2.23
To be receptive to a call is to be vulnerable; it’s to open to letting others move you. Of course, we are this inevitable openness to being moved – we are this vulnerability through and through. Things have meaning for us because we’re fragile, where meaning is an arcing across things that are facing and open to one another.
While openness is inevitable, we can adopt various dispositions towards it. We can imagine all kinds of independence and security: we say we’re secure, but when this is inevitably challenged by the world, we can get angry, driven by vengefulness, acting violently to, as it were, restore ourselves as secure agents and re-establish our security. We take out violence against the world in response to being violated, and take all sorts of steps to try to guarantee hermeticism. But we’re always impinged upon, and these attempts at restoration are, of course, responses and so betray notions of independence and security.
To try to seal oneself off reveals a weakness — a vulnerability that tries to deny itself.
Meaning can be violent. It’s an exchange that points beyond ourselves.
To open to the receptivity of a call is to be vulnerable, but also to be strong. The strength isn’t that of stone, but of water or the reed that bends in the wind. Strength faces both the other and the vulnerability at its root. It maintains integrity while opening to the world: adaptable, flexible, patient, and welcoming. These are the values of transformation.