Feeling Fragile In This Life and On This Planet? Join the Club.

“To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an aging cell.” --Marina Dyachenko, Ukrainian author

Ok. I’ll confess. Tell the truth.

I’ve been feeling vulnerable lately, fragile even.  Like I’m coming to realize that more and more, my body is fragile and the world I inhabit, that we inhabit—that’s fragile too. In a real way, to be alive is to be breakable and that’s a good thing and that’s a not so good thing.

So, at age 62, the birthday I just celebrated, I’m very aware that there is more life behind me than in front of me. Folks my age who claim to be middle aged? If I was middle aged, I’d hope to live to 124 I suppose. Nice try. Unless we live to be a record setting age, people at and above my time in life are definitely on the back nine. It’s the seventh inning. You know, the fourth quarter. The autumn of life. Standing in that place on the human timeline absolutely makes me feel vulnerable. Makes me want to appreciate more deeply the time that I have right now and the days that I am living right now. I want to be more grateful for this moment. It never was before and never will be again.  

Time is fragile too. There’s only today. It’s gone before we know it. So, how well are we living? Through the good times and the bad times and the times in between? Vulnerability pushes me to ask those questions.

We are all fragile.   

Take my still much of the time healthy, but sometimes creaky, body. I think my physical slippery slope started when I found out I needed a new hip, a little more than three years ago. From that fateful November morning when I awoke with a pain that I’d never felt before, well, things began to malfunction more and more, body wise. Weird aches in the morning. “What is THAT!” Where once long ago the party was just starting at midnight, now that’s when I am fast asleep or visiting the bathroom. It’s all the stuff that begins to happen when you hit your seventh decade.

Thank goodness I received a replacement hip in June of 2020. Doc told me the old one just wore out. The warranty on it from God expired. Now I now have a piece of hardware in my body that absolutely will outlive me. The great news is I can now walk and bike and jump and run without pain. The amazing fact is that while my body will take something like twenty years to fully go back into the earth after my death, that piece of titanium nested in my fragile body can theoretically last forever. It never rusts.  

Maybe God should have made us out of titanium. Just a thought.

I’m feeling vulnerable about the vulnerability of the natural world in global and local ways too. A week ago, a deer rushed out of the woods and ran in front of my car as I was driving at dusk and I struck it, really hard. It ran off, injured, I am sure. I’ve no idea what happened to that poor animal, but it was definitely fragile, like all things flesh and blood are.

Then there was that string of seventy degree plus days we recently “enjoyed” in early November. For upwards of a week the weather felt more like mid-spring or late summer, not the cusp of winter. I know lots of folks who liked that blast of balmy air, but me? It kind of freaked me out, reminded me that our fragile climate is starting to go haywire.  If it was thirty-two degrees in June for a week or so I’d also freak out. It’s not supposed to be t-shirt weather right now. 

Poor mother earth. She’s so fragile.

I wonder if the spiritual key to facing into this reality is to make peace with our fragility, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities as children of God, and as a planet. I can’t change the state of my body for the most part. Yes, I can eat lots more vegetables and walk more than 7,000 steps a day and keep riding my bike long distances and get enough sleep. Those things will probably help my longevity, my physical humanity. 

But the hard truth is that every day is finally a gift from God, from the universe, with no guarantees that we are going to get another day. Stuff happens. Deer run out in front of cars. Hearts skip a beat. A cell splits one way instead of the other and it is cancer. All the things we cannot predict or prevent. So, what I need to remember is that the most important time in the fragile place called my one life is right now. NOW.

Not a past I regret nor a future I fear. No. NOW.  

The way I live on this fragile earth matters too, right now. How all of us live. Climate scientists report in we have crossed a line and there’s no turning back. Seventy degree fall days will become “normal”. But we’ve also backed away from a doomsday apocalyptic scenario for the planet by beginning to make healthy and wise lifestyle changes. Making different choices about the energy we consume. Maybe we are starting to better respect the vulnerability of our God given natural home.

I hope so.

Fragility—it is who we are. It is hardwired into creation.  God made us this way for a reason and our job is to figure out why. Our job is to live into fragility without fear. Our job is to live with joy and thanksgiving even as the clock keeps ticking away and our planetary home struggles so.

Fragile. Handle with Care. Yourself. Others. The earth.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.