Psalm 139:1-18 | 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
Jeremy Richards
Today we are in week three of our four week series on “Restoring Love of Self.” We’ve been talking about the importance of loving and knowing ourselves in relation to loving and knowing both God and our neighbors. We’ve been using Henri Nouwen’s book The Life of the Beloved as our guide. Nouwen says there are 4 words that characterize the life of the Beloved: taken, blessed, broken, and given. Today we’re talking going to talk about brokenness.
At first, this may strike us as odd. We’re trying to restore the love of ourselves, after we’ve been told for so long by both the world and, unfortunately, religion, that we’re inherently unlovable, that our default position in relation to God is condemned and judged. So why are we talking about brokenness? Isn’t that just emphasizing the very thing we’re trying to deemphasize?
To be honest, that was my thought when I first started reading this chapter in Life of the Beloved. Aren’t we trying to say that we’re not broken, that we’re good, we’re chosen, we’re blessed? But as I read the chapter, I came to see how flawed and unhealthy my thinking was – and how damaging it could be. Because my assumption was that brokenness is in some way contrary to, or in opposition to, our chosenness and our blessedness. And so our brokenness is something to overcome, to repress, or maybe to deny all together.
This is an AWFUL approach to the human condition. Praise God for Henri Nouwen and his wisdom in this book. Unlike me, Nouwen doesn’t skirt around brokenness. He doesn’t ignore it. In fact, he says it can’t be ignored, even if we tried. And that to deny it would be to deny ourselves.
At the very beginning of the chapter he says, “Our brokenness is so visible and tangible, so concreate and specific, that it is often difficult to believe there is much to think, speak or write about other than our brokenness.”[1] He goes on later to say that all the best works of art are often “direct expressions of the human awareness of brokenness.”[2] I’m reminded of the phrase that appears on a lot of the musician Julien Baker’s merchandise: “Sad songs make me feel better.” We can all relate to brokenness, and, in fact, another’s acknowledgement – the “sad songs” they’ve written for example – can actually be a great comfort to us.
It’s true (isn’t it?), that the music, paintings, movies, poems, stories, shows, dances, etc. that move us the most are often the ones that address human brokenness head on. I was just talking with Collin and Katie a couple of weeks ago about how all the Oscar winners are always really sad, heavy movies. They said some of their family members tried to watch all the Oscar winners during shelter-in-place and they had to give up really early on, because they were getting too depressed!
Ironically, the world outside may now be more honest than the Church is about brokenness, because brokenness has become such a loaded concept within Christianity. There’s so much baggage around it that we don’t know how to address it in a healthy way. To oversimplify, churches tend to go with one extreme or the other. There are those churches who make our brokenness the most important thing: we are damaged goods, unworthy of love, deserving only of divine wrath, or we’re pretty much good, God loves us, so let’s not focus on the negative too much (which is the way our church tends to lean).
In the first scenario, our brokenness, not our “chosenness” or our “Belovedness” (to use Nouwen’s words), becomes the core of our identity, which is untrue, unbiblical, and extremely harmful. In the second scenario, our brokenness is basically never addressed, and so it becomes something we repress, avoid, or deny. Or, I should say, something we try to repress, avoid, or deny, which is also untrue, unbiblical, and extremely harmful.
If we’re honest – and honesty is vital to any kind of self-knowledge, right? – then we can’t avoid our brokenness. But what do I mean by brokenness? Well, it’s hard to speak in generalities about brokenness, because Nouwen says that our individual brokenness is as unique to us as our chosenness and our blessedness. “Our brokenness is always lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique. I am deeply convinced that each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers,” he says. He goes on to say, “I am more grateful for a person who can acknowledge that I am very alone in my pain than for someone who tries to tell me that there are many others who have a similar or worse pain…Our pain is truly ours. Nobody else’s.”[3] So it’s hard to say exactly what we mean by brokenness, because it’s unique to each of us. And yet I think we all recognize it when we see it. We all know it, even when we can’t always put our finger on it.
In the book, the only way Nouwen can give tangible examples is to use real experiences. The Life of the Beloved is actually a kind of letter to his secular Jewish friend Fred. So Nouwen uses examples from their lives to illustrate what he means by brokenness. When it comes to himself, Nouwen talks about his own brokenness as loneliness, isolation, and insecurity, and when it comes to Fred’s brokenness he talks about the painful divorce that Fred went through years earlier, as well as Fred’s more general confusion about the direction of his life. To illustrate Nouwen’s point, these are all feelings we can relate to to some degree or another, and yet we also know that we’ve never experienced them in the precise, unique ways that Nouwen and Fred have.
If our pain is so unique to us, then, Nouwen says, “The way you are broken tells me something unique about you.”[4] This reminds me of a line from the well-known poem, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you about mine.” So part of getting to know someone, and part of getting to be known by someone is sharing our brokenness, because we can’t share ourselves without also sharing our brokenness.
But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself, because I’m talking about the importance of sharing our brokenness with others, but we can’t do that if we won’t face our brokenness ourselves. But what does it mean to “face our brokenness”? How do we do that?
This may sound counterintuitive, but Nouwen says that we must befriend it. As I read Nouwen’s explanation of what it means to befriend our brokenness, it instantly reminded me of the retreat Brie and I went on about a month ago. And this is probably a good time to tell you that a few weeks back, when I was gone for the weekend, I was on a retreat for the Living School. I thought everyone knew that, but then I told a few people when I got back and no one knew that, so I guess I never told all of you. So it was a very restful, rejuvenating weekend, but we weren’t just on a vacation, we were at a short retreat for the Living School.
It was a special intensive given by one of our teachers, James Finley, who’s a trained psychologist in addition to being a well-known spiritual teacher. After graduating from high school, he was a novice at the Abbey of Gethsemani, and Thomas Merton was his spiritual director. The intensive was all online, but my small group from the Living School decided to all get together in the small town of Kelseyville, CA where two of my small group members owned houses. Most of us stayed at the larger house which had a beautiful view of Clear Lake. This intensive was special because spouses/partners/significant others/friends were invited to join, so many of us brought someone with us. I obviously brought Brie!
The most paradigm-shifting segment of the intensive was when Finley, who we all just call Jim, talked about trauma. He shared openly about abuse he had experienced as a child and as a young man. Again and again he said in his own way, like Nouwen, that we must befriend the part of ourselves that has been hurt, instead of trying to get over it or fix it or, worst of all, ignore or repress it. There was one point when this idea became really concrete, and I would guess that most people who were at the intensive would say it was the most moving part of the weekend.
On Sunday morning, there was a time for questions, and one man shared with his wife sitting next to him. He said he was 70 years old and classified himself as a “recovering trauma survivor, ‘psychotic mystic,’ Presbyterian minister gone rouge, (and) pastoral psychotherapist,” and as soon as he got through his introduction and started to ask his question, he almost immediately began to cry, and he essentially said that despite all those things he listed about himself, he’s still so untrusting. He just struggles to trust people, even though he wants to. He said, “I can hear my heart beating as I talk with you because I’m so afraid of being visible in the world,” and then he asked this brilliant question, which goes along with this idea of befriending our brokenness, he asked, “Do you have any tips or helpful hints to help me realize the divinity of my mistrust.”
What he was saying was “I’m broken. I see that I’m broken. How can I see my brokenness as a doorway to God.” Or, to use Nouwen’s words, “How can I befriend my brokenness?
And Jim said, “Yes, yes.” And Jim has a great sense of humor in addition to being very wise, and he started by saying, “Yes, yes. I want to be God talking, alright? Here it goes…” then he said, “Thank you for sharing, I already knew what you were going to say because I’m God, but I appreciate it.” Then he said there were a few things he wanted this student to consider. The first is that the part of you that doesn’t trust is trying to take care of you, because in the past you were in a situation where your trust was shattered and broken. And it’s true that it’s overdoing it because it’s still afraid, but it’s your guardian. And then he said, “You can befriend the part of you that doesn’t trust and thank it for its effort, thank it for being so faithful to you, because it’s convinced that if it were to let you trust, something terrible would happen. That’s the world it still lives in. So first you should thank it for it’s efforts, but then you should remind it of a few things: first of all, for all of your lack of trust, look at all that God’s achieved in you, in your ministry and your work. And furthermore (remember he’s pretending to be God talking), for all the trouble you have trusting, I have no trouble trusting you. And I have used your lack of trust as the poverty through which you’ve let me touch people in your life. Also, in your lack of trust, it gives you empathy for others who are also afraid to trust, too. Takes one to know one. And this makes you safe to be with. It makes them able to trust you. And so, it’s a gift. It turns a liability into an asset. And by the way, all these people here are so grateful that you trusted enough in all of us to share with all of us that you don’t trust, and we’re touched by that, and we’re moved by the fact that you were moved when you said it, and the community got deeper. So on behalf of the group, and myself as God, I thank you for being so real with us.” And what Jim said was true, I looked around the room at my group and almost every single person was crying. It was so moving. It was a real paradigm-shifting moment for me.
I’m sure that for most of this man’s 70-year life, he had wanted to overcome his brokenness, to just stop being so untrusting. That’s how I feel about my own brokenness, my own hurts that have lasting effects. “If only I could get back to who I was before that!” I think. But no, God says (or at least James Finley pretending to be God says), don’t push it away, befriend it, thank it.
That’s not to say that suffering or injustice is good. Abuse is not a blessing. That is never the case. Please hear that clearly. Abuse is never of God. But with God nothing is wasted. With God all things can be redeemed, so the place of pain can become the door to deeper connection. That’s what happened at the intensive, right? That man shared his own brokenness with us, and, in the words of James Finley, the whole community got deeper. That’s the story of the cross. The cross was the place of death, yet through it God brings life to all in the resurrection of Jesus. The cross was a curse, plain and simple, and yet God turned it into a blessing. God called forth God’s Son from the grave, God called forth the Beloved from the tomb.
In our own brokenness, our own pain, our own suffering, God also calls us forth again and again. God calls us too, as the Beloved, out of the deep hole of our pain and suffering and trauma. God chooses us, God blesses us. And in our brokenness we find communion with the broken God who hung on the cross. And we find communion with the broken friend who sits 6 feet away from us this morning, or a computer screen away this morning.
“Tell me about despair, yours, and I’ll tell you about mine.” We don’t only say this to one another. If you can believe it, Christ says this to us as well. Christ offers to sit with you, over coffee or tea, and if you open your Bible, he’ll tell you about weeping at the grave of Lazarus, about weeping over the city of Jerusalem, about weeping at the Garden of Gethsemane. He’ll tell you about the time his best friends deserted him. He’ll tell you about the time he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He’ll tell you about his own death. “Tell me about, despair,” he says, “yours, and I’ll tell you about mine.”
I’ve come to see that Nouwen and James Finley are right. The only way to wholeness is to befriend our brokenness. We can never live the life of the Beloved if we are not honest about brokenness because our brokenness is part of us, and we can’t accept ourselves if we can’t accept our brokenness. To run from it is to run from ourselves, which is, ultimately, to run from God.
But if we turn and face it, not with our jaws set and our fists clenched, but with compassion and maybe even a bit of gratitude, we will see it is the very opening to life with God. It is the door through which grace flows. It’s the weakness that becomes our strength. It’s the window through which God calls our name, through which God says, in the words of Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Amen.
[1] Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Life of the Beloved, 69.
[2] Ibid 70.
[3] Ibid 71.
[4] Ibid 71.