I want to be as transparent as I possibly can in this article. I cannot speak highly enough of the theology of strength in weakness. Of the paradoxical life. Of the life that almost nobody lives, yet the life that stands dormant in overcoming strength—the strength of a “weak” Jesus nailed to a cross, rather than the marauding military leader the Jews expected their Saviour to be.
Weakness in the human realm is not hard to identify, because it’s in us, inherently in each of us.
There’s perhaps no better way of heralding this point than of investigating the study of those who undertake the Twelve Steps. Principally, in Step Four, we find the gumption to undertake a searching and fearless moral inventory. The way I did this exercise, and the way I coach people through it, is through the seven deadly sins.
The process of plunging deep into the sins of my past and present took me two months. The paradoxical thing is, you’d expect it to be an excruciating process. On the contrary, it was the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. It liberated me from my fear, from my guilt, and from my shame. It became a competition against myself. The more that was revealed to me, the better I felt, because I realised I was being utterly transparent and authentic before God. The longer the process took, the more that came, the more I saw my commitment was matched by God’s faithfulness.
The process of identifying and confessing everything I could think of led me to my first experience of being baptised in the Holy Spirit—four days later I had an experience of sheer ecstasy that lasted intensely for nearly half an hour, an experience that has been repeated since in smaller bursts. These experiences I’d never ever experienced. They can only come from God.
A process that I thought might have killed me was the making of me.
But let me be blunt about this. This is a precis of the substance of it:
ANGER: though my anger has not caused mortal injury, or “murder,” in this life, whether by judgement or passive aggressiveness or rage, anger has so often had its way. One of the biggest blessings I’ve come to see about my anger is it’s part of me, it’s a weakness, and when I see it as a weakness, when I’m not scared of it, when I accept it, I can harness it as a strength of passion.
SLOTH: this in the most general terms is the sin of laziness. I always been more driven than slothful, but in an honest appraisal I was able to identify where I had been genuinely lacking in commitment to do the work that life required of me. Again, the moment I recognised my lack of commitment in any serious quest of my life, the moment I recommitted, strength was added.
LUST: if there’s a more embarrassing weakness than the sin of lust, I’m not sure what it is, because lust depicts the weakness of a lack of raw self-control. Add to this, the weakness that’s most embarrassing at all, the weakness of an exposed sexuality. Sexuality is most embarrassing because it’s the most intimate thing and most exposing thing in the whole of our lives. As I looked at my life, it took a lot of courage to admit my weaknesses, and yet when I considered in the cold light of day that these weaknesses are common to humanity, I was relieved of the majority of the burden of it. The admission alone, I found, was strength enough to ward against most of temptation’s power.
PRIDE: oh, how much my pride got me into trouble. Pride, a lot of the time, I have found in my life, stems from fear, and back 20 years ago there was a lot of fear driving my life. Fear of failure, fear of not measuring up, fear of not achieving, and fear of not meeting people’s approval. Yet as an utter irony, all that fear was veiled in pride. Pride pretends it’s got everything when truly it knows it’s got nothing. There’s nothing scarier than pretending you’re all over something when you haven’t got a clue.
ENVY: this is about looking over the fence and noticing how green the grass is. We all struggle with envy, and perhaps my biggest challenge was envying the achievements of others. There will always be people achieving more than we achieve. There will always be people who have more than we have. There will always be people who are more popular than we are. Like all the sins, our opportunities to engage with them is at the level of confession and repentance. Through honesty, we achieve freedom.
GLUTTONY: truth be known I’ve had quite a relationship with gluttony all my life. I still struggle with it, and anyone who has the propensity toward addiction will suffer from it. But knowing about the weakness is the invitation to strength. There have been many times in my spiritual journey where I have fasted and prayed and engaged in the disciplines of abstinence and been blessed as a result. Like the other sins, this one reveals the lack of control that in itself is an invitation to the wiser life. The more we move away from our gluttony, the more spiritually blessed we become.
GREED: the spiritual life itself is the greatest strength in overcoming the covetousness of greed. Quite possibly linked with envy, whose propensity to want and want and want, and never be satisfied, greed is a dungeon. Just being honest about our greed is enough to herald a higher purpose: the more we give away, the more we gain. This simply must be lived to be believed.
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This is the hidden secret to life that many of us are afraid of opening the door to. We are more often ashamed of our weaknesses than seeing them as avenues of strength. When our weaknesses are displayed, we feel vulnerable and exposed, even embarrassed tending toward the traumatic, but what if we existed in communities that celebrated our weaknesses. What if communities endorsed the very things that isolate us from being more fully known. What if we were no longer afraid of our weaknesses and decided instead to see them as strengths. Then nothing could conquer us.
Embrace weakness to overcome fear.
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