Brokenhearted
I recently got a text from my friend Paul that read, “Well shit. What do we do now?”
This fact is notable because Paul and I are friends from high school--think, 30+ years ago--and while I love him and love the memories of our irreverent back-row classroom shenanigans, he lives on the other side of the country and we don’t communicate often. So when I got his text, I might have been confused by what he meant...except for the fact that he texted me on the same day that the United States Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump of crimes he clearly committed, sending our country into a frontier of lawlessness unprecedented in our lifetimes. I knew exactly what Paul meant.
I answered as best I could in the moment: “Organize like crazy.”
But Paul’s question was not a question about mechanics. He knows as well as I do that we have to give and organize and vote for what we believe in. His question was rather more deeply theological. I expect he texted me because I’m a pastor, a public theologian, someone who regularly opines on the spiritual as it relates to the temporal, the political, even. And he wanted answers to theological questions, not political ones. Answers to questions like: “What do you do when bad things happen?” “Why do evil people gain and hold power?” “How do you stay strong in the face of, now, government-sanctioned evil?” “What does our faith have to say in a circumstance like this?” “Where is God?”
These are excellent questions, especially since (I assume) most people learned early we were supposed to tell the truth, do the right thing, care about our neighbors, love our enemies, and do our best work. At least that’s what Paul and I learned at our private Christian high school. So what are we to make of this current public lauding of everything we were taught to abhor...often by the people who taught us those very things?
Truth be told, these are the questions pastors hate to get, because there are no easy answers. To be the one selling devotion to a reality that doesn’t seem possible is a terrible and fear-filled role to play; most pastors I know avoid these questions altogether for fear of upsetting people and, mostly, losing their jobs. But faith is the intangible insistence that a new world is actually possible...that what we see around us is not the end, or even a reality to which we must acquiesce.
And to be fully human is to need to believe that something new is possible, because if it isn’t, and if we don’t, then all there is to say is: “Well shit. What do we do now?”
Perhaps the one who comes closest to a deeply spiritual response to all of this is Parker Palmer, who writes about our obligation to hold the broken-heartedness of the world. He writes:
“There are at least two ways to picture a broken heart, using heart in its original meaning not merely as the seat of the emotions but as the core of our sense of self. The conventional image, of course, is that of a heart broken by unbearable tension into a thousand shards—shards that sometimes become shrapnel aimed at the source of our pain. Every day, untold numbers of people try to ‘pick up the pieces,’ some of them taking grim satisfaction in the way the heart’s explosion has injured their enemies. Here the broken heart is an unresolved wound that we too often inflict on others.
But there is another way to visualize what a broken heart might mean. Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart ‘broken open’ into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy. This, too, happens every day. Who among us has not seen evidence, in our own or other people’s lives, that compassion and grace can be the fruits of great suffering? Here heartbreak becomes a source of healing, enlarging our empathy and extending our ability to reach out.
Broken-open hearts are in short supply these days, at least in politics. Formed—or deformed—by an impatient and control-obsessed culture, many of us do not hold social and political tensions in ways that open us to the world. Instead, we shut our hearts down, either withdrawing into fearful isolation or angrily lashing out at the alien ‘other’: the alien at home becomes unpatriotic, the alien abroad, an enemy. Heartbroken and heavily armed, we act in ways that diminish democracy and make the world an even more dangerous place.
The capacity to hold tensions creatively is the key to much that matters—from a life lived in love to a democracy worthy of the name to even the most modest movement toward peace between nations. So those of us who care about such things must work to root out the seeds of violence in our culture, including its impatience and its incessant drive toward control. And since culture is a human creation, whose deformations begin not ‘out there’ but in our inner lives, we can transform our culture only as we are inwardly transformed.
As long as we are mortal creatures who love other mortals, heartbreak will be a staple of our lives. And all heartbreak, personal and political, will confront us with the same choice. Will we hold our hearts open and keep trying to love, even as love makes us more vulnerable to the losses that break our hearts? Or will we shut down or lash out, refusing to risk love again and seeking refuge in withdrawal or hostility?”
Of course I couldn’t text all of this to Paul; I’m not as eloquent as Parker Palmer. But I wish I had texted an answer like: “We have to tenaciously hold each other. Never. Let. Go. Insist on the right. Take bold risks for the greater good. Refuse to clench up and give in to evil. Don’t give up.”
And then I thought of the image of a choir, a group of people tasked with holding a note for far longer than one human set of lungs can possibly do. The way the sound ends up emitting from the group, then, is that when one singer needs to stop singing and take a breath, she does. And while she’s breathing, the other singers sing a little louder to fill the gap. And then she joins in again, giving someone else a break. That’s what we have to do right now. Sing a song of freedom and hope as loud as we can, and when we feel we’re at the end of the rope we take a break...then start singing again. And we gather the people around us who understand what it means to hold the broken-heartedness of the world...and still keep singing.