Another Helping of Brokenness

Podcast: Download (4.3MB)

Subscribe: More

I am prone to sudden jerky movements that are beyond my control. The other day, I was out on an errand. As happens so often when I go out, I experienced how we judge one another. And how sometimes we are both spectacularly loud and spectacularly wrong in our judgments.

“That, right there,” an adult said to a youth while pointing me out, “is why you need to not use drugs. God has blessed her and let her live. But you can’t count on that kind of blessing. Just say no to drugs.”

“Some people,” another person opined aloud on this same trip, “shouldn’t be allowed out without their keepers.”

I find blessings in my experiences with disease, but this trip wasn’t full of those moments, just full of social sin. But later, recounting this story to someone else with mobility limitations, we started sharing horrible stories and laughing together, recognizing the judgments aimed at us, our own defensiveness and judgments in return, and how easy it is not to cherish and hold onto our common humanity, but to break us apart into enough and less than enough, saved and damned, whole and broken.

The really humbling bit is that I still catch myself judging others with judgments I would hate to have leveled at myself. It is a brokenness that awakens me to being more attentive to my promises and to trying again to live fully into my beliefs.

When you think about what kinds of blessings you welcome, does another helping of brokenness figure into those imaginings?

I’m not rushing around to go break something so I can experience the blessing of brokenness again. I can trust with my own fumblings and falls that brokenness is not far off. I may feel my life is blessed by grace, but I’m also prone to the disappointment, devastation, radical transformation, and losses that are the common experiences of brokenness.

But often brokenness is an experience of social sin, when we are separated from the whole, othered, found wanting, and left out. Individual control is denied and taken away, as we are classed and cleared away by bias. It is possible to create astounding blessings out of that experience, especially with others who also know the burn of that social sin, when resilient communities awake and grow strong, proud and loud out of oppressive situations. To speak of the blessings of brokenness is to give voice to those whose voices have been systematically stripped away and denied. But only those whose voices have been denied have the right to name the experience of the social sin of brokenness as a blessing.

The persons judging me in the store did not have the right to name my experience. If I had been asked, I could have named many blessings from my living with chronic disease. But with my voice denied once again I had to work through that experience of brokenness, and find and create new blessings from it.

Would you really like another helping of brokenness?