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Good Morning.

Earlier this week, the children’s author, Michael Rosen, spoke on this programme of surviving Covid 19 after being on a ventilator for 7 weeks. He said he felt feeble and lop-sided; and you could hear his voice cracking with the strain and emotion of that trauma – as well as gratitude towards those who had saved his life. Asked if the experience had changed him, he said it had shown him that vulnerability was a part of life, not separate from it.

By speaking so powerfully about his weakness, I think Rosen offers us strength. His words are a life-giving message brought to us from the brink of death. They also felt timely. For a lot of people are feeling feeble and lop-sided right now; some as a direct result of having the virus, others from the sheer stress of this experience. Battered by the loss of loved ones, work or even hope.

Of course, some believe vulnerability is for wimps. In a world of strongmen, admission of weakness is just weakness. The philosopher Nietzsche saw physical vulnerability as something to be heroically overcome rather than accepted. He was disgusted at what he perceived to be praise for weakness as practiced in Christianity. Reserving particular ire for Paul’s claim that ‘God chose the weak things of this world.’ For what kind of God would do that?

But if rugged individualism has no time for the sick or the suffering, who does? If the experience of this pandemic has shown us anything it is that we really are weak and that we really do need each-other. In his poem ‘These Are The Hands’ celebrating the NHS, Rosen describes this need for the hands of others to help ‘stop the leaks, carry the can, find the pulse and wheel the bin.’

To invert Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. And weakness is our reality. Vulnerability is not something to be embarrassed by or put off – it is an essential part of being fully human. And a true response to suffering. It takes a different kind of strength to admit it but recognising weakness is the beginning of our healing.

Before his death, Christ admits fear at the suffering to come, but knows he must go through it. A God who suffers and dies on a cross might not fit with ideas about what a God should do. But give me a feeble and lop-sided Christ over an indifferent superman any day. For as Paul also wrote ‘he was crucified in weakness, likewise we are weak in him, yet by God’s power we will live.’

We can’t avoid suffering. But we go through it together. Just like the family in Rosen’s most famous story – ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’ – who, when they encounter trouble along the way realise: ‘We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, oh no, we’ve got to go through it.’

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