To Wound

He only is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I shall not be shaken. Psalm 62:6  NASB

Only – Here’s the problem. We all want deeply satisfying relationships, relationships that provide us a sense of worth, a place of safety, someone who knows us for who we really are. That’s the good part.  The bad part is that in order to experience this we need to be vulnerable.  We need to risk who we are in order to be understood for who we are.  There are no deeply satisfying relationship with walls in the middle.  So we have to take down the walls, the very things that protected us from being rejected, being misunderstood, being unsafe.  But vulnerability contains its own downfall.

From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded.  The fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped.  The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function.  The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defense mechanism and can enable a child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic.[1]

Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. . . When we flee vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. . . . A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness . . .[2]

That’s the emotional see-saw of living.  Risk in order to be seen, experience rejection for being seen.  No wonder we have walls—and addictions to numb the damaging outcome of helplessness, failure and shame.

David seems to have had his fair share of human battering.  Innocently he attempts to serve and please King Saul.  What happens?  For reasons completely opaque to David, Saul tries to kill him.  Of course, first Saul betrays him.  Then he tries to belittle him.  Finally it comes to swords.  Perhaps that’s when David penned this line.  “He only is my rock.”  Yes, YHVH is David’s only trustworthy champion. Except, of course, when He isn’t. YHVH is also disciplinarian, judge, jury, teacher, accuser, counselor and taskmaster.  Everything we could want in someone who never abandons us no matter what we have or haven’t done.  Everything we want and are afraid to get.  Yes, YHVH is my only rock.

But what does that say about all the other relationships that matter so much to us?  Are we to simply acknowledge that they are all flawed, all potential wounds, all probable sources of pain?  Wounding seems to be an essential part of truly living.  Even parents, as hard as they try to be loving, inflict emotional damage on their children.  Perhaps unconsciously, they pass along those traumas they never settled in their own lives. And it’s getting worse.

With the rise of industrial societies came dislocation: the destruction of traditional relationships, extended family, clan, tribe, and village.  Vast economic and social changes tore asunder the ties that formerly connected people to those closest to them and to their communities.  They displaced people from their homes and shredded the value systems that secured people’s sense of belonging in the moral and spiritual universe. The same process is happening around the world as a result of globalization.[3]

Dislocation continues to be an ever-accelerating feature of modern living.  The disruption of family life and the erosion of stable communities afflict many segments of society.  Even the nuclear family is under severe pressure with a high divorce rate and single-parent households or, in many cases, two parents having to work outside the home.  For these endemic cultural and economic reasons many children today who are not abused and who come from loving homes have lost their primary emotional attachment with the nurturing adults in their lives, with results disastrous for their development.[4]

David had clan, tribe, a long cultural heritage, a history of God’s intervention with his people, some semblance of trustworthiness.  What do we have?

In a state of spiritual poverty, we will be seduced by whatever it is that can make us insensate to our dread.  That, ultimately, is the origin of the addiction process, since the very essence of that process is the drive to take in from the outside that which properly arises from within. . . . The sparser the innate joy that springs from being alive, the more fervently we seek joy’s pale substitute, pleasure; the less our inner strength, the greater our craving for power; the feebler our awareness of truth, the more desperate our search for certainty outside of ourselves.  The greater the dread, the more vigorous the gravitational pull of the addiction process.[5]

Ask yourself, “Is God your only rock?”  Is that satisfying?  Perhaps we need to repair all of the other factors we have so easily let slip away in our headlong pursuit for accumulation.  We paid an enormous price.  We are still paying, and so will our children, until we stop chasing and are ready to be wounded.

Topical Index: vulnerability, wound, trustworthy, addict, Psalm 62:6

[1]Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, p. 40.

[2]Ibid., p. 41.

[3]Ibid., p. 275.

[4]Ibid., p. 277.

[5]Ibid.,  p. 414.