Life of the Beloved (3)

The third movement in becoming the beloved is something we don't talk much about in our communities of faith: brokenness. We prefer people who are doing well (How are you? if met with really honest answers would leave the questioner at a loss what to say) Generally we do not know how to hold each others brokenness up to God, as part of the mystery of the human being who is still 'becoming'. We may prefer to get people 'fixed' by sending them to see a counsellor or psychologist, or to some healing ministry sessions.

Yet, Nouwen says that our brokenness is lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique. Here he speaks in particular of inner brokenness - a brokenness of heart, the places where we are most needy and vulnerable. (Of course the outer brokenness of life's disorders does get to us too......I am right now waiting for the plumber to come and see if he can unblock an outlet pipe in my kitchen......if not, there may be rather major repairs by removing tiles to get to the pipe underground! Sounds a bit like wondering if angioplasty will help or will it require open heart surgery)

How do we respond to this brokenness? ...the inner type :-)

Nouwen says we should take courage from the Lord and face it squarely, befriend it, embrace it. Facing it, living through it is the way to healing. And i would add that just sitting and being held in God's love allows the 'stuff' to come out and we let that 'stuff' encounter Him, rather than try to work through it ourselves - which could lead to introspection.

Secondly, we are to put our brokenness under the blessing. Allow the blessing to touch us in our brokenness. I think we are often defined or we define ourselves by how our lives seem to unfold (are we successful Christians, do we have wonderful families, are our ministries enlarging and so on). Yet the story of our lives always remains unfinished even when we die, and it is the nature of the mercy of God to deal with what is unfinished - while the evil one would like us to think of ourselves as failures for not living up to certain ideals.

"The great spiritual call of the beloved children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing."

O how freeing to know in the depths of our soul, in the very fibers of our being, that the first and last word of God to us is grace (unlike what we are often made to believe, it is not 'sin' - in this I now differ from those who are strict Calvinists with the TULIP acronym!). Sin comes because we creaturely humans through the ages have been unable to respond freely to grace. We often see only the sin because it has clouded the deepest ground of our being - our original blessing.