REsources for Living
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One of the most important lesson we learn—and try to teach our kids—is that when something goes wrong or breaks, we need to take a deep breath and figure out how to fix it. Owies can be fixed with a kiss and a Band-Aid. Toys can be fixed with glue or needle and thread or new batteries. Friendships can be fixed with a sincere apology and an understanding that we will do better next time. Grades can be fixed with more studying or the help of a tutor. Whatever the physical or emotional damage, the best approach is to figure out what needs to be done to make things better, and then go do it.
Except for when it isn’t. Yes, learning how to regain calm and figure out a solution is an incredibly important life skill. But the sad fact is that if you are on this planet long enough—and sometimes it doesn’t take very long—you find out that there are some parts of life that you just can’t fix. There are times when things simply break beyond repair. Sometimes the precious handmade baby quilt gets left on the train and disappears forever. There are some relationships that, no matter how important they are to you, are just not going to work out. There are people you love who get hurt or sick in ways that nothing can cure.
Sometimes, like Humpty Dumpty after the fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are not going to be enough to put things back together again. So what do you do then? What do you do when there is nothing to do, no way to go back and repair what is broken?
That’s when we get to religion. Most of what we human beings do—engineering and medicine and plumbing and psychology and waste management and so on—is designed to figure out problems and then find solutions. Religion is about the only field that offers us a place to sit when pieces of our lives are simply broken and going to stay that way.
Buddhism, for instance, teaches that life is naturally full of pain. There is no getting around the fact that things break, that people die, that we might never get what we desperately want. The Buddhist solution is to give up attachment, to learn to accept that the way of the world includes inevitable brokenness, and that grasping after our personal desires is only going to make it harder. Buddhist meditation practice is a disciplined way of learning to let go, to let the world be as it is without making things harder for ourselves by grabbing after things that we will never be able to hold on to.
This path of detachment, of calm acceptance of the way things are, is not necessarily a strong suit for Unitarian Universalists. We tend to be people who are committed to fixing problems. We want to make things better—for ourselves, for our children, and for the world as a whole. We’re willing to take on big issues because we have faith that people of good will, working together, can make a difference. And goodness knows the world has big problems that need big solutions, and a huge need for people who are willing to take on the important work of trying to figure out those solutions.
But sometimes things are just so broken that we need a way not to fix them, but rather to sit with the brokenness. In the Jewish tradition, when a family member dies you tear your clothes to show your grief, and you have an official time, called shiva, when you just stay home. You just sit with the brokenness of the fact that someone you love is gone, without needing to try to make it better or say that things are okay or claim that the person has gone to a better place. You just sit at home and your friends come to help and to be with you in the not-okay-ness of it all.
That piece of taking time and being together is what we can do when there is nothing else to do. Some losses aren’t fixable, but almost any loss is survivable, with enough time and a chance to remember all that remains. What religion can do—along with its cousins music, literature and art—is remind us that we are not alone, that we stand in a long line of people who have had to live with loss and suffering and brokenness.
And sometimes—often, even—we manage to come though that brokenness in a new form that we could never have imagined. Religion does not offer us the faith that everything will be okay. Sometimes everything is really not fine. What it offers us is the promise that every hole in our lives is also a door to something new, and that we are never completely alone as we step through that door.
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
