Broken Open, Not Broken Down

Driving around the city is very strange these days.  Restaurants open for take out only, mall parking lots empty, and freeway traffic moving more freely than normal.  People out walking around seem more friendly, nodding to our shared experience and hungry for additional human interaction.  Behind these scenes are human stories.  Some of those stories are a mixture of upside-down feelings, while at the same time noticing it is kind of nice to slow down or work from home.   Some are stories of deeper pain, fear, and despair for many reasons.  Tuning into the news reveals the grim statistics of loss and struggle and chaos on a level most of us have not witnessed before.  We feel the sadness in the air and know some things are lost and some broken beyond repair.   We hope for positive changes and regeneration to also be a part of this COVID-19 story.

Poets, prophets, priests, and various wise women and men over time have observed that being heartbroken is not only human but necessary for our growth and evolution.  In Savage Grace: Living Resiliently in the Dark Night of the Globe, authors  Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker declare that we must go through a period of being in the dark hole of chaos, followed by a rebirth, in order to truly grow up.  Poet Gregory Orr put it this way:

Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.
But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs.
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss….

Yes, life breaks our hearts at times, and some of those times seem too much to bear.  But the hope is that our hearts can be broken open, not broken down and shattered.  When our hearts are broken open, truth can enter in.  Truth we need to hear, to see, to know.  It may be truth about our hectic and self-absorbed lives, and awareness that we cannot go on in the same way.  We may connect with sadness or with new hope for future generations.  When we are broken down, we cannot hear truth because we fall into despair or bitterness or hopelessness.  When we are broken open, we can humbly admit our need for help, for other people, for spiritual guidance and soul searching.  When we are broken down, we experience humiliation and shame.  Being broken open leads us to healing and greater empathy and compassion for ourselves and for others.  Being broken down leads us to emotional isolation and indifference towards others.  Being broken open does not mean we have all the answers, but we are open to learning, to growth, and to life. 

A woman I met with recently had been sad, lonely, and unhappy in her marriage for many years.  Despite past efforts, she carried this burden silently in her heart until she began to break.  She came to the point where she decided she needed to leave and search for a sense of home again.  She poured out the truth about her broken heart to her husband, fully prepared to act on what she needed to do to save herself.  This level of truth and openness shook him, and they started to talk openly, honestly, and with no agenda.  To her surprise they started to experience new stirrings of life and connection between them, and they agreed to keep talking and see what happens.  When I saw her again, she had a lightness and hope she had not felt in a long while.  This was a marriage broken open.

Within each story of tragedy, pain, and struggle there lies the possibility of being broken open.  We may not comprehend how it is possible or be able see beyond the moment.  There are times we have no answers and we are painfully aware we cannot control life.  But we do have choices in how we respond.  We can allow ourselves to fully feel whatever it is we are feeling, which healing requires.  We can reach out and ask for help and allow others to be present with us. We can begin to speak the truth to ourselves and others with no conditions or demands.  We can humbly ask for Divine grace to hold us and open us up.  I leave you with the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.