Reflection work

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Beyond the False Choice

Two questions haunt every human life and every human community. The first: What are we meant to be? The second: Why are we so far from what we’re meant to be?

Human beings have an indelible sense that our life has a purpose—and a dogged sense that we have not fulfilled our purpose. Something has gone wrong on the way to becoming what we were meant to be, individually and together.

The first question exposes the gap in our own self- understanding, our half-formed sense that we are meant to be more than we know. How can we have such a deep sense of purpose but find ourselves unable to easily name or grasp that purpose? Yet this is the human condition.

The second question exposes the gap between our aspira- tions and our accomplishments, between our hopes and our reality, between our reach and our grasp. If the first question gives voice to our greatest hopes, the second brings to the

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/11/2021 11:34 AM via TRINITY WESTERN UNIV AN: 1160528 ; Crouch, Andy.; Strong and Weak : Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing Account: s6511865

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surface our deepest regrets. Having both great hopes and great regrets is also, alas, the human condition.

In this book I offer a way of answering both of these questions. It’s simple enough to explain in a minute or two of conversation, or in a page or two of a book—it’s coming up in just a few pages, and you’ll grasp its essence almost immediately. You’ll see it in action in your friend- ships, your workplace, your family and your favorite TV show or movie—you’ll find it in the pages of Scripture and in the most mundane moments of day-to-day life. You’ll see it in the most horrifying contexts of injustice and exploitation, and in the most inspiring moments of compassion and reconciliation.

Many simple ideas are simplistic—they filter out too much of reality to be truly useful. This one is not, be- cause it is a particular kind of simple idea, the kind we call a paradox. It holds together two simple truths in a simple relationship, but it generates fruitful tension, complexity and possibility. I’ve come to call it the paradox of flourishing.

“Flourishing” is a way of answering the first great question, What are we meant to be? We are meant to flourish—not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to exist, but to explore and expand. “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

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Beyond the False Choice 11

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.

Every paradox requires that we embrace two things that seem like opposites. The paradox of flourishing is that true flourishing requires two things that at first do not seem to go together at all. But in fact, if you do not have both, you do not have flourishing, and you do not create it for others.

Here’s the paradox: flourishing comes from being both strong and weak.

Flourishing requires us to embrace both authority and vulnerability, both capacity and frailty— even, at least in this broken world, both life and death.

The answer to the second great question—Why are we so far from what we’re meant to be?—is that we have for- gotten this basic paradox of flourishing, which is the secret of being fully alive. Actually, we haven’t just forgotten it, as if we had misplaced it absentmindedly. We’ve suppressed

Flourishing comes from being both strong and weak.

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it. We’ve hidden it. We’ve fled from it. Because we fear it. I used to think that what we feared was vulnerability—

the “weak” part of the paradox. But in the course of writing this book and talking with many others about the paradox of flourishing, I’ve realized that we fear authority too. The truth is that we are afraid of both sides of the paradox of flourishing—and we especially fear to combine them in the only way that really leads to real life, for our- selves and others.

This book is about how to embrace the life for which we were made—life that embraces the paradox of flourishing, that pursues greater authority and greater vulnerability at the same time.

But most of all, this book is about a picture, the simplest and best way I know to explore the paradox of flourishing. It’s really just a sketch, the kind of thing you can draw on a napkin, but it will give us plenty to think about for the rest of this book (see figure 1.1).

It’s one of my favorite things: a 2x2 chart.

The Power of the 2x2 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 com- plement one another.

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The world is littered with false choices. The leadership writers Jim Collins and Scott Porras talk about “the tyranny of the OR and the genius of the AND.” Should products be low cost or high quality? Whom do managers serve, their investors or their employees? The most transformative companies manage both. Are we the products of our nature or our nurture? They are not opposites—they have to go together.

The Christian world has its own versions: Is the mission of the church evangelism and proclamation or is it justice and demonstration? Are we supposed to be conservative or radical, contemplative or active, set apart from the world or engaged in the world? Or take the topic that almost generated the first

IV I

III II

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

Figure 1.1

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great biblical 2x2 chart. Is the life of the Christian about faith or works? (“Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you a 2x2 chart of my faith and works”—James 2:18, my take on the original Greek!) Then you’ll be ready for the ultimate question: Was Jesus of Nazareth human or divine? Was he Son of Man or Son of God?

In all these cases, what we need is not a linear “or” but a two-dimensional “and” that presses us to see the sur- prising connections between two things we thought we had to choose between—and perhaps even to discover that having the fullness of one requires that we have the fullness of the other.

One of the best examples comes from studies of effective parenting—the kind of parenting that produces children who display self-confidence and self-control. Which is better, to be a strict, demanding parent who sets firm boundaries, or a responsive, engaging parent who interacts with their children with warmth and compassion? If you were a parent, where on this spectrum would you want to be (see figure 1.2)?

Put the question this way and most parents will lean one

FIRMNESSWARMTH

Figure 1.2

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way or the other. Some will quote Proverbs—“spare the rod, spoil the child”—and opt for firmness (see Proverbs 13:24). Others will quote Paul—“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger”—and opt for warmth (see Ephesians 6:4, Colossians 3:21).

Both are right. Firmness and warmth, it turns out, are not actually op-

posites. They can go together—in fact, they must go to- gether for children to flourish. Their relationship is much better shown with a 2x2 (see figure 1.3).

Map firmness and warmth this way, and you quickly dis- cover that either one, without the other, is poor parenting. Firmness without warmth—authoritarian parenting—leads

FI RM

NE SS

WARMTH

Figure 1.3

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eventually to rebellion. Warmth without firmness—in- dulgent parenting—leads eventually to spoiled, entitled brats.

In fact, there aren’t just two ways to be a bad parent— there are three! The worst of all is parenting that is neither warm nor firm—absent parenting (see figure 1.4).

There is a difference, it turns out, between being nice and being kind. “Nice” parenting drifts down to the bottom right, settling for easy, warm feelings without ever setting high expectations. Kind parenting manages to be clear and firm while also tender and affectionate. Psychologists call it authoritative parenting rather than authoritarian. The best parenting, in our 2x2, is up and to the right.

There are a few more insights hidden in this simple diagram.

ABSENT INDULGENT

AUTHORITARIAN KIND

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III II

FI RM

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WARMTH

Figure 1.4

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I’ve numbered the quadrants using Roman numerals I to IV, starting with the ideal quadrant up and to the right and con- tinuing around clockwise—in the same order and direction we’ll consider them for the next four chapters. Consider the line from the top left to the bottom right, from quadrant IV (Authoritarian) to quadrant II (Indulgent), from firmness without warmth to warmth without firmness.

Remember our one-dimensional line with warmth on the left and firmness on the right? In practice, if that is your mental model of parenting, you’ll end up becoming either authoritarian (firmness without warmth) or indulgent (warmth without firmness). The IV-II line describes the line of false choice—the world we often think we live in (see figure 1.5). It describes our default way of thinking about

IV I

III II

FALSE CHOICE

Figure 1.5Cop yr ig ht ©

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how the world works—at least when we are limited to a linear model.

Because neither authoritarian nor indulgent parenting produces healthy results, they tend to generate and rein- force one another. Grow up in an authoritarian home, and you may well react by being an overly indulgent parent. Grow up with indulgence, and you may well overcorrect toward strictness when your own children come along. Much of the dysfunction of our lives comes from oscil- lating along the line of the false choice, never seeing that there might be another way.

One other observation: There is one quadrant that really is the worst of all. It’s quadrant III (Absent), the quadrant of withdrawal and disengagement. Authoritarian parents may not meet their children’s need for affection, but at least they provide structure. Indulgent parents may not provide structure, but at least they create an environment of ac- ceptance and affirmation. But absent parents leave two voids in their children’s lives, not just one. There’s some- thing about the Absent quadrant that is uniquely dam- aging—the total opposite of the Kind quadrant.

You could sum it up this way: We tend to think that our lives have to be lived along the line of false choice, the IV-II line. But actually the deepest question of our lives is how to move further and further away from quadrant III (Absent) and more and more fully into quadrant I (Kind).

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The III-I axis is the one that matters the most—the one that leads from a life that is not worth living to the life that really is life. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about.

The Paradox of Jesus No human being ever embodied flourishing more than Jesus of Nazareth. No human life (let alone death) ever un- leashed more flourishing for others. And precisely for this reason, no other life brings the paradox of flourishing so clearly into focus. In the life of Jesus we see two distinct patterns that can seem impossible to reconcile.

On the one hand, consider the bookends of his life on earth. He was born an infant, utterly dependent like every other human being. He ended his life on a Roman cross, was buried and descended to the dead. One of Christian- ity’s oldest texts puts it this way:

Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6-8)

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On the other hand, there were Jesus’ three years of flour- ishing public ministry, the culture-making effects of which resound through history and throughout the world—the most consequential life ever lived. Christians believe that this very Son of Man and Son of God now sits at the right hand of the Father, truly the world’s Lord, and sends his Spirit of power to equip us to live his life in the world. To quote the very next line of that same ancient text: “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). Indeed, Jesus himself told his first followers that they would do even greater things than he himself had done (John 14:12).

But how can these two callings—to humility and to boldness, to death and to life, to submission to the worst

the world can do and to reigning with Christ over the world— possibly coexist? What do they mean for those of us who have some scope of choice and action—those of us who have been granted privilege and power? What do they mean for those who live at the cruelest edges of the world, in settings

of implacable injustice and oppression? Is there really any Christlike way to exercise leadership within our broken

How can these two callings—to humility and to boldness, to death and

to life, to submission to the worst the world can do and to reigning with Christ over the world—

possibly coexist?

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human institutions all the way up to (or down to) the church itself? What would be the specific practices we could adopt to live in ways that bear the true image and bring lasting flourishing?

We need a way to hold these two seemingly opposing facets of Jesus’ life, and our calling, together—a way to navigate this complexity without being overwhelmed. Which means we need a 2x2 chart, of course.

The Dimensions of Power I’m sure you see it coming already—the two dimensions of Jesus’ life, his vulnerability in dependence and death on the one hand, his authority in his earthly ministry and his heavenly exaltation on the other hand, can easily start to seem like linear alternatives. Exaltation or humiliation? Ascension or crucifixion? Miracles of healing, deliverance and even resurrection, or, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The empty tomb or the cross? The only way to hold them together is a 2x2 (see figure 1.6).

Some of us will instinctively identify with, or aspire to, the “vulnerability” dimension. Perhaps that is the reality of our lives—it is, eventually, the reality of every mortal life. It may be the reality of the community or family into which we were born, making us keenly aware of the limits of our power and the precariousness of our circumstances. Or we may aspire to identify with vulnerable people and places.

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From those places and with those people, we look at Jesus and see vulnerability. Jesus identified with the vulnerable in his birth, life and death. Whether we identify with vul- nerability or aspire to it, Jesus is there.

On the other hand, others of us identify with, or aspire to, authority. We have been told we can make a difference in the world; we’ve been given opportunities for creativity and leadership. Other people respond positively when we suggest a course of action. Maybe we’ve invested sub- stantial amounts of our time and money (maybe our parents’ money) in gaining authority in the form of training and certificates and degrees. We look at Jesus and see au- thority—as early as age twelve in the temple, engaging

FLOURISHING

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III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

Figure 1.6

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powerfully with the scribes; standing up in his hometown synagogue and boldly proclaiming himself as the ful- fillment of the prophet’s vision; confounding Pilate and the Jewish leaders even when he was in chains; breathing on his disciples after his resurrection and giving them his Spirit, telling them they were now commissioned to go out into the whole world with his authority. Whether we identify with authority or aspire to it, Jesus is there.

When we identify with one dimension or another, it’s easy to become impatient with people who emphasize the other one. I worked in a campus ministry on an Ivy League campus where we emphasized the Christian call to

“downward mobility,” to use one’s privilege and power as an opportunity to serve the materially and spiritually poor. One day an African American student confronted me.

“When I came to college,” he said with some frustration, “my entire community held a prayer service and laid hands on me to commission me to go to Harvard. And now you want me to tell them that I’m just coming back to the hood to work for a nonprofit ministry?” His community had commissioned him for authority—power and position in parts of the culture where they had historically been absent or underrepresented. Who was I to tell him not to stay on that path?

What I was missing, at that point in my life, was a 2x2 conception of authority and vulnerability—the possibility

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that the journey of Christian discipleship, and true power, would involve not just a progression toward one or the other, but toward both at the same time. Such a conception would not simply authorize my student to leave his vulner- ability behind and pursue privilege and power, but it also did not authorize me to ignore his (and his community’s) legitimate pursuit of flourishing and the authority that flourishing requires.

This book is my long overdue answer to that student. First we will examine the four possible combinations of au- thority and vulnerability on that 2x2 diagram. Properly combined, authority and vulnerability lead to flourishing (chapter 2). But when either one is absent—or even worse, when both are missing—we find distortions of human beings, organizations and institutions. We find suffering, withdrawing and exploiting (chapters 3, 4 and 5)—which in their most virulent forms become poverty, apathy and tyranny. They don’t always appear to be that bad—poverty can look like mild disempowerment, apathy can look ap- pealingly like safety, tyranny often seems like mastery. In another layer of complexity, it will turn out that all of us inevitably spend time in each of these three quadrants, and God’s grace is real and available in them all. But none of them is the fullness of what we are made for, the life that is really life.

So how do we move up and to the right on this 2x2 chart?

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Surprisingly, rather than simply moving pleasantly into ever greater authority and ever greater vulnerability, we have to take two fearsome journeys, both of which seem like detours that lead away from the prime quadrant. The first is the journey to hidden vulnerability (chapter 6), the willingness to bear burdens and expose ourselves to risks that no one else can fully see or understand. The second is descending to the dead (chapter 7), the choice to visit the most broken corners of the world and our own heart. Only once we have made these two fateful journeys will we be the kind of people who can be entrusted with true power, the power that moves up and to the right (chapter 8) and brings others who have been trapped in tyranny, apathy and poverty along with us.

In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, the re- nowned public health physician Paul Farmer tells his bi- ographer, Tracy Kidder, “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.”

I think Farmer is entirely right that a saint would be a great thing to be. The saints are, ultimately, the people we recognize as fully alive—the people who flourished and brought flourishing to others, the ones in whom the glory of God was most fully seen. There really is no other goal higher for us than to become people who are so full of au- thority and vulnerability that we perfectly reflect what

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human beings were meant to be and disclose the reality of the Creator in the midst of creation. “Life holds only one tragedy,” the French Catholic Léon Bloy wrote, “not to have been a saint.”

But becoming a saint is about quite a bit more than “working harder”—or perhaps better put, it’s about a great deal less. If you have some inkling, like Farmer, that a saint would be a great thing to be, and if you also have some inkling that you never could work hard enough to actually become one, you’re on the path to true flourishing.

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Flourishing

Flourishing is something both we and our neighbors seek and want. Flourishing captures Jesus’ statement of his own life’s purpose in John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” It echoes Paul’s words to Timothy as that young man sought to pastor the wealthy in his

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VULNERABILITY

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congregation, urging him to lead them toward “the life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6:19). To be fully, abundantly, gloriously alive—this would be flourishing. What could we desire more?

But there is a danger here, and Paul understood it. To say that there is a “life that really is life” implies that there is a life that is not really life. You can be mistaken. You can miss it. You could possibly live your whole life without ever knowing what real life is. And Paul implies that the people most at risk for missing “the life that really is life” are the rich.

Since nearly every reader of this book possesses wealth that would have been unimaginable to Paul and Timothy, resources out of reach of most of the billions with whom we share the planet, Paul’s warning should ring in our ears. If there is a life that is not really life, there is surely a flour- ishing that is not really flourishing. So perhaps we should remind ourselves what flourishing is not.

Flourishing is not the life we see portrayed in the com- mercial messages that have saturated the imagination of every resident of the mediated world—the unselfcon- sciously multicultural millennial tribes, the blissfully happy families with their responsible-yet-still-cool parents and cheeky-but-still-lovable kids, the youthful retirees on the weathered porch, all glowing in the warmth of the photog- raphers’ golden hour.

Flourishing is not health as we normally understand it.

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There are people with profound physical and mental dis- abilities who flourish and make flourishing possible for others, while there are gyms full of people hitting their per- sonal bests who are nonetheless not flourishing.

Flourishing is not the same thing as growth—the ubiq- uitous Southern weed we call kudzu grows, all right, but a roadside overgrown with kudzu is not flourishing.

Flourishing is not affluence. There can be flourishing among the materially poor, and there can be a debilitating spiritual sickness among the affluent.

Flourishing is not gentrification. There are flourishing communities that never appear on lists of the hippest neighborhoods, and a Whole Foods or a sudden influx of people carrying yoga mats is no guarantee of a flourishing neighborhood.

How do we know that flourishing is none of these things? Because the most influential human being in history was a Judean carpenter and rabbi who did not live in a gentrified neighborhood (although, to be fair, he did tell at least one person to pick up his mat). He was never noted for his physical appearance (in fact, he had “nothing in his ap- pearance that we should desire him,” see Isaiah 53:2). His circle of followers first expanded then dwindled as his mission reached its culmination—from curious crowds of thousands to a few steadfast and heartbroken women standing by his cross.

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He lived the most exemplary human life possible, but it was not a life that looks like our affluence-addled picture of flourishing.

Define flourishing carelessly—define it hastily, instinc- tively, from a position of temporary power or privilege— and you will end up missing the real thing, or the real One.

You will miss Jesus—and you will also miss Angela.

Angela Like all my sister Melinda’s children, Angela, her third of four, was born in a plastic inflatable tub in the middle of their living room, attended by a midwife and surrounded by family—a scene that will give you some sense of my con- fident, resilient and countercultural sister. (My wife Cath- erine and I have preferred to experience the miracle of new life in, shall we say, more controlled environments.)

But the moment that Angela arrived in the world, the midwife’s patient and cheerful coaching shifted suddenly to decisive urgency. I will never forget picking up the phone, three hundred miles away, and hearing my father’s an- guished voice as he struggled to say the words, “There’s something wrong with the baby.” By that time Melinda, her husband, Dave, the midwife and Angela were already speeding toward the regional hospital, half an hour’s drive over mountain roads from their home.

There was indeed something wrong—one basic thing

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wrong, it turned out, that led to many other things wrong. Angela, doctors determined after days of tests, had three copies of her thirteenth chromosome, a condition called trisomy 13. (The far more common condition called Down Syndrome involves an extra copy of the twenty-first chro- mosome—trisomy 21.) Some babies are born with a milder

“mosaic” version of this condition that only affects some cells. In Angela’s case, every cell had this debilitating extra set of instructions.

Many children with trisomy 13 die before birth; half of those born alive die within the first week. Trisomy 13 af- fects almost everything, for the worse, in a human body— from the unfused plates in Angela’s skull that first alerted the midwife to her need for urgent medical attention, to the curled-in toes on her feet. It is so rare that even at the tertiary-care facility where she was cared for, most doctors had only heard of the condition, never seen it. When they did see it, their words were grim.

My brother-in-law still has the notebook where he tried to keep track of what the endless parade of specialists said in those first few frantic days. Early on he wrote down the phrase, “Incompatible with life.” Yet eleven years later, Angela was still alive.

She could not meaningfully see or hear; she could not walk; she could not feed or bathe herself. She knew nothing of language. We could only guess what she knew or under-

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stood of her mother, her father, her grandparents, brother and sisters. Early on she would respond to voice and touch; in recent years, even as she had grown physically, she had for long seasons receded further into an already distant and un- knowable world.

Which leads to this question: Is Angela flourishing?

The Flourishing of the Vulnerable If your definition of flourishing is the life held out for us by mass-affluent consumer culture, the obvious answer is that Angela is not flourishing—never has and never will. She cannot purchase her satisfactions; she cannot impress her peers; she cannot even “express herself ” in the ways we think are so important for our own fulfillment.

But perhaps the question actually has things backwards. When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he told a parable that turned that question on its head, ending with the question, “[Who] was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” (Luke 10:29, 36).

If we were to similarly turn the question of flourishing around, maybe we would be asking, “Who is helping Angela flourish?” We might be asking, “Who is flourishing because of Angela?” And even, “How can we become the kind of people among whom Angela flourishes and who flourish with Angela in our midst?”

Flourishing is not actually the property of an individual

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at all, no matter how able or disabled. It describes a com- munity. The real question of flourishing is for the com- munity that surrounds Angela—her parents and siblings, her extended family, the skilled practitioners of medicine and education and nutrition who care for her, and in a wider sense the society and nation of which she is a citizen. The real test of every human community is how it cares for the most vulnerable, those like Angela who cannot sustain even a simulation of independence and autonomy. The question is not whether Angela alone is flourishing or not— the question is whether her presence in our midst leads us to flourishing together.

Then the question goes one step further. Is Angela helping us flourish? Is she the occasion of our becoming more fully what we were created to be, more engaged with the world in its variety and com- plexity, more deeply em- bedded in relationship and mutual dependence, more truly free?

The surprising answer is that precisely because of Angela’s great vulnerabil- ities, because of the immense challenges that accompanied her into the world, a kind of flourishing is possible that would not otherwise exist. For ten years and counting,

The question is not whether Angela alone is flourishing or not—the question is whether

her presence in our midst leads us to flourishing together.

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untold people have had the opportunity to serve Angela and her family with authority and with vulnerability. The medical teams who have cared for her from the earliest days have had to bring all their authority as physicians and caregivers to bear on her many vulnerabilities. But because her condition is so complex and all-encompassing, mere medical authority is by no means sufficient—everyone in- volved with Angela must also take risks, be willing to learn and discover that they were mistaken, be willing to open themselves to the reality that even the most effective medical care will only provide partial healing.

The only kind of power that can sustain Angela’s life has to be up and to the right in our 2x2 diagram. Authority without vulnerability will not suffice. Neither will vulner- ability without authority. The two together are what is needed. And these two together, I have come to believe, are the very heart of what it is to be human and to live for God and others.

If there is someone in your own life who has contributed in dramatic ways to your own flourishing—a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a friend—they almost certainly acted with authority in your life and exposed themselves to vul- nerability as well.

If you have ever been part of a community that experi- enced some real measure of flourishing (a business, a church, a neighborhood, a sports team, a musical ensemble,

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a class)—some group of people who experienced a deep health and growth, among whom the vulnerable were wel- comed and the strong were vulnerable—I suspect you’ll find that among the characteristics of that community were high authority and high vulnerability. It’s the way we were meant to live.

True Authority Think of authority this way: the capacity for meaningful action. When you have authority, what you do, or do not do, makes a meaningful difference in the world around you. Teachers and nurses have authority in the classroom and the hospital; plumbers have authority with pipes and land- scapers have it with plants; pilots have authority with air- planes and librarians have it with books. When you have authority, you can ask, command, or even merely imply that something should be done, and it will be done. Not all authority, though, is about the ability to command or control. Sometimes it means knowing, or being known, in ways that set you free. An electrical engineer can read a circuit diagram that would stump the rest of us, under- stand how it works and see how to make it work better. If you have risen through the ranks of a business, you can walk into meetings and those present will already know your name, your character, your track record. You will be able to act in ways that you cannot act among strangers.

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Authority requires that our action be meaningful, not just willy-nilly activity. I can idly pluck the strings on a guitar, but because I have never learned the guitar, my plucking has no real musical meaning or value. No one may be stopping me from picking up the instrument and plucking the strings, but I still do not really have the au- thority to play the guitar.

What makes action meaningful? Above all, meaningful action participates in a story. It has a past and a future. Meaningful action does not just come from nowhere, and it does not just vanish in an instant—it takes place in the midst of a story that matters.

Authority, at least for human beings, is always limited. The president of the United States has a great deal of ex- ecutive authority within that nation, but none at all when visiting another country; and of course that capacity for meaningful action is conferred only for four years at a time, eight years at the most. Authority is limited not just in space and time, but to particular domains—the CFO of a firm has broad authority over the firm’s accounting con- trols, but not generally over its advertising decisions, and he or she has no authority over the accounting practices of another firm.

Perhaps most importantly of all, true authority is always given. The capacity for meaningful action is not something we possess on our own. It is something others confer on us.

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Without being given countless gifts—of language, of nurture, of love—by those who cared for us in our infancy and childhood, none of us would have the capacity to act meaningfully in the world. Without being continually af- firmed and upheld in our capacity to act, none of us would be able to exercise whatever authority we have—as teachers, parents, pastors, presidents or coaches. Sociologists distin- guish between “ascribed” authority and “achieved” au- thority—the kind that comes from a title or an inheritance versus the kind that comes from a history of successful action—but both come from outside ourselves. Authority, like flourishing, is a shared reality, not a private possession.

More Authority Than Any Other Creature Human beings have far more authority than any other creature. Other creatures act, certainly, and even act with lasting effects, sometimes reshaping their environment in significant ways (as a beaver does when building a dam). But they do so in limited ways and always in a particular ecological niche. Human beings, on the other hand, have found ways to flourish and act meaningfully in nearly every ecosystem on the planet, from the steppes of Siberia to tropical rainforests—even, in modern times, to the con- tinent of Antarctica. The first readers of the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28) can only have had the faintest

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inkling of how truly human beings have been able to fulfill that call—and, as well, how terribly we have been able to abuse it.

Likewise, no other creature, at least in any way we can tell, acts meaningfully in the ways that human beings do— that is, acts as part of a grand and complex story about the world’s origins and destiny and their place in it. There are other creatures on the continent of Antarctica, but none of them are pondering the history and destiny of our planet and cosmos in the way that the scientists are doing as they conduct experiments there. (Indeed, the fact that human beings will voluntarily travel to a land of constant subzero temperatures and no daylight for three months a year, just to study the world, is an extraordinary testimony to our desire for meaning.)

No other species has such a clear sense of responsibility for other species—what Christian theology calls dominion, the capacity and responsibility to act on behalf of the flour- ishing of the rest of creation. The psalmist of Psalm 8, having considered the vastness of the cosmos and human beings’ smallness in the midst of it, then proclaims,

Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under their feet,

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all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

(Psalm 8:5-8)

This authority, uniquely ours as the image bearers of God, is a gift in every way. It does not come from our own autonomous selves—it is given by Another. And it is good. The sorrow of the whole human story is not that we have authority, it is the way we have misused and neglected au- thority. Our drive for authority—our sense of frustration when we are denied it or our sense of grief when we lose it—comes from its fundamental goodness.

So authority is meant to characterize every image bearer— even the most vulnerable. As infants, long before we could provide for ourselves in any way, we learned that we were capable of meaningful action. We emerged from the womb and instinctively sought to recognize a human face. We learned that others would give meaning to our cries.

Even my niece Angela has authority in this sense. Cer- tainly her authority is limited—but as we have already seen, that is actually true for every human being. Like everyone’s authority, Angela’s capacity for meaningful action comes from the community around her. When she cries out with frustration, hunger or discomfort, others around her in- terpret those sounds and respond. They incorporate her

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actions, as unconscious and limited as they are, into a story, a shared reality with a past and a future. Angela’s capacity for meaningful action is a gift, to be sure—one she cannot earn or sustain on her own. But that does not make it less real—that makes it true authority.

And Angela certainly has the other quality that makes us uniquely human, uniquely capable of bearing the divine image. The other thing that is essential for the exercise of true power is our vulnerability.

Two Kinds of Vulnerability 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. We live in an age of oversharing. Ordinary people and celeb- rities disclose all kinds of seemingly shameful or incrimi- nating details of their lives. Indeed, some people who have become celebrities simply through the sheer volume and extravagance of their self-disclosure are praised for their

“vulnerability.” But this is not really what I mean by the vulnerability

that leads to flourishing. Instead, think of it this way: ex- posure to meaningful risk. Sometimes emotional trans- parency is indeed a meaningful risk—but not always. For one thing, what was truly vulnerable and brave in one gen- eration can become a key to success in another. When you

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can acquire fame, wealth and significant cultural power by frequently appearing on screen physically naked, na- kedness can become less about the exposure that human beings fear and more about the “exposure” that every would-be celebrity needs—a currency of power, not of loss.

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 some- thing 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

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk.

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lost, potentially never to be gained again. Here again we need the word meaningful to do its work.

We are not talking about willy-nilly risk, putting ourselves in harm’s way for no good reason. Nor are we talking about risking things we don’t care whether we keep or lose, playing poker with chips that never have to be cashed in. True vulnerability involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value. And like authority, true vulnera- bility involves a story—a history that shapes why we are choosing to risk and a future that makes the risk worth- while but also holds the potential of loss coming to pass. When we expose ourselves to meaningful risk, we become vulnerable in the sense I will use the word in this book.

So emotional transparency can be meaningful risk—or it can be calculated manipulation. An already powerful person can use what seems like emotional honesty, even tears, to win followers, avoid confrontation or sidestep accountability. If you are in a setting where emotional transparency will almost certainly win you a hearing or undermine others’ criticisms, to be emotionally transparent may indeed be the right thing to do. It may even be part of the proper exercise of your au- thority, a meaningful action that will contribute to your com- munity’s story. But it is not necessarily vulnerable.

Naked Creatures The very first word of Patrick Lencioni’s “business fable”

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Getting Naked is vulnerability. His fable tells the story of a small but unusually successful consulting firm that is swallowed up by a larger and more conventional company. The secret of the smaller firm’s success, it turns out, is vulnerability. Lencioni applies the vivid phrase “getting naked” to actions consultants can take in front of their clients that directly challenge three fears: fear of losing the business, fear of being embarrassed and fear of feeling inferior. It’s a compact catalogue of the sources of au- thority in the consulting world: profit, prestige and a reputation for being smarter than anyone else. Even though Lencioni agrees that consultants need to be prof- itable, be well regarded and bring unusual insight to the table, his fictional narrator Jack discovers that achieving those goals actually requires putting them at risk—

“getting naked” by exposing oneself to the possibility of losing them all. Jack learns to make honest but difficult observations about his clients’ businesses—and perhaps more difficult, to be willing to ask “dumb questions” that reveal his own limits or ignorance.

Nakedness is a funny thing. Of all the creatures in the world, only human beings can be naked. By adulthood, every other creature naturally possesses whatever fur, scales or hide are necessary to protect it from its envi- ronment. No other creature—even naked mole rats or Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless feline sidekick of Mike Myers’s

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movie villain Dr. Evil—shows any sign, in its natural state, of feeling incomplete in the way that human beings consis- tently do. Only human beings live our whole lives able to return to a state that renders us uniquely vulnerable, not just to nature but to one another.

The unsettling truth is that just as human beings have more authority than any other creature, we also have more vulnerability than any other creature. We are not just born naked, we are born dependent, exposed in every conceivable way to the possibility of loss. For far longer than even our closest evolutionary relatives, after we are born we are de- pendent on others to nourish us, clean us and protect us. For many years we remain immature—unable to fully assert our authority competently in the world. (With the extension of adolescence in the modern world, that timespan keeps growing—Joseph and Mary presumably made their trip to Bethlehem when she was a teenager, but it’s not until age twenty-five that you can freely rent a car from most com- panies in the United States and not until age twenty-six that parents must remove children from their health insurance plan. The length of time you can live in your parents’ basement is continually being renegotiated upward as well!)

This is the essential human condition: greater authority and greater vulnerability than any other creature under heaven. Indeed, as the scholar Walter Brueggemann pointed out many years ago, the way the original man in

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Genesis 2 recognizes the original woman as his suitable partner, after seeing so many other creatures that would never suffice, is with this outburst of poetry: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Bones—hard, rigid, strong. Flesh—soft, pliable, vulnerable. We image bearers are bone and flesh—strength and weakness, authority and vulnerability, together.

The same psalmist who celebrated human dominion over the creatures also was capable of looking up into the heavens and grasping what they meant for the significance, or insignificance, of our small and transitory lives: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, / the moon and the stars that you have established; / what are human beings that you are mindful of them, / mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4). Only a human being can fully grasp the meaning of that canopy of stars, of the in- finitude of the Creator’s life before and after our small lives—so only a human being can be so completely ex- posed to meaningful risk.

I 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.

When the true image bearer came, the “image of the in- visible God” (Colossians 1:15), he came with unparalleled

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authority—more capacity for meaningful action than any other person who has lived. His actions all took their place within the story of Israel, the greatest of all shared histories, and they decisively changed the path of history and created a new and different shared future. And yet he, too, was born naked, as dependent and therefore vulnerable as any human being; and though the Western artistic tradition has placed loincloths over the uncomfortable truth of crucifixion, he died naked as well. He died exposed to the possibility of loss, not just of human life but of his very identity as the divine Son with whom the Father was well pleased. He was laid in the dust of death, the final and full expression of loss. And in all of this, he was not just Very Man but Very God.

What Love Longs to Be As I was writing this chapter the makers of the GoPro line of cameras had their latest viral video hit. A helicopter drops the skier Cody Townsend at the top of a seemingly impossible, nearly vertical crevasse between two rock walls at the top of a snow-covered mountain. Thanks to the head-mounted camera, we follow him off the edge, plunging down through the narrow canyon and out, safely, just barely, onto the gentler slopes below.

It is terrifying. (One person who shared it online said that as he watched, he “tightened every orifice in sym- pathy.”) It is also mesmerizing and exhilarating.

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What makes this ninety-second video so compelling and compulsively shareable? It’s the combination of authority and vulnerability—Townsend’s complete command of the sport of skiing plus his willingness to stretch that compe- tence to its absolute limit, to the point where there was the real possibility of loss. A video that showed authority without vulnerability might be impressive, but it would ul- timately be boring; a video that showed gratuitous risk- taking without commensurate authority might well be good for a few laughs in the genre of “stupid human tricks,” but it would not provoke astonishment, admiration and awe. What we truly admire in human beings is not authority alone or vulnerability alone—we seek both together.

When authority and vulnerability are combined, you find true flourishing. Not just the flourishing of the gifted or affluent, but the needy and limited as well. For my niece Angela to flourish, others will have to act meaningfully and place her own actions in a meaningful story. Indeed, if An- gela’s condition could be solved with a simple, technical medical procedure, perhaps all it would take to restore her health would be someone with medical authority. But her con- dition is too comprehensively challenging for that—it will

What we truly admire in human beings is not

authority alone or vulnerability alone—we

seek both together.

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never be “solved.” So Angela’s flourishing also depends on others being willing to put something meaningful at risk— the doctors charting an uncertain and difficult medical treatment, the caregivers who bear the difficulties and in- dignities of providing for a broken human body, and above all her parents choosing to love sacrificially, day after day, in the face of a most uncertain future.

In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of mean- ingful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything meaningful is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

What we will have to unlearn, and be saved from, are our failures of authority, vulnerability or both—and that is the territory we now must explore.

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Suffering

When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen

people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us were there be- cause we knew Gideon’s remarkable personal story—

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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growing up Afrikaner in the last years of apartheid South Africa, becoming deeply involved in that coun- try’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Com- mission. Others were interested in his work with the Center for Public Justice, an innovative think tank in Washington, DC.

From my eleven-year-old daughter—perched on her mother’s lap for lack of chairs—to the gray-haired couple from a nearby suburb, all of us took turns answering Gideon’s question. A few minutes earlier you could have mistaken this gathering for a polite dinner party of rea- sonably diverse, prosperous professionals. But as we went around the circle, as so often happens, the answers went deeper and deeper, longer and longer.

Almost every answer to Gideon’s question involved a story of violence.

In this room of seemingly secure citizens of the United States, there was hardly anyone who had not encountered some kind of forceful violation of dignity that had shaken their world, bruised their innocence and kindled a passion for justice. That word justice, potentially so abstract and distant, was in fact acutely personal. But for me one answer came even closer to home.

Abby, an Asian American physician a few years younger than me, had been invited by mutual friends. When her turn came to answer Gideon’s question, she began, “When

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I was a girl my family moved to a suburb of Boston, Mas- sachusetts, called Needham.”

Needham! My family, too, had moved to Needham when I was thirteen years old. I came of age there, and it will always be home for me, though my parents moved away years ago. Abby was from my hometown. I barely restrained a delighted outburst as she continued her story.

“There was a convenience store named The Little Peach in Needham.”

Yes, there was—down the street from the high school, right across from the Methodist church where I came to a living faith. My friends and I stopped at The Little Peach countless afternoons in my high school years. I enjoyed a pleasant wave of nostalgia (and a distinct memory of the taste of Orange Crush soda) as Abby went on.

“One day my dad needed to use the copy machine there, and he brought me along. I must have been seven or eight years old.” I quickly estimated the years—that would have been my sophomore or junior year in high school.

“My father was born in China, and his English was poor. He had trouble figuring out how to get the copy machine to work. But he couldn’t explain his problem to the owner of the store. The owner became furious with my father. He started mocking my dad’s Chinese accent. Then he grabbed my father’s papers, ripped them up and tossed them on the floor, and told us to get out of his store.”

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Abby paused. “I had always known my father as strong, kind and smart. I had never seen him humiliated like that in front of me. He was so ashamed—I was so ashamed. I didn’t know what racism was before that day and what it could do to someone—but after that, I knew.”

Vulnerability Without Authority I never knew.

All those years, full of the joyous energy of adolescence, my friends and I—all of us “white” without ever giving it one moment’s thought—had spilled out the doors of that little convenience store, sodas in hand. To us, racism was something that happened long before and far away, not under our noses, not at the copy machine I used a dozen times or more, not at the counter of The Little Peach.

For me, Needham was always about flourishing—the place where I came of age, discovered talents and ability, learned to pray and fell in love, was granted authority and discovered vulnerability. For Abby, it was the place where the violence of the world burst into the open, where her own father saw his authority ripped into pieces and thrown to the floor, his identity mocked and his weakness ex- ploited. The place where an eight-year-old girl started a journey that would lead her, one day, to a circle of people, bruised by violence, seeking justice.

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby discovered

what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority.

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discovered what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority. Authority, the capacity for meaningful action, has many sources. It comes from facility in a language—but immi- grants trade their native tongue for one they learn with difficulty, if at all. It comes from citizenship in a nation and all the rights that come with citizenship— but many immigrants arrive with only provisional status, at best, in the new land. It comes from membership in an extended family, the deep knowledge of people and place that is only acquired over generations—immigrants give all that up the moment they step on the ship or plane that takes them away from their home. Immigration is such a drastic step that few would take it except in cases where the vulnerability of staying home, whether economic, po- litical or cultural, is even greater than the vulnerability of trying to make a life and a living in a new home.

Abby’s parents had taken that step. And one of the most admirable things about the United States is how much au- thority they had in fact been able to acquire, in the form of economic and educational opportunities, by the time they arrived in Needham. But on that afternoon, Abby was rudely awakened to all the ways her parents lived with

Vulnerability Without Authority I never knew.

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby

That afternoon in The Little Peach, eight-year-old Abby discovered

what it is like to live with vulnerability without authority.

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vulnerabilities she had not seen—how authority could be snatched out of her father’s hand and ground spitefully underfoot. She had discovered the reality of life in the corner called Suffering.

Discovering Suffering None of us make it very far in life without spending time in this corner. Suffering can be the result of injustice and evil, but it touches even the most sheltered lives.

My friends and I in Needham knew little of the worst of the world, but suffering found us all the same. My friend Paul, head over heels in love with a girl named Janet, was summoned to the back of the library stacks junior year, where Janet told him she had tried to commit suicide the previous weekend. She was breaking up with him, she said, so he wouldn’t have to deal with her depression. I knew nothing of this until six years later, when it spilled out in a conversation one summer day back from college, and Paul wept as uncontrollably as if it had happened yesterday. That same summer, one of my best friend’s parents divorced, and I suddenly replayed my memories of their home in high school and realized that all those years his family had lived with toxic bitterness, as corrosive as any acid to the hope and confidence of their children.

I will never forget the first funeral I attended for someone my age, in the church across the street from The Little

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Peach. Matt had been practicing with the freshman football team when he noticed unusual bruises from the gentlest of collisions. Four months later, he died from leukemia, and my friends and I sat in the overflow crowd in the vestibule of the church as we watched his parents walk in to the service. In his grief, his father looked to me like the strongest man in the world carrying the heaviest weight in the world on his shoulders. Out of nowhere, suffering had found him, and us.

All this happened to me, and around me, in one of the most protected corners of the world, in one of the most affluent places on the planet. (Even decades later, the wounds are deep enough that I have changed names and identifying details in this chapter out of respect for friends’ privacy.) Wherever you come of age, suffering will come into your life earlier than you expected, in the form of risks you cannot manage and pain you cannot avoid, a room with no exit.

Ultimately, suffering—vulnerability without authority— is the last word of every human life, no matter how privi- leged or powerful. We will end our days, one way or an- other, radically vulnerable to others, only able to hope that they will honor our diminishment and departure with care and dignity. The authority we carefully store up for our- selves will evaporate slowly or quickly, over the span of decades—or over brunch.

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Eric and Kate Before I really talk with Eric and Kate for the first time, I can already make a rough guess of their status and occupa- tions. Eric is athletic, handsome, in a suit with an open collar; Kate is dressed with the effortless panache that takes a great deal of effort. It’s not hard to picture her on the paths along Boston’s Charles River with the other early-morning runners (a more apt name for her Lycra- clad tribe than “joggers”). He works in finance; she works in marketing—they both live on Beacon Hill, Boston’s neighborhood for young professionals with good jobs, good friends and good prospects.

They began dating, I find out, shortly before Eric started going to church. Eric is effusive in his newly discovered faith—Kate is more reserved. And yet you sense her opening up to the possibility that a loving God knows her and is seeking her, along with a growing wonder at the openness and generosity she has discovered among the fol- lowers of Jesus.

On Easter Sunday, a few months after we meet, Eric and Kate attend church and go out for brunch with friends. In the middle of the meal, Kate’s head droops, and then her whole body goes limp. An ambulance rushes Kate, unresponsive, to the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital. By the time I get Eric’s anguished email to a few Christian friends later that night, she is in the neurological intensive care unit.

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On Monday morning, and every morning for the next week, I visit to support Eric and to pray with him as Kate’s chest rises and falls with the mechanical rhythm of the life-support equipment. Her face is expressionless, pale, soft as with sleep. The hospital’s chief of neurology takes over Kate’s case and spends hours with the family and with attending physicians, interns and nurses at Kate’s side. They have arrived at a diagnosis: a rare and undetected genetic condition has made Kate vulnerable, all her life, to a massive stroke. It could have happened years ago; it could have waited years longer. On Easter Monday, there is still some hope Kate might recover, at least partially. Over the coming days that hope dwindles. She will never open her eyes again. Late one afternoon, with her family around her, the doctors remove the equipment from her body and she is gone.

I attend the funeral in one of Boston’s most affluent suburbs—not very different from my own home of Needham. The impeccably dressed mourners arrive in late-model SUVs, and I am reminded of how highly New England’s elite value their control—control over slippery roads, over ap- pearances, over emotions, over relationships. Kate’s room- mates give bewildered eulogies, grasping for profundity out of friendships born largely of carefree partying and the small trials of college life. The faith that she had just begun to ex- plore hovers over a service that is hollow with grief.

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At the graveside I am surprised to see the hospital’s chief of neurology. He is perhaps sixty years old—he has cared for countless patients, has risen to the very top of his pro- fession at one of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, and yet here he is at this young woman’s grave, his face streaked with tears. He is shorter than I remem- bered from the hospital. He reaches up to embrace Eric and says, “I’m so sorry we couldn’t save her.”

The Paths to Suffering Of the four quadrants, Suffering is the one we least want to visit. And yet it is the only one I can be absolutely sure

every reader of this book has experienced. You may or may not feel you have ever tasted the flourishing that comes from simultaneously experiencing great authority and great vulnerability; you may or may not have ever

lingered in the withdrawal of having neither authority nor vulnerability; perhaps you have never had the opportunity to taste the tantalizing promise of authority without vul- nerability. But without a doubt you have experienced vul- nerability without authority, risk without options.

We suffer in the hospital waiting room, knowing that the

Of the four quadrants, Suffering is the one we least want to visit. And yet it is the only one I can be absolutely

sure every reader of this book has experienced.

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child or parent or friend who just was taken into surgery has taken everything we cherish in life with them—but also knowing that we can do nothing, beyond faithful waiting and prayer, to affect the outcome.

We suffer in romance, being on the receiving end of one of the worst and most cowardly inventions of the modern age, the breakup by text message. (Now that is vulnerability without authority!)

We even suffer in ambition, having sent off an appli- cation for a job or a place at university, all the documen- tation we could muster of our authority—but then having to wait weeks or months for a decision.

Indeed, sometimes suffering is simply the painful payoff of risking love in a broken world. This is the burden of Eric at Kate’s grave, but it is also the burden of the chief of neu- rology at Mass General Hospital, with all his professional success and skill; it’s the burden of the widower closing his wife’s casket after fifty years of marriage; on a smaller but still very real scale, it is the burden of my friend grieving his breakup with Janet six years later.

But there is another path to suffering, one that has nothing to do with the risks that come with true flour- ishing. The other path is injustice—the spiritual and physical violence done by those who seek authority without vulnerability. Abby’s father had done nothing to earn the violent contempt of the proprietor of The Little Peach, but

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that man’s distorted use of his petty power did damage all the same—far more damage, surely, than any satisfaction he gained from his display of superiority. One bleak day I sat with my friend Jeremy the day after his divorce was fi- nalized. His ex-wife had opted out of marriage with its de- mands for growth and transparency. It is surpassingly un- likely that she will end up happier in the long run, but the damage has been done in their lives and the life of the young daughter she left behind.

The most painful path to the quadrant called Suffering is the human choice, at the very origins of the species, to pursue Exploiting—to seek authority without vulnerability, godlike power without God-like character. We are vul- nerable without authority because our first parents sought authority without vulnerability—and because their fallen children seek it still.

Generations of Suffering Any experience of vulnerability without authority is painful, but the deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational. They involve whole peoples who find themselves stuck in suffering, whole communities with a shared painful history and a dismal expected future.

This is not just a matter of financial deprivation. Even if you are personally materially poor, if your community—

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your family of origin, your ethnic group, your nation—has some measure of authority and can resist the worst of human vulnerabilities, you are at a much lower risk of true poverty. You are connected with others who can restore some measure of flourishing in your life.

Conversely, even if you are personally materially well-off, if your community is mired in suffering—if your parents, people and nation have known little for generations but enforced helplessness due to tragedy and injustice— then you are not free from the oppressive reality of suf- fering. And this kind of suf- fering is far deeper, and far less tractable, than the suffering all of us experience as individuals—because simply escaping it as an individual does nothing to change the fundamental systems of vulnerability without authority.

Sandra grew up in Ventura County in southern Cali- fornia, and she carries herself with the confidence that seems to be the birthright of children of those safe, sunny, endless suburbs, the confidence that carried her to uni- versity and into a professional career. Meeting her for the first time, I make a host of assumptions—almost all of which turn out to be wrong.

I assume that like so many young Americans, she can

The deepest and most intractable examples of suffering are communal and multigenerational.

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largely chart her own course in life, choosing her college major and career—when in fact, every one of these deci- sions has been discussed and debated and decided by her whole extended family.

I assume she grew up knowing she would go to college. In fact, no one in Sandra’s family had ever gone to college. For most of her childhood it was a distant and hazy dream.

I assume her parents worked hard to pay for her edu- cation—but in fact, Sandra’s parents worked hard her whole life at several jobs each, not to save money but to pay for basic daily expenses.

I assume she grew up in a loving, stable home, which is half true. Her family was generous and warm, but stability was far beyond their grasp—because although Sandra was born in the United States, her parents were not. They have spent her whole life in the United States without legal status. Early in her teens, translating from the Spanish that is their only fully comfortable language to the English that she speaks like the American native she is, she fully grasped the reality: any hour, any day—at a routine traffic stop or when a white Immigration & Customs Enforcement ve- hicle would pull up at the places where they held down their informal, under-the-table jobs—they could in an in- stant be taken away from her, back to the land they left before she was born.

Her family is part of the vast and complicated story of

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undocumented immigration to the United States—a story of brave and hard-working people leaving homes of little opportunity and perilous violence to take back- and spirit- breaking work in American factories and fields. During Sandra’s years in junior high school, a movement began to force the issue of these long-term, tax-paying residents and workers. Sandra and her friends skipped school to march in the peaceful procession through downtown Los Angeles. For them, American-born citizens, the worst that could happen would be a night in jail. For many of the im- migrant workers in the march—their uncles, aunts, parents and neighbors—speaking up for basic recognition and fair treatment could have been the last act of their lives in America.

As Sandra tells this story, you can still glimpse the scared and perplexed thirteen-year-old she once was. She de- scribes her yearning for her eighteenth birthday, the day she could apply for family-based green cards for her own parents. She cannot speak without emotion about the day those green cards arrived two years later. Sandra no longer lives with that radical vulnerability, knowing her parents could disappear to a country she has never visited. Or maybe, since all of us live with the vulnerabilities of our teenage years long after those years are gone, she lives with that vulnerability every day.

Every one of us is a neighbor to communities in suf-

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fering. This can literally be true—the pleasant town where I live borders a postindustrial city with one of the highest murder rates in my state. Nearly every reader of this book will live within an hour’s drive of a place similarly en- trenched in vulnerability without authority—and we all live a short plane flight away from even more extreme ex- amples. Within our businesses and our workplaces, our hospitals and our colleges, in even the healthiest places, there are pockets of persistent and seemingly intractable poverty, material and spiritual.

You might object. Not all workplaces, you might say. What about those darlings of the media, the social media startups of the last decade where every employee is a mil- lionaire, the companies with stratospheric valuations, onsite masseurs and free vegan cuisine in the cafeteria, the firms full of authority and healthy risk-taking?

But in fact these firms also are neighbors to and inter- twined with an economic ecosystem that leaves whole communities in suffering. In October 2014 Wired mag- azine reported on the dirty work every social media company must somehow handle: moderating the deluge of exploitative, degrading content posted in unimaginable quantities around the world and around the clock by boors (and increasingly by bots). This is not simply material that might offend those of gentle or puritanical sensibilities, but truly unthinkable representations of real and fictional vio-

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lence, abuse of women and men, children and animals, and countless other horrors conjured up by the human mind.

Someone has to prevent the average user from encoun- tering these horrors or else all of our news feeds would be regularly infiltrated by retch-inducing images and text. But this means that a human being has to review every degrading image. And that someone is usually a resident of a distant country, employed by an outsourcing firm—at the time of Wired’s article, largely in the Philippines, thanks to its cheap labor supply and reasonably close ties to Western culture. Philippine young adults do this work because there is no better work to do, and they do it until they are utterly undone by it.

This is the reality of the globalized Internet world, in which the depredations of a few, the pornographers and exploiters who seek power without vulnerability (Ex- ploiting), are foisted on those with no alternative (Suf- fering) in order to allow the privileged to live in ignorant comfort (Withdrawing). It’s a world in which poverty of spirit is bought at near-poverty wages. The flourishing of a few powerful companies—and we who use their services— is a mirage made possible only if you avert your eyes from the vulnerability they outsource to others.

Building Authority The existence and persistence of the quadrant called Suf- fering is the real test of power—a test that all of us with

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power have failed. The consequences of our failure to fully bear the divine image fall most heavily on those who live in this quadrant with no prospect of escape—the in- dividuals and communities who exist in a state of con- tinual vulnerability.

Making things worse, some well-meaning attempts to intervene in situations of suffering can actually increase vulnerability and undermine authority. As Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros point out in their compelling book The Locust Effect, half a century’s worth of financial in- vestment in the materially poor world has had surpris- ingly little effect. Introducing material resources alone into a system of exploitation—treating the symptoms of Suffering without addressing the disease of Exploiting and Withdrawing—actually can increase the vulnera- bility of the poor. Even at the smallest scale, a family given a few farm animals by a well-intentioned devel- opment program can begin to attract the hungry gaze of people willing to do them violence. At the largest scale, global development funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars become powerful incentives to corruption at the highest levels of government.

Too often, our efforts to intervene in suffering end up only reinforcing poverty. It is almost never enough to reduce vulnerability—even though that is what most of us seek to do in our own lives. We must also restore proper

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authority to individual persons and to whole communities. There is nothing wrong with reducing meaningless risk in people’s lives—their vulnerability to hunger or disease. But the best interventions in situations of persistent poverty increase authority as well.

How do we move people stuck in the quadrant called Suffering toward the authority for which they were made? The only truly sustainable response is to help build lasting authority. In 2007 I had the opportunity to visit a district in India where bonded labor—modern-day child slavery— had been endemic. But with the help of the Christian hu- manitarian organization World Vision, these small, mate- rially poor communities had begun to see extraordinary change. A few of World Vision’s interventions in that situ- ation were focused on pressing, immediate relief of vulner- ability (programs to provide basic food, clean water and shelter), but most were aimed at increasing meaningful authority: savings programs for women (financial savings, especially in communities of great poverty, are an im- portant source of capacity for meaningful action), training and support for local law enforcement (encouraging the kind of legitimate authority that could restrain exploitative moneylenders), and, most memorably for me, the “chil- dren’s panchayat,” a village council just for children, where they could practice the responsibility for the community that would be theirs when they came of age.

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What I found in that community is what can be found in so many communities marked by suffering: when the gospel begins to transform individuals and communities, it does not simply relieve the most immediate needs. Indeed, many of those needs may remain unmet in any material sense. And yet the gospel restores hope and dignity, mean- ingful action and meaningful risk. At a distance, you might suppose that systemic injustice and multigenerational vul- nerability would leave nothing but misery in their wake. But draw closer to even the greatest suffering and you find people of extraordinary resilience and spiritual power. One of them, for me, is named Isabel.

A Path Appears Every session of the weekend conference on faith and work, held at an energetic and growing church in Santa Barbara, California, was to begin with an interview between Kyle, the pastor hosting the event, and a member of the congre- gation talking about their work. The very first story we heard is what I will always remember about that weekend.

Isabel, poised and impeccably dressed, joined Kyle on the stage. She gave a brief summary of her story in profi- cient, Spanish-inflected English—born in the city of Viña del Mar in Chile, trained and credentialed there as a family counselor. A few years before she had immigrated to the United States with her American husband, awaiting the

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birth of their son. They settled in Santa Barbara to be near family members. But Isabel discovered that her profes- sional credentials from Chile were not recognized in the United States, and her husband struggled to find steady work. Still, Isabel said gratefully, she had eventually been able to find full-time work.

“And what is that work?” prompted Kyle. “I clean houses,” Isabel said. The Santa Barbara hills are

full of spacious homes, and nearly every one employs a Hispanic woman as a cleaner. That was the work that Isabel had found—and could speak about in theological terms.

“How do you see your work reflecting God’s work?” Kyle asked.

“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 moti- vation 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 ser- vanthood 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

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near-verbatim transcript from her interview: in a few sen- tences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.

“Do you encounter bro- kenness in the work you do?” Kyle asked.

“Of course,” Isabel re- plied. “It’s sad to see people who have everything beau-

tiful, everything perfect. They contract with you so their world can continue perfect and clean. But you realize their life is empty. So I have to be light for them. Every single home I go to, I pray for that family, that they can find him. If he will use me, amen. If not, amen—he will send somebody else.”

When Isabel is not working or caring for her own family, she is volunteering with a center called Immigrant Hope that serves other women from Latin America, most of whom also clean houses. Isabel teaches courses that help them prepare for drivers license exams and the tests re- quired for citizenship in the United States. “The Lord Jesus is teaching me that we are all immigrants,” she told me,

“and our real home is with him. So we should be showing others his love and mercy, and how much he loves those whose lives are broken. By addressing very practical needs, we show them the one who makes everything new.”

In a few sentences, Isabel had just given us a trinitarian vision of the work of house cleaning.

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I called Isabel to ask her permission to quote from that interview in this book. She asked for time to pray about it, then asked if we could speak by phone a few days later. It turned out that Isabel had not primarily been praying about whether she should give permission for her story to be in this book—God had apparently settled that question quickly, and it was fine. Instead, she had been praying for me, by name, and God had given her specific words to speak to me, specific instructions for my own prayer life and a set of verses from the New Testament letter 1 Peter to guide me. Printed on a piece of paper, they sit on my desk as I write.

Isabel has authority, something you discover the moment you meet her. She speaks and acts meaningfully in every- thing she does. Her authority does not come primarily from her circumstances—those reflect the vulnerability of the countless immigrants who, their deeper gifts so often unrecognized and unused, serve in jobs that few Amer- icans will take at all, let alone take gladly. There is much in Isabel’s life and story, both spoken and left unsaid between the lines of her testimony, that speaks of the vulnerability without authority that comes to so many in a broken world.

But her story has been transformed by another story— her life’s action has been made meaningful by being caught up in the story of the gospel. She has moved from quadrant II to quadrant I, from Suffering to Flourishing—and she is bringing others with her.

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This can be true for us as well. No one escapes this quadrant of human experience. As we will see in the final chapters of this book, we actually will be called to seek out suffering, to go to its depths, if we truly want to bring flour- ishing to the world. But when we journey to the heart of suffering, whether by circumstance or by choice, we are only going where Another has gone before us. When we find our place in that story and in that journey, our vulner- ability, too, becomes the path to flourishing.

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Withdrawing

As a father, I discovered what exactly the Gospel of Luke had meant by “swaddling clothes.” My newborn son loved nothing so much as to be tightly wrapped in a blanket, arms and legs neatly tucked into a package, and held. Un- swaddled, he would fuss and squirm; properly swaddled,

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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he became both calm and alert, able to take in the world around him without anxiety. The swaddling clothes bound him but also comforted him. It is worth pondering that the Savior of the world, too, was swaddled in his own infancy— protected from both action and risk.

Within a few weeks, of course, my son outgrew his swad- dling blankets and his desire for them. (And not all babies take to swaddling, as his sister made fiercely clear when she came along a few years later.) But for the first years of his life, it was my deepest desire as a parent to protect him from too much of either authority or vulnerability. We moved tantalizing but fragile objects out of his reach; we swooped in to pick him up when he wandered too far on the sidewalk or the playground; we scanned every room for sources of risk. A healthy childhood is one where both ca- pacity for action and exposure to meaningful risk are meted out in measured doses, gradually increasing as the child matures.

So if Suffering is the quadrant none of us have been able to avoid, the quadrant of Withdrawing is where we all began—and at the beginning it was called Safety.

No authority and no vulnerability—or at least no awareness of either one. Unborn, we had no capacity for meaningful action, and we were blissfully unconscious of meaningful risk. We had not yet discovered the world with its history, future, possibilities and dangers. Just as well,

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because we were unformed and unready for them. If we had been too exposed to either authority or vulnerability at that most tender stage of human life, we would not be alive today.

Such safety is a fleeting thing. Far too many childhoods are compromised by the early introduction of too much vulnerability and too much authority. This very day there are children picking through smoldering heaps of garbage in the ports of Africa and Asia where our discarded elec- tronics go for recycling, making tiny sums of money to support their families while exposing their lungs to toxic fumes and their hands and feet to jagged metal and glass. Others are being handed lethal weapons and trained in killing before they have developed the moral compunc- tions of adulthood; still others are exposed to the degraded passions of desperate men. Few parents would wish this kind of crash course in the cruelty of the world on their children, but many parents themselves live deep in the quadrant called Suffering. There is no vulnerability deeper, no lack of authority more crushing, than the inability to protect your own child from harm. Millions of parents on this planet know that reality all too well.

One night as I tucked my daughter into her bed, safe beneath her down comforter and properly lavished with kisses and hugs, and prayed for her safety, I unexpectedly sensed the unmistakable voice of Another addressing me

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in return. “I hear your prayers,” this voice seemed to say kindly but sternly. “But I also hear the prayers every night of parents who can offer their children no protection.” It was not a rebuke; it was an invitation to understand exactly how much anguish is brought before “the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name.” And perhaps it was a reminder that there is another way to fail your children: too much swaddling.

The Only Thing Money Can Buy For almost all of human history, parents’ nightly prayers for their children’s protection were offered in the face of urgent and unavoidable vulnerability. Only in these last decades, in privileged corners of the world, has any child been tucked into bed with such utter security as my own children have known. Perhaps parents have always been tempted to swaddle their children for too long, protecting them from as much of the world as they can—but only recently have we been able to actually succeed.

We have a saying in our family: The only thing money can buy is bubble wrap. Affluence cannot ultimately remove the vulnerability that is our human condition and

our true human calling, but it can swaddle you in so many layers of insu- lation that you will never

The only thing money can buy is bubble wrap.

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be able to fully feel it—or to freely move. It can keep you swaddled far beyond your tender years, well into an adulthood of risk-averse entitlement.

If you settle down in this corner, even your ambitions will become carefully circumscribed, following well- marked paths to good compensation and social respecta- bility. The slippery pole of ascent to an Ivy League edu- cation may be fiercely contested—a friend who works in college admissions jokes that “helicopter parents” have now been replaced by “bulldozer parents,” who clear every obstacle from their children’s paths, and “drone parents,” who hover invisibly overhead and then swoop in with over- whelming force when their progeny is endangered. But the competition is so fierce precisely because the prize is so predictable: a golden ticket to career paths that are care- fully staked out in advance to maximize reward and min- imize risk. If you look at life this way, there is nowhere so safe as Harvard Yard. If you aim for real flourishing, there is nowhere more dangerous.

The greatest challenge of success is the freedom it gives you to opt out of real risk and real authority. Entrepreneurs who take on substantial authority in the face of real risk, and have the fortune to be rewarded for that venture into the quadrant called Flourishing, can cash out of the game, turning the fruits of their success into so much stored wealth that they can retreat from risk—and authority—

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altogether. The more that you know, or sense, that your success was as much a product of luck and timing as of skill and character, the less likely you will be to ever dare to risk that much again.

The Eternal Cruise We have to begin in Safety in order to flourish, but to cling to it in adulthood is folly. When I think about this quadrant, and the strange allure it holds for us later in life, I think about one of the leisure fantasies of the modern world: taking a cruise. Not a crossing, mind you, the epic journey

from the Old World to the New across the Atlantic that some of my ancestors undertook, a one-way trip with a destination and something different and

difficult waiting at the other end. And not even the kind of cruises, like those up into the glacier bays of Alaska or the f jords of Norway, that allow you to come close to natural wonders impossible to apprehend any other way—the kind that leave you feeling awed, humbled, properly small and full of praise. I’m thinking of the cruises without destina- tions that circle around the tourist-friendly ports of tropical islands, cruises where the real desire and delight is to be on the ship itself.

We have to begin in Safety in order to flourish, but to cling

to it in adulthood is folly.

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As you can guess, I am firmly in the non-cruising part of humanity—the part that chortles at David Foster Wal- lace’s epic essay about such a cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and hopes never to do it in the first place. But I can appreciate why my cruising ac- quaintances think that a cruise, with its languid days and nights, its bountiful buffets, its complete disengagement from terrestrial life, is a marvelous vacation. After all, a cruise is about as pure a return to the quadrant III of childhood as you could ask for. Food is abundant, de- mands on your time are minimal, the sun is bright. You have absolutely no authority—even if the captain invites you to visit the bridge, you will be forcibly restrained if you attempt to take command of the ship—and, for all practical purposes, no vulnerability either. (We will set aside the handful of cruises from hell where the engines give out, the ship starts turning in slow wide gyres in the Gulf of Mexico and the passengers spell out “HELP” with their bodies on the Lido deck—as well as the surprisingly frequent cruises where some virus colonizes the kitchen and half the crew and passengers become ill, or those where the steady rolling of the ship leaves you bedridden for days. As you can see, I’m just not that much of a fan of cruises.)

This is all fine—as vacation. It is delicious for a few days or perhaps even a week.

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But what if your whole life were a cruise? Year after year of others deciding where you will go, what’s for dinner, an- ticipating your needs and protecting you from any real harm? That would be less than human. Indeed, it would be something quite like hell. The magnificent Pixar film WALL-E depicts exactly such a cruise gone wrong, set in a not-so-distant future in which all of humanity has fled the mess their own greed created. The first passengers are told it will be a brief excursion, but instead it goes on for cen- turies with no hope of return, and each generation be- comes less capable and more dependent on the robots who take over their image-bearing calling.

Like all Pixar films, WALL-E is about what it is to be fully human. With his insatiable curiosity, his delight in both order and abundance, and his willingness to fall in love with a lovely and lethal robot far more advanced than himself, the little trash-collecting robot is the truly flour- ishing character in the midst of Earth’s garbage and the spaceliner Axiom’s decadence.

But for all of WALL-E’s charm, he turns out to be a supporting character. Once we meet the ship’s captain, who has been reduced to pudgy inactivity deep in the corner of Safety and Withdrawing, the real conflict un- folds. The captain represents all of us human beings in all of our infantilized incapacity. His awakening to the delights of an almost-forgotten Earth and the call of

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stewardship—and his decision to wrest command of the ship from autopilot—is the laugh-and-shout-out-loud climax of the movie (hilariously accompanied by the strains of Also sprach Zarathustra). We cheer for the captain because he is claiming his authority and em- bracing meaningful risk—exiting Withdrawing in hopes of a return to Flourishing.

We are not meant to be eternal cruise-ship passengers. We are meant for more than leisure. This is true for our own sakes, but it is also true because, like the diminished human beings aboard the Axiom, we are still responsible for a world gone wrong. The deepest reason for the call out of With- drawing is not our own health, though this quadrant is none too healthy or satis- fying a place to live. It is far more about the neighbors and the created order we have neglected, who have no option to board a cruise away from vulnerability, who live, in some cases quite literally, among the trash our af- fluence has discarded. To disengage from the profound needs of those caught in suffering is to reject the call to bear the image of God. We all began in the protection of par- adise, but attempting to make that safety our final state will in fact consign us to hell.

We are not meant to be eternal cruise-ship passengers.

We are meant for more than leisure.

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Simulated Authority There is, however, a subtler version of withdrawing than the pure vacancy of a cruise. Most of us would in fact find ourselves bored to tears after a few weeks of perpetual va- cation—our thirst for flourishing is too strong to com- pletely abandon the call to authority and vulnerability. But the technological culture has another, stronger trick up its sleeve—not total disengagement, but powerful and re- warding simulations of engagement. 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.

So if you really want to see what withdrawing looks like in affluent, technological America, you don’t have to visit a port of call. You just have to turn on the PlayStation in

your living room. Just like cruises and

other forms of vacation, games have an impor tant place in a healthy life. For children, games are a primary way of prac-

ticing the authority and vulnerability that will be their calling in adult life. For adults, games’ simplicity and rule- based rewards are a welcome break from the open-ended, complicated demands of maturity.

If you really want to see what withdrawing looks like in affluent,

technological America, you just have to turn on the PlayStation

in your living room.

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But just as a cruise starts to degrade from heaven to hell if it becomes your daily life, games, especially technologi- cally enhanced ones, are a dangerous place to live. Very few of us can afford a perpetual cruise. But we can afford video games—they are priced at the sweet spot of consumer dis- cretionary demand. We would have to rearrange our whole lives to spend our remaining years on cruises. Video games, however, gladly take up residence at the center of our homes. Most of us would start to get fidgety after a few days onboard a ship. Video games are a far more satisfying version of withdrawing—because while you are engrossed in them, you feel totally convinced that you are flourishing.

Games confer authority. But video games (and most screen-based forms of recreation) confer authority more quickly and more completely than any real-world game does. To become the quarterback for the pickup game in my neighbor’s backyard would require me to demonstrate some level of mastery of the game of football to other human beings. Even being a backyard quarterback is probably beyond the reach of my puny arms, but to become a quarterback in the NFL requires nearly superhuman abilities and discipline.

To become an “NFL quarterback” in the video game Madden Football, however, requires little more than choosing an avatar and pressing a button. Suddenly you are vested with all of the authority, and much of the ability, of

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your chosen celebrity player. Of course there is a learning curve in Madden Football—if there were not, it would quickly become repetitive and boring. Your onscreen self will drop passes, get sacked and make poor decisions. But with a little dedication, almost anyone can become a ca- pable Madden Football quarterback. The learning curve is far shallower in the video game than in the real game—if it were not, almost no one would find it rewarding to play.

The game also gives you an experience of vulnerability— exposure to meaningful risk—but even more than the ersatz authority you gain with technology’s help, this vul- nerability is well and truly a mirage. Play enough Madden Football and you really will acquire certain kinds of skills, thin though they may be—that is, you will gain some real authority in understanding and playing the game of football. But no matter how much you play, you will never get a concussion, you will never be cut from the team, and you will lose nothing of value in the “real world” outside the game (except, of course, whatever real capacities you could have developed in the time you spent becoming an expert at Madden Football). The authority may be largely simu- lated, but the vulnerability is entirely an illusion.

This is the power of video games—the reason they are far more absorbing than TV, with its one-way, passive con- sumption, and a bigger industry than movies after just a few decades in existence ($93 billion worldwide in 2013

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compared to the movie industry’s $88 billion). They give us accessible simulations of flourishing life, the life which we all crave—the life of action and risk, the life of adventure and conquest, even (in some games) the life of romance and the satisfactions of community.

But they are only simulations. There is a marked asym- metry between the skill you acquire in the world of space, time and flesh-and-blood bodies, and the skill you acquire in the virtual world of screens and controllers. Skill from the real world translates well, generally, into the virtual world. If you are skilled at the actual embodied game of (American) football, you will likely be good at the video game Madden Football. If you are an accomplished race- car driver, you can probably quickly master Forza Motor- sport 5. But the skills do not transfer, or transfer only min- imally, in the other direction. Being good at Madden Football will have very little effect in your neighbor’s backyard, let alone on the turf at Soldier Field.

Ironically, the reason video games develop so little real skill is that they are too rewarding. Real authority is a te- dious business. Developing the depth of competence re- quired to play an in- strument, pilot an aircraft or transplant a human organ requires thousands of hours of

Ironically, the reason video games develop so little real skill

is that they are too rewarding.

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unstimulating, unstinting practice that gives us little im- mediate sense of authority.

And yet this kind of patient development, which is itself a form of vulnerability, is the only path to real au- thority. In video games, every warrior has qualified for the Special Forces; every basketball player has a 30-inch vertical leap. Not to mention that wielding lethal violence leaves no emotional scars, just a pleasant sense of victory— and the bodies on the screen stay perpetually young and vital. The more you give yourself over to simulations, the more true authority and true vulnerability recede from your life. Video games give us a shortcut to the godlike figures we wish ourselves to be but are too inconstant to actually become.

Friction-Free Activism If this simulated flourishing were restricted to the world of leisure—cruises and games—at least we would know that it was not the real world. But the reward structure of video games—the simulated authority and vulnerability of virtual reality—is increasingly colonizing our interactions with the most serious matters of the real world as well. Like technologically mediated entertainment, the technology of social media is becoming more “gamified” by the year as developers learn how to tap into the deep human hunger for simulations of authority and vulnerability. In social

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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.

Like all media (including books like this one!), social media are largely what we make of them—escapist or trans- forming depending on what we expect from them and how we use them. In far-flung places in the world, an emerging generation has used media like Twitter to coordinate im- pressive examples of meaningful action combined with extraordinary risk—the 2014 protests in Hong Kong and the outcry in the United States about police practices and race being recent examples as I write this book.

But these two uses of social media have two key features in common. First, they were largely used by people living deep in Suffering—exposed to meaningful risk without being granted meaningful capacity for action by their so- cieties. Second, they led to embodied, in-the-flesh experi- ences of action in community. 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

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our characters, then “virtual activism” is in fact a way of doubling down on withdrawing, holding on to one’s invul- nerability and incapacity while creating a sensation of in- volvement. Only when technology serves a genuine, em- bodied, 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.

The Safety Generation Before the current era, almost no one could stay in With- drawing beyond the early years of childhood. The world was too harsh and human cultures too demanding of real maturity. Society could not afford to tolerate those who shirked the authority and vulnerability that were necessary to eke out flourishing from the world. Consider the eight- year-old child sent to the barn to milk a cow. She has al- ready been granted real flourishing—the authority of do- minion over a creature, responsible for its flourishing and benefiting from its abundance, along with the vulnerability of being a small human being next to a massive bovine. It is a kind of flourishing that a child milking a cow in Mine- craft (accomplished, I’m told, by right clicking while

“holding” a bucket) will never know. But today we have to constantly choose to move up and

to the right. If there is one temptation that seems to me endemic to the emerging generation of young adults, it is

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to choose Withdrawing—to retreat from authority and vul- nerability alike. At a worship service one evening in the spring of 2014, I presented these four quadrants—espe- cially the three where all of us spend far too much of our lives—to several hundred college students. We invited stu- dents to come forward for prayer, to be liberated for the abundant and flourishing life we were made for. We were astonished and moved as more than one hundred students came forward for personal prayer. It was one of the mani- festations of the power and presence of God that you cannot orchestrate but can only receive, and we stayed long into the night praying alongside these friends.

The next day, the college chaplain and the team of coun- selors who had offered prayer gathered to debrief the pre- vious night’s event. I was curious about which quadrant most of the prayer requests had come from. Were students wrestling with experiences of persistent vulnerability without authority? Or the temptation to grasp authority without vulnerability? Or the retreat from both? Over- whelmingly, every prayer leader reported, it was With- drawing. The domain of inaction, of fear of exposure, of safety. One young man approached me for prayer and con- fided that in each of his four closest friendships, he was experiencing overwhelming temptation to minimize risk, avoid real engagement and abandon them.

Amidst safety the world has never before known, the

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greatest spiritual struggle many of us face is to be willing to take off our bubble wrap.

The Path from Withdrawing The good news about escaping the Withdrawing quadrant is that pretty much any move, toward either authority or vulnerability, is a step in the right direction. Perhaps the two best beginning moves, for those of us swaddled in af- fluence and intoxicated by our technology, are into the natural world—the world of stars, snow and rain, trees and deserts—and into the relational world—the world of real bodies with heartbeats, hands and faces.

Turn off your devices and go for a walk or a run, not just on days when the weather is pleasant but on days when the wind is fierce, the rain is falling or the humidity is high. Shiver or sweat, feel fatigue in your limbs, hear the sounds of the city or the countryside unfiltered by headphones. Choose to go to places—the ocean, the mountains, or a broad, wide field—where you will feel small rather than grand.

Dare to walk across campus or across town without looking at a screen.

Decide to introduce yourself to one new person each day—just to learn their name and give them yours, with no further agenda.

Choose to go to places— the ocean, the mountains,

or a broad, wide field— where you will feel small

rather than grand.

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Brew coffee or tea, sit with a friend and ask them ques- tions—questions just one step riskier than the last time you talked. As you listen, observe the flickers of sadness or hope that cross their face. Try to imagine what it must be like to live their story, suffer their losses, dream their dreams. Pray with them and dare to put into words their heart’s desires, and dare to ask God to grant them.

The next time you travel, decide not to be a tourist, who uses material wealth to purchase experiences of vicarious significance—being in places that make us feel grand and worth noticing. Instead, travel like a pilgrim, who travels to encounter people who have been sanctified by suffering. Seek out people who live on the cruel edges of the world. Accompany them in person, at least for short seasons, in their authority and vulnerability. Share what you have with them in sufficient measure that your generosity feels vul- nerable, emptying your bank account to the point that you instinctively start to pray for daily bread.

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.

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Exploiting

As I write these words, the world’s most apparently suc- cessful tyrant is a man named Kim Jong Un.

Along with a small band of elite leaders, Kim rules the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—better known to the rest of the world as North Korea—with absolute

WITHDRAWING SUFFERING

EXPLOITING FLOURISHING

IV I

III II

AU TH OR IT Y

VULNERABILITY

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authority. Like his father and grandfather, he has ruthlessly eliminated anyone who might pose a threat to his power, including ordering the execution of elder members of his own family. Causing even the most minor disturbance to the leader’s authority or his sense of national pride—say, turning in an insufficiently pleasing design for a new airport—is a death warrant for officials high or low.

If we believe the reports of former chefs and, improbably enough, movie directors employed by the Kim family, Kim Jong Un has enjoyed a life of extraordinary privilege and comfort. But in spite of the relentlessly upbeat reports that emerge from the state-controlled news agency, this abun- dance never spreads beyond a tiny circle. Most of Kim’s subjects live in profound poverty, and every one of his country’s citizens lives with well-justified fear.

Kim Jong Un lives up and to the left, in quadrant IV, Exploiting. But the people he leads live deep in quadrant II. Tyranny and suffering, exploiting and poverty, always are found together. Indeed, you know you are encountering a situation of injustice when a few people in a system enjoy authority without vulnerability at the price of most people in that system suffering vulnerability without authority.

Tyrants and dictators live at the most extreme edge of exploitation, with their people living at the most extreme edge of suffering. But Exploiting is found anywhere people seek to maximize power while eliminating risk.

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And it turns out to be the most seductive and dangerous quadrant of all.

Risk and Reward We human beings, as one ingeniously devised experiment after another has demonstrated, are considerably more motivated by the fear of loss than the possibility of gain. If I give you fifty dollars, then give you the choice of simply walking away with that fifty dollars or wagering it in a bet where you have a chance of making five hundred dollars, you are far more likely to choose the safe fifty than take the bet. Just a few moments ago, you had nothing—but once we have something, we want to keep it.

This tendency toward “loss aversion” is not universal— some of us will take on much more risk than others—but overall it is consistent and powerful enough to affect whole industries, economies and nations. The completely rational actor of economics, that fictional creature sometimes called homo economicus, would balance risk against reward in strictly mathematical fashion—but we homo sapiens weigh risk and reward using very different scales.

And this explains something interesting about our 2x2 grid. Flourishing, I’ve been arguing, requires both authority and vulnerability in equal measure. The true life for which we were made will require us both to act and to risk. But we do not pursue these two good things with the same

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wholeheartedness—or even the same halfheartedness. Most of us are far more willing to move up than we are to move to the right—indeed, we are more likely to spend significant amounts of energy moving away from the right than toward the right at all.

It’s loss aversion in action. 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. In our daily choices, both con- scious and unconscious, the possibility of loss counts far more than the possibility of gain. That is why so many of us end up moving to the left, away from vulnerability.

That is why, to many of us, authority without risk sounds like a much better deal. Perhaps the only real difference between us and Kim Jong Un is that for him, by an accident of birth, that dream of living up and to the left came ter- ribly true.

Your Brain on Drugs Take a social situation every human being has to deal with at some point: walking into a room full of people we do not know. For most of us, that is a meaningful risk. (For a few ultra-extroverts, it’s sheer delight—a hundred friends you haven’t met yet! You know who you are. The rest of us know who you are, too, and we both envy you and think you are truly bizarre.) After the first blissful days of our earliest

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childhood, we learned, usually the hard way, that there is vulnerability in crowds.

Think about the vulnerability of the first days and months of your adult life, your first season away from home, perhaps on a university campus, and the simulta- neous excitement and trepidation of your first big on- campus party—full of seemingly happy, confident, at- tractive peers.

What if I could hand something to the eighteen-year-old version of you walking into that party—something you could hold in your hand, something that would increase your authority and decrease your vulnerability? Something that as you held it—and sipped it—gradually eased your discomfort and enhanced your excitement? It wouldn’t be strictly legal, in the United States at least—but it would be very appealing indeed.

At the moment that you begin to use alcohol to manage your vulnerability in a social situation, you are heading up and to the left. At first, and up to a point, it will work wonders. A few drinks will take the edge off the sense of risk and exposure you felt when you walked in. They will give you a heightened sense of power and possibility. You will be living the intoxicating life of a minor god.

But over time, as with all addictions (and all idols), the effect begins to wear off. A higher and higher dose is needed for the same effect. And gradually, the thing that

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once delivered authority without vulnerability begins to expose you to risk and rob you of authority. In the long run, unless you are delivered by a miracle of grace, you will find that the very thing that promised authority without vulner- ability has betrayed you, handing you over to the depths of suffering—vulnerability without authority.

Our daily lives are filled with these small choices—small at first, but over time, becoming a deep dependence on strategies that preserve our sense of action while mini- mizing our sense of risk. The church once enumerated seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Most of them are ways of pursuing authority without vulnerability. Sex without commitment (lust), food without moderation (gluttony), goods without limit (greed), anger without compassion (wrath), and above all the pursuit of autonomous, godlike power (pride)—all these are forms of what Scripture calls, most comprehen- sively, idolatry, the use of created things to pursue godlike power without risk or limit. (Sloth, of course, is the deadly sin that corresponds to Withdrawing, the safety of risking nothing in the world; and envy may be the besetting sin of Suffering, the jealousy and bitterness of those who can see only their own vulnerability and others’ authority.) All these are just variations on the promises that accompanied the very first idol, the fruit proffered by the serpent in the Garden: “You will be like God”—unlimited authority—

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and, “You will not die”—none of that vulnerable creaturely dependence.

Perhaps the most characteristic idol of our time is online pornography because it fuses two of the most powerful idols of our time: sex and technology. Available at a click are vicarious experiences of sexual knowledge and conquest— authority that begins with the ability to see others in naked and vulnerable states, and escalates, in “harder” forms of porn, to more extravagant and ultimately demonic forms of domination. But these experiences of godlike knowledge and control are almost always consumed from a position of complete invulnerability, in isolation and secrecy.

The irony is stunning: the twentieth-century sexual rev- olution’s promise of “freedom” has given way to a twenty- first-century epidemic of attenuated, mediated sexual es- capism. Even most secular observers now admit that pornography undermines the capacity of men and women to maintain healthy levels of sexual desire for their actual partners, let alone experience the true authority and vul- nerability of embodied encounter. Who could have pre- dicted such an outcome? Anyone could have predicted it—anyone who understood the power of idols to promise freedom and deliver slavery, to offer authority and deliver vulnerability, to whisper fantasies of power but end up with us completely in their grip.

While some of us, by the sheer grace of God, manage to

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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 vulnera- bility 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.

But control is an illusion. In fact, all of the quadrant called Exploiting is an illusion. There is, in the long run, no such thing as true authority without true vulnerability. Our idols inevitably fail us, generally sooner rather than later. And as they begin to fail, we begin to grasp ever more violently for the control we thought they promised and we deserved. This is why the end result of life in this quadrant is exploitation—ripping from the world, and especially from those too weak to resist, the good things our idols promised but are failing to deliver.

As a few people pursue and even for a season grasp the idol of control and exploitation, the community around them falls into the poverty that exploitation always brings.

Control is the dream of the risk- and loss-averse, the promise of every idol.

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Phil and Leslie My friends Phil and Leslie are driving home one night after a full day of work as campus ministers at the University of California, Berkeley. They stop for a few groceries, turn the corner onto the avenue where they live, and see the flashing blue and red lights of a police car behind them. Do we have a taillight out? Phil wonders.

Within minutes, six police cars have appeared, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Later Phil would write about what happened:

A voice from a loudspeaker told me to roll down my window. The voice told me to open my car door, keeping my hands visible at all times. Take four steps away from the car, keeping your hands clearly visible, I was told. The instructions went on: Face the car. Bend down on both knees. Put your hands on the ground. Lie face down. Turn your face to the right.

Lying on the ground, Phil is handcuffed and placed in one police car. Leslie is subjected to the same procedure. Now they are in separate police cars, watching as police search their vehicle (turning up groceries and Bible study materials, and nothing more). Someone has been robbed at gunpoint a couple of blocks away, an officer tells Phil, and he and Leslie “match the description” of the robbers. The officer ignores Phil’s offer to produce the time-stamped receipt from the grocery store that could clear them of Co

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