Brokenness in Human Lives
| The woman and the daughter do not speak. The crippled man does not stir. The breeze comes in the window and stops the scene from turning into a painting. Tim Winton, Cloudstreet |
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Confusion will be my epitaph as I crawl a cracked and broken path.If we make it we can all sit back and laugh. But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying,Yes, I fear tomorrow I'll be crying. Robert Fripp & Others, Epitaph |
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The kingdom is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking on the road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke. The meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realise it; she had noticed no accident. When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty. Jesus of Nazareth, Gospel of Thomas 97 |
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Why ever did I come out of the womb to live in toil and sorrow and to end my days in shame! Jeremiah 20:18 |
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Now we are approaching the year 2000 -optimism has given way to hopelessnessand illusions are fading. We are confronted with the stark reality of a broken humanity. Jean Vanier, The Body Broken,St. Paul Publications, 1988 |
What is life? But a journey from sickness to health, from captivity to freedom, from brokenness to wholeness!
Jean Vanier, The Body Broken,St. Paul Publications, 1988 |
To be human is to know pain and brokenness in our lives. Sooner or later we all experience loss and grief in a way that touches us at the deepest level of our being:
All such experiences touch upon a raw nerve and leave us with feelings of despair and meaninglessness. We face the darkness of life and the darkness of our own inner-selves.
Human Responses to Brokenness
One common response to the experience of human brokenness is to attempt to fill our lives with all kinds of substitutes, whether these be work, alcohol, drugs, sex or material things. We tend to live in a society of various forms of addiction. The sad irony is that these ways of "numbing the pain" do not succeed. They are attempts to deny or avoid the pain but, in reality, only feed our feelings of bitterness, self-loathing and hopelessness. Addictive and avoidance rituals are inevitably self-defeating.
Another false ritual is to believe that we can overcome suffering and death on the basis of our own powers. Some self-help programmes are built around the belief that all negative feelings can be eradicated if only we summon our own inner-strength to overcome them. This is less a strategy of denial than a strategy of self-illusion. It assumes that we can think or will ourselves beyond feelings of sorrow and brokenness as if such feelings were not integral to our human reality.
Another common but false ritual of coping with brokenness is cynicism. It often expresses itself in the form of rebellion and in the belief that there is no final purpose to our human lives. Frequently, on the basis of broken relationships, cynicism takes cold comfort in the conviction that all human ideals and commitments are only masks for selfish and self-serving acts. Cynicism denies the possibility of human fulfillment and love. As such, it is a strategy of delusion.
Positive rituals begin with the acknowledgement that to be human is to grow, and that to grow is to move through many different life-experiences, both positive and negative. In order to become an adult, one must leave behind the things of childhood. To grow in relationships is to be constantly prepared to "let go" past ways of relating--and even past relationships. It has been said with much truth that life is a series of "little deaths", a path of "letting go" what we have been in order to become what we are called to be.
It is also said that to live is to change, and to live humanly is to change often--or, if you like, to die to ourselves in order that our new selves will emerge. Sometimes it is only through an experience of loss and grief that we are able to begin--or re-enter--the journey of change and growth. In any case, the only positive way of coping with deep hurt and pain in our lives is through the ritual of acknowledgement and the strategy of learning to "let go". Here, we learn to surrender ourselves to the mystery of life.
The Christian Response: From Brokenness to Wholeness
The Christian asks herself what the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth has to say to us about handling brokenness in our lives. It is important for us to realise that Jesus' ministry was primarily a ministry of healing for the poor and abandoned of his society and time, a ministry that situates Jesus "most at home" with those who know their own fragility and brokenness. Jean Vanier expresses this well for us in The Broken Body (quotes pp. 44-46):
It is clear from his life
that Jesus feels most at home,
not with the intellectuals or with people in power,
but with the poor, the needy, those in pain,
with those children that his disciples wanted to keep away.
As his ministry progressed
we see him insisting on the privileged place of the poor
in his vision and in his heart.
Who, then, are these 'poor' with whom Jesus so readily associates? Vanier tells us:
The poor can be the economically poor,
who are hungry, homeless and out of work,
or the rejected ones -
those put aside because of their infirmities and handicaps,
their apparent uselessness.
They are longing to be accepted and loved,
longing for meaning and a healing relationship.
The poor are those caught up in sin,
yet craving also to be liberated from it.
Vanier recognises that the 'poor' are any of us who know hurt and brokenness in our lives--and who long for healing and wholeness:
The poor are also any of us
who are sad and alone, feeling guilty and unloved.
The poor know their own emptiness.
They do not hide from it.
They long for a saviour
who will heal their hearts
and bring them peace.
We have already said that to experience this peace it is necessary to acknowledge our need to be healed through a power greater than ourselves. Christians understand that this power, this saviour-figure, is none other than Jesus Christ himself who reaches out to touch us in the places of our deepest hurt, shame and guilt. However, Jesus does not impose his healing on us. In a certain sense we must first `believe'. We need to turn from ourselves towards him if we want to make the journey from sickness to health.
Of course there are always some in pain and distress,
who shut themselves up in anger and fear;
their hearts are closed to Jesus,
and to his healing promise.
On either side of Jesus, at his crucifixion, were two thieves.
One, whom we call the good thief,
was open to the truth and new life;
but the other was angry and turned in upon himself,
and so could receive nothing.
We also know that Jesus' healing ministry came to an abrupt end in his own crucified body. However, with Jesus, brokenness and death itself do not have the last word. God raised Jesus from the dead and it is this mystery of Christian faith that tells us that none of our life-experiences, no matter how painful, is beyond the bounds of God's redeeming love.
When the risen Christ appears to the disciples, he greets them by saying: "Do not be afraid" and "Peace be with you". It is also the risen Jesus who comes to us in our brokenness with the same message of forgiveness, love and peace. He comes to make us whole, to bind our wounds, to set us free--if only we could believe that our woundedness is what makes us especially precious in the eyes of God. We are able to share in the life of the risen Christ of glory when we allow our broken and vulnerable selves to be touched by the surprise of grace.
Human Brokenness and Divine Grace
It is important to realise that all human beings share something of the brokenness of the human condition. We are born into it. In traditional Christian language, we are all affected by original sin. This doctrine of faith tells us that the world in which we live is somehow distorted and that, through no initial fault of our own, we are all touched by the mystery of evil. In view of this, Monika Hellwig suggests that we should think of original sin as a "cheerful doctrine"! She explains:
[Original Sin] says that if you find your life does not seem to go according to the pattern you would wish, if it does not seem to work out in the kind of integrity and totality that you had hoped for, if it does not seem to realise its possibilities, that you find yourself doing things that are not right and are self-defeating, then you should also know that you are more sinned against than sinning. . . . [Original Sin] is a doctrine that says we should understand that it is not our fault that things are not going perfectly because we do not start out with perfect possibilities. But we should also not that God has taken note of this and has offered redemption. [Compass Theology Review (1986), p.7.]
The other side of the mystery of sin and evil is the mystery of divine love and grace--or the mystery of redemption. Scripture tells us that God sent his Son into the world to share the brokenness of creation in order to bring creation to its proper fulfillment. It is not only human beings, but the whole created universe that "will be set free from its bondage to decay and will attain the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). Created life has been divinized by God. What we experience now are the birth-pangs of a universe being transformed into the new world where "every tear will be wiped away" (Commemoration for the Dead, Eucharistic Prayer III) and where, indeed, "we shall see God face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12).
In the face of the mystery of human life and brokenness, the Christian vision is predominantly a vision of hope. On the one hand, it stresses that "our sufferings in this present world are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). On the other hand, even in this world we should know that we are not alone: the mystery of divine love and goodness is already available to us if we open our eyes and our hearts to the divine energy that is the centre of all things.
God does not want us to suffer just as God did not will Jesus to suffer on the Cross of Calvary. Nonetheless, sin and evil do exist at least in part because human beings allow greed and selfishness to dictate their lives and behaviour. The Good News is that, in raising Jesus from the dead, God shows us all a way in which even the most perverse evil and darkness can be converted into goodness and light. The deepest truth of our earthly lives is that brokenness and emptiness are the privileged places where we are vulnerable enough to meet the living God of Jesus.
