by Andy Crouch
So how do we move up and to the right on this 2x2 chart? 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 renowned public health physician Paul Farmer tells his biographer, 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 authority and vulnerability that we perfectly reflect what 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 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 flourishing 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 commercial messages that have saturated the imagination of every resident of the mediated world—the unselfconsciously 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 photographers’ golden hour.
Flourishing is not health as we normally understand it. There are people with profound physical and mental disabilities who flourish and make flourishing possible for others, while there are gyms full of people hitting their personal bests who are nonetheless not flourishing.
Flourishing is not the same thing as growth—the ubiquitous 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 appearance 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.
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, instinctively, 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 confident, resilient and countercultural sister. (My wife Catherine 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 anguished 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 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 chromosome—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 affects 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 understood 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 unknowable 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 at all, no matter how able or disabled. It describes a community. The real question of flourishing is for the community 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.
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 complexity, more deeply embedded in relationship and mutual dependence, more truly free?
The surprising answer is that precisely because of Angela’s great vulnerabilities, 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, 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 involved 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 vulnerability 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 vulnerability as well.
If you have ever been part of a community that experienced some real measure of flourishing (a business, a church, a neighborhood, a sports team, a musical ensemble, a class)—some group of people who experienced a deep health and growth, among whom the vulnerable were welcomed 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 landscapers have it with plants; pilots have authority with airplanes 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, understand 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.
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 authority 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 executive 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 controls, 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. 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 affirmed 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 distinguish between “ascribed” authority and “achieved” authority—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 continent 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 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 call
s dominion, the capacity and responsibility to act on behalf of the flourishing 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,
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 authority. 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. Certainly 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 interpret those sounds and respond. They incorporate her 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.