Growing Our Hearts Wings

In a disposable world, brokenness is often terrible and terrifying. Who repairs, recycles, reuses, mends, and darns any more? We exile the attributes that shame us, wall away the hurting places, and shove the frightened and shattered behind a pretty curtain.

Brokenness just is, neither good nor bad. It is just as much part of being as birth and death, failure and success, crying and laughing, and all the emotions and deeds and aspirations and losses that make us who we are. What we do with that brokenness is what matters.

The story is told that the great violinist Yitzhak Perlman once was playing a concerto when one of his violin strings broke. Usually when this happens, everything stops, the string is replaced, and the musicians begin again. But Perlman finished the concerto with only three strings. Afterwards, he reportedly said, “Our task is to make music with what remains.”

Like the other kinds of human experience, brokenness can be an opportunity for goodness and spiritual growth, a chance for our heart to grow its wings. Brokenness can also be what stultifies us and suffocates or shatters us so completely we give in to terrible deeds and even to apathy and cruelty. Our calling, as faithful people, though, is to grow those wings, to find a way to carry on and make something beautiful out of a time of hurt and grief.

I believe we are not alone in those efforts to make something beautiful out of something painful. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures teach me that the Holy repairs, recycles, reuses, mends, darns, and heals our broken hearts and battered spirits with us. The psalmist of Psalm 107 sings of the Holy gathering up the lost and broken, the ill and scattered, for redemption, for healing, for home coming. The Holy does not view us or creation as junk—as disposable—to be thrown away because we are not as shiny as we once were or because we have been cracked and mended inexpertly. Isaiah speaks to the people in exile, broken and scattered, and shares a vision of consolation, and that vision is a way made out of exile, where the broken-hearted are welcomed for healing, and the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.

Out of our experiences of brokenness, with the Holy, we strive to make something beautiful, to bear a blessing and grow our hearts wings.