Feeling Vulnerary

Today, the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day on my blog is vulnerary: an adjective that means "used to promote the healing of wounds."

That's not a word I would use regularly to describe myself.

(Partly because I didn't know what it meant before today--thank you Merriam-Webster for making me 0.1349% smarter than I was yesterday).

I'm more inclined to use the word vulnerable: "susceptible to being wounded or hurt." And I hate that feeling. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid it.

However, one of the things I love about words is the way they relate to each other on a root level. Both vulnerable and vulnerary come from the Latin noun vulnus, meaning wound.

(The Romans had a lot of words to describe injuring or killing things. Funny how that works...).

(Please also note, adding to my extraneous use of parentheses, that I didn't have to look that up. I just knew, 'cause I'm awesome like that. Although I did double check in my Latin/English dictionary. Yes, I own one.)

But I digress.

Sometimes when I think about brokenness and wounding, I get so caught up in thinking about my own propensity for being hurt that I forget about the possibility of healing. And, I want to push this one step further, I forget about my call to be a part of the healing of others.

(I'm especially thinking of Romans 12:6-8, and Ephesians 1 and 3:14-21. Which I did have to look up. Hmm...)

On the one hand, that's a lot of responsibility. There are good reasons I chose not to pursue a career in medicine. Seems like the blind leading the blind, to have the wounded trying to heal.

But there's another definition of vulnerary. As a noun, it means a remedy for wounds. That's not a role I can play. That part is up to God. I think, if I may fall back on the sheer beauty of grammar, I can fit much better as the adjective, "a word that expresses an attribute of [a noun]." It doesn't replace the noun. But it shows something about the nature of the noun.

So to be adjectivally vulnerary (oh, what a great phrase): What would that look like? While we're on the honesty note, I'm not sure I know. I'm not sure I'm ready to let go of the boundaries that keep me safe and me-focused. But I do think it's something to aim for.

And, in the wise (or not-so-wise) words of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, "Therefore a health to all that shot and missed!"

(No, I didn't have to look that up either.)