Still Thinking – Brokenness

About three years ago Anne, my wife and I went to a concert in the Yarra Valley to hear the musician/poet /songwriter Leonard Cohen.  Cohen’s music is difficult to define.  He could be called an existential poet or perhaps a soulful folk singer.  The concert was fantastic. Cohen is over seventy years old and yet on that night he sang with the energy of a young man.  Among the many songs he performed was one titled The Anthem.  I have heard it many times before but the chorus never fails to move me.  The words go like this:

Ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything that's how the light gets in. 

The two images in the song are deeply spiritual.  First, the need to let go of religious perfectionism and the notion that God is waiting for the perfect offering.  And secondly, the recognition that it is when we are broken; when our lives are cracked open, that that is when the light and truth gets in.

It is an uncomfortable truth that most often the Spirit of God finds its way into our lives through our weakness, vulnerability, sadness and brokenness.  The ego in all of us is as Carl Jung suggested, “a little god that resists the life changing presence of God’s spirit.”  So the light of God’s truth finds the cracks in our lives and in our weakness begins to show us a new vision of wholeness.

Jacob Needleman, professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University draws this story of the power of brokenness from the Jewish Hasidic tradition.  He writes:

A disciple asks his Rabbi, “Rebbe, why does the Torah tell us to place these words upon our hearts?  Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?  The Rabbi answers, “it is because as we are, we are closed and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts.  So we place them on top of our hearts.  And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks open and the words fall in.”

Our life journey will pass through experiences of “heartbreak”.  The Christian story is clear that Jesus embraced the suffering visited upon him, so that the cross becomes a symbol of God’s love poured out for all humanity.  It is a sign to the followers of Jesus that the heart/the centre of our lives, must be large enough to hold both joy and suffering; despair and ecstasy, but only when it is open to the presence of God’s light and love.  And that is the difficult part for us.  This is not just a doctrine that must be believed, it is instead a painful experience that must be lived.

The Quaker scholar, Parker Palmer in a recent article draws us to this uncomfortable conclusion that we must allow ourselves to feel the pain of life fully lived.  Rather than numbing it with anaesthetics, fleeing from it with distractions, or fighting it off with blame and attack, we open our lives to the experience, allowing the turmoil to settle and an inner quietude to emerge so that the God within us can help us find our way through.[i]

Many know that a “heartbreak” can be a “breakthrough.”  Without the heart, the core of ourselves, being broken open, we will never know the largeness of life and the wonderful capacity within us to hold both joy and sorrow together in our lives.

Christopher

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[i] Palmer, Parker. “The Broken-Open Heart: Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap.” Weavings, March/April 2009 http://www.upperroom.org/weavings/pdf/PalmerReprint.Weavings.pdf