Brokenness

~The biggest disease this day and age is that of people feeling unloved.~
Princess Diana 7/1/1971

Do you ever get the feeling that people just don't understand your broken heart? We've all suffered one, that's what makes it so surprising when we ignore those of others. Not the broken heart of crushes and love affairs necessarily, just the damage that occurs when we feel unloved - what happens to our soul when we look to another for support or love or decency and our pleas, silent or spoken, are rejected or simply go unnoticed. An injury, a fracture, a bruise, a slice. A break in the love - a heart broken. A boss fumes about a project you proudly and heartfully produced. A group of friends ignores you. A parent yells angry things. A child rebels. A lover loves someone else. A shoulder to lean on doesn't come. A dream is crushed. There seems to be no end to the possibilities - and there isn't.

Even when healing happens and life gets happy again and we allow ourselves to love and depend and hope and capture peace, even when the heart finds healing or relief, the mind remembers. It's what minds do. They file, catalog, judge, predict, plan. They output that which has been input. Without careful consideration, our lives can recklessly reflect in output the input of heartbreak. We can easily glide on the slippery pond of emotions rather than trudge on the firm banks of reality. It's such a shining tempting sheet of pretty ice, isn't it? And, the trudging...certainly seems less efficient on first glance, doesn't it? Why hold it together and proceed with care, with fewer falls, fewer collisions with the bank, fewer extravagant movements? Why carefully carve the path ahead, read the landscape, exercise patience? How does one live with a broken heart? With all of our fractures of our hearts? Sometimes slide, sometimes trudge.

Sliding, trudging, acting, reacting, sucking it up, falling to pieces...the original break does not evaporate into thin air, it can't. Nothing, once it happens, evaporates. It can stay in your heart, piercing you. It can stay in your mind, driving you. Or it can be incorporated. I think of corporal as body and I think of it, a broken heart, as being incorporated into the body, and carried along. Not drug along, like an albatross or an anchor, exhausting you and interfering, but simply "along," like all the other experiences and moments and memories and thoughts that we carry along with us through life. At least, that seems like a realistic view, an earthly view. Just take it along, you can't leave it, so don't spend the rest of your days standing in one place trying to unstick it from your fingers. Just face facts and walk along with it. It may help you in the future, who knows?

But, there's an even better corporal. Corporal-from the doctrine that the bread of the Eucharist becomes or represents the body of Christ When your focus is on Christ and you see that Christ's focus is on you, carrying any load and especially the load of the unloved is no longer a burden because you see that unloved on earth is a blip when you're loved in eternity. Eternity starts now. So, where will you put it if you don't bring it to Christ?

Comments

Popular Posts