spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

9.3.2 Vulnerability and quality of life
This subsection is an elaboration on the idea of vulnerability of creation as the realm of the Holy
Spirit, and of the suggestion that in the vulnerability of creation its quality can be found. The
motif of vulnerability as bearer of quality does not match well with the common idea of human
health. Yet it is asserted here that the Spirit reveals the meaning of quality of life as health, on
the basis of the theme of vulnerability.
Many people perceive vulnerability as synonymous with weakness and frailty. Vulnerability is
often associated with newborn life as well as with life that is drawing to a close: vulnerability
refers to a condition that is not desirable for people who want to be healthy and strong. That is
why people turn to strategies of invulnerability (Culp 2010:88). In certain situations, such
strategies provide the necessary defense against uncertainty and destruction. Insurance policies,
the building of dykes, having airbags in the car: these are but a few examples of how people,
individually and collectively, try to defend themselves against their vulnerability. With regard to
the human body, such defense mechanisms are usually incorporated in such a way that one’s
health and one’s body are taken for granted. One’s vulnerability is hidden behind the perception
of the body as a machine that needs to be maintained with food, sports and vitamin pills, while
the presence of disease is interpreted as failure of the body, because the body does not function
properly.
When such shields of invulnerability become exclusive or primary defense mechanisms, a
situation is created in which the human being refuses to accept the experience of vulnerability
and finality of life. In a sense, creaturely life, the human body, and one’s health are reduced to
the reign of the human being. Exclusive strategies of resistance to vulnerability are in fact a
denial of the Spirit’s creation, in the sense that creaturely life is vulnerable, finite and restricted.
Restrictedness, then, should be understood as the boundaries to the quantity of life, not as a
reduction in quality of life. Any form of life that is called by the Creator Spirit, is final.
Embodied life is restricted life by necessity, since life owes its value to its restrictedness. If there
were no boundaries to human life, then life would lose its value and its quality. Precisely in the
finality and vulnerability arises the quality of life.
Vulnerability as the realm and the breeding place of the Spirit means that (exclusive) strategies
of invulnerability cannot be the work of the Spirit. The Spirit, seeking bodies and giving life to
our bodies (Jensen 2008:2), embraces the idea that one is one’s body. The relation between the
vulnerable body and the self is constituted by the experience that one cannot hide from one’s
own vulnerability, because the human being does not have a body, but he or she is his or her
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