy, tenderness says let’s build something better together.

I wanted to be unapologetically both/and, you know? I wanted to embody this paradoxical prayer.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to hold these two things together. Yet I knew I needed to do so if I was going to be committed to this way of loving. So I clung to this paradox as a lifeline.

As my chosen Episcopal faith family likes to say, “Praying shapes believing.” That prayer has been working on me ever since, shaping the orientation of my attention, honing my values, distilling the divine in a way I can understand Them (at least in some infinitesimally small part).

Fast forward to 2020. Amidst the storms of lockdown, with my own personal cloud of despair precariously hanging overhead, Eeyore-style, I somehow managed to read Kazu Haga’s Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm. And friends, it brought me back to life again. Haga fleshed out my sense of what loving well looks like, beginning with his robust paradox of a title.

Rooted in his experience as a student, practitioner, and trainer of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s principles of nonviolence, Haga presents a theory of change which calls for the integration of the strategic and the spiritual. This “healing resistance” holds space for both courageous deconstruction and soulful rebuilding.

Oriented toward the vision of Beloved Community, healing resistance has at its core upholding the belovedness of every person — no matter how entrenched they are in the status quo. (Listen to this podcast to try on metta meditation with Haga — a practice that emphasizes this ethic of lovingkindness). It’s about the long-haul work of healing from the violence we’ve internalized within ourselves and building trust with others through transformative conflict, as together we seek the disruption and dismantling of violent systems.

With colleagues in this work, Haga went on to form the Fierce Vulnerability Network, which contends for change through nonviolent direct action at the intersection of climate justice and racial reparations. FVN’s handbook features a dandelion — an image of resilience and interconnectedness — and I recently chose to have a similar image tattooed on my forearm. It holds many reminders for me:

• The roots remind me to be rooted in an ethic of nonviolence, and that I am nourished by the legacy of those faithful ancestors whose love laid the ground for my being;

• The three phases of the dandelion (flower, seed head, and seeds), remind me to participate courageously in the lifecycle of life, death, and resurrection, lifting my face toward the hope of what could be, while allowing those stories which no longer serve me to die, trusting that there are seeds of future possibilities already emerging;

• The seed head is a reminder to breathe, drawing on my childhood delight of blowing the seeds into the breeze with a wish, while recalling my brush with death in 2020 when I experienced two pulmonary embolisms. It invokes the powerful magic and grace of breath, which for me is one of the most potent images of God (the Hebrew word for spirit, wind, and breath is the same: ruach);

• The two achenes (seeds) are reminders of my twin daughters, and my responsibility to them and the next generation.

• As a whole, dandelions serve to help me remember that life wants to live, and that my work is to support life’s flourishing.

When I talk about nonviolence in future newsletters, know that you can swap that word out for fierce tenderness, healing resistance, fierce vulnerability, or simply the image of a dandelion. All of these convey for me the power of love in action, a commitment to the dignity of every human being (and our nonhuman relations), and a focused, strategic approach to social change.

I recently encountered another prayer, which I shared with my girls last night at bed time. It appears in Teresa Kim Pecinovsky’s captivating children’s book (with breathtaking illustrations by Khoa Le), Mother God. A spread with a growling mother bear standing before her two cubs features these poignant words:

She protects Her cubs from danger,

God, the great Mother Bear.

As fierce as She is tender,

She guards them in Her care.

Tears of recognition sprung to my eyes as I saw this prayer as yet another ring of resonance, linked to that initial stone of yearning flung with fervent hope into the pool of my soul a decade ago.

I wonder: what about you?

What paradoxical prayers/hopes/longings help you navigate change within your own life or the world? Who or what is keeping your wondrous, multifaceted soul rooted in fierce vulnerability right now?