Tuesday Telegram | Vulnerability, Light, and the Long Becoming
Can you sense it? The emergence of what is and is becoming?
Tuesday Telegram | Vulnerability, Light, and the Long Becoming
Beloved Becoming Ones—
We are approaching a feast.
Christmas arrives not as a single day, but as a season—twelve slow, luminous days that carry us toward Epiphany, toward learning how to trust an emerging light rather than seize it too quickly. If Advent taught us how to wait in the dark, Christmastide invites us to practice staying with the light as it grows, fragile and unfinished.
The human story of incarnation is disarmingly simple.
God became human.
Not armored.
Not triumphant.
But vulnerable.
Born of a woman named Mary. Born into precarity. Born into a body that could be wounded. Whatever one believes about doctrine or dogma, the wisdom at the heart of this story is unmistakable: the Ground of Being chose fragility. Chose proximity. Chose to walk with us for a while—made of the same stardust, subject to the same aches, learning breath and hunger and touch.
Vulnerability, at its root, is the capacity to be wounded.
It is not weakness.
It is a disposition.
An orientation toward life.
As I return to myself through daily practices of metanoia—small turnings, quiet refusals—I find the feast days teaching me again how to pay attention. Where do I spend my time? How much of my life passes through a glowing rectangle in my hand? How often am I tending embodied connection—with my own breath, with another’s presence, with the world as it actually is?
We are overstimulated and undernourished. Distracted to the point of numbness. Someone wrote today that we are functionally numb, and it landed with the clarity of a bell. If this is true, then vulnerability is not a liability—it is a corrective. A way back into sensation. Into care. Into each other.
These days—between Christmas and Epiphany—ask us to linger. To let the light teach us how to see rather than how to perform. Epiphany is not about spectacle; it is about recognition. About learning to trust what is quietly revealing itself.
If vulnerability is the threshold, then let us tend it gently.
If fragility is the invitation, let us meet it together.
Let us nurture one another into another fold of our becoming—
a world that is already here, and yet elsewhere,
as James Baldwin once named it.
This is not escapism.
It is practice.
It is orientation.
It is learning how to live toward the light without abandoning the dark that made us ready to see.
More soon.
Paz, —RCE+