The Shattering Nature of Brokenness
This morning I was reading Rob Bell's words ...
“Our world isn’t one. It’s broken, shattered, fractured, with pieces lying all over the floor.
We all have friends who are from ‘broken homes.’
A couple ‘split up.’
A spouse is ‘shattered’ by his lover’s infidelity.
Somebody’s marriage fell apart and she’s ‘picking up the pieces.’”
... And then I promptly lost the grip on my water glass and it fell to the floor.
As my heart jumped at its shattering crash into the hardwood, I felt something I’ve long known, and could clearly see as I began trying to navigate a path in my bare feet:
Our brokenness hurts people.
I’m sorry, that is just the truth, and it’s the reason this work of healing is so vital.
This means two important things in our world:
- When we have unhealed, unseen wounds, we are hurting others, regardless of our intent to love them.
- The wounding we see in the world - racism, abuse, exploitation of power - comes from brokenness.
These things are wounds to be healed, not evils to be destroyed.
This matters so much, because they require completely different approaches to eliminating them.
We can’t “destroy” a wound.
We only make it deeper and wider.
Wound must be healed.
But make no mistake, before they are healed, they create shattering damage.
Every single bit as much from "us," as from those “others“ we perceive as “evil.“
If you’re a regular reader here, you know that there’s a man I’ve loved for more than four years.
This love has been completely from afar, and has been the center of every moment of my healing and discovery.
It’s been intentionally from afar, and for the first year, completely in the space of not even knowing if he was available or what may or may not have been possible.
It’s lived in that space because I’ve known that I have things to heal before I will be able to be a loving presence rather than a wounding one.
One of the first things I discovered in coming to know the truth of love - a truth I had no concept of before this man walked into my world - was that I would never, ever want to inflict on his heart what was inflicted on mine.
Even if it meant loving him from a distance, that had to be the path over shattering the most stunning heart I’ve ever encountered.
It’s also not just him in the picture.
He has three precious little girls, and the things I felt rising in me told me that if I didn't first do some serious healing work, I would absolutely be the wounding presence in their lives that my deeply broken mother figures were in mine.
I was not wiling to shatter those precious fragile hearts, either.
Now this is not to say we’ll never hurt each other in healthy relationships.
We absolutely will.
But there is a fundamental difference walking in the world knowing - and owning - your wounds and what rises from them, and walking in the world unaware of them, believing that those things that rise from your wounds are coming from the people around you.
This is how we pass our wounds on to others.
We project them onto those others and then teach them that they are the cause of our pain, when they never, ever were.
I have no idea what the future holds for the truly sacred space between my beloved and me.
And it is a sacred space.
As seemingly vast and empty as it is much of the time, I continue to be stunned at what shows up there, in the most phenomenal moments.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
Another of the miraculous gifts of this journey is the powerful truth that not only can I not know what any future moments holds for that space ... Neither can he.
No one, including those we believe hold all the power, knows what will unfold in the next moment.
Every moment after this one is a mystery, which means that it is alive with infinite possibility.
As an example of the kinds of things that show up in that sacred space between us, he randomly spoke that truth to me in our last conversation.
What I dream of with him now is absolutely possible, as are a million other wonders I can’t even conceive of yet.
I don't get to know what's going to happen.
But I do know this: As I walk through my days interacting with people, I’m coming to see more and more the healing and life-giving presence I am.
I'm finding that I know exactly what to say in difficult and painful moments, and that my "sacred weird" as my stunning friend CJ Casciotta calls it, is speaking into people's hearts and reminding them of the astonishing light of their own being.
To a certain degree that’s always been who I am, so much of this journey of healing is simply about uncovering what was already there.
When we are living from our wounds, however, even amidst those life-giving moments we may create, we are doing shattering damage as we speak and act from our fears.
I’ve learned from loving this man that love and fear cannot live in the same space.
They truly cannot.
It's the reason I've spoken truths to him I would never have imagined speaking to someone so profoundly important to me.
Outside of those rare moments we are actually in life-threatening danger and it serves us well, fear tends to be a destructive force.
Or I should say, living in the space of fear is destructive.
It prevents connection, and destroys the possibility of love.
Living in the space of love is a completely different experience.
It does not wound, ever.
EVER.
I continue to be stunned at the viciousness I see people call “love.”
That is just not love, friends.
Love SEES with kindness and grace.
Being loving and kind is not a matter of crafting or filtering our language ... It’s a matter of SEEING the light and beauty in the world and in others, and simply speaking the truth of what we see.
Trust me, when you’re filtering your critical language and spirit, we all know it, and we do not experience you as loving or kind.
We experience you as insincere.
Nothing has contributed more to my ability to see with compassion than this work of "getting a Ph.D. in myself," as Miles Adcox so often and wisely says.
It's feeling the deep pain and vicious unwelcoming rise in me when I feel threatened that shows me that all those things we call "hate" and "evil" are nothing but excruciating pain and fear.
I've also found that those things are based 100% on lies.
It's not what's happening that shatters me and causes those things to rise, it's what I'm telling myself about them.
It's the lies that were planted in me by the brokenness of the powerful voices in my young life.
When those painful things rise and I meet them with grace and kindness, everything - the way I way I see myself and others and the world - changes.
Love has to come from the inside out.
It has to exist first and foremost inside, and for, ourselves.
When it doesn’t, our brokenness will only cut those we long to touch.