"The Broken Heart is Smart"

READING

Kimberley Patton is Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. These remarks come from the address she delivered to last year's graduating class.

The religious imagination reveals the broken heart as the very best means to wisdom and growth, even when it disrupts the dreams and goals that have inspired us; even when it overshadows the CVs we craft or the faces we publicly present; even when it scatters the ducks we have so carefully lined up in a row. . . .

There have been or will be times in all of our lives when the ducks will not line up. They scatter and squawk, or they are devoured by a starving coyote. Far from being distractions, these times of apparent anarchy are the most important times in our lives, and again, this is an ancient idea. For it is highly likely that during such broken-hearted, disorienting times, illusions will shatter; old ideas and attachments will be burned up; old ways of being will dissolve; and the one thing or person or way of life we thought we could not live without will be take from us. These are times when we will learn compassion, what in Buddhism is called "boddicitta," the awakened heart, times when the unbearably wounded will themselves emerge as healers.

My students say to me sometimes, as they apply to doctoral programs or jobs in parish ministry, "How shall I account for the two, or the ten, missing years on my resume? How should I explain the gap?" And I wish I could always answer them: "Tell the truth. Say, 'I took in a child whose mother was in prison and sang her to sleep every night while she cried. I worked the night shift in a rifle factory. I battled an addiction, and won. My husband was crushed by a boulder that fell in our own backyard, and I tended his grave. I worked as a stripper to save money to go to graduate school. I fled to Caledonia. I fled to Paraguay. I lived in a monastery in Thailand where I came to see that all things, all things are empty and undeserving of our outrageous attachment to them. I swapped dirty needles for clean. I took photos of skulls left by the Khmer Rouge. I cut down trees all day and made them into tables.'" These are all true stories of the things my students have done during the "gaps" in their resumes.

These experiences are how hearts and broken, and re-made; how souls are forged; how we become human beings with credible beliefs about existence itself.

The gaps on the resume are the abysses into which we fall from time to time, and in the process, fall into the hands of the living God. The gaps are when the initiations take place. It is our profound ignorance that makes us ashamed of such times . . . .

From "Harvard Divinity Bulletin," Winter 2006.

SERMON

If you came to church today because you had no where else to turn; if you find yourself sitting here, aching with grief or filled with confusion; if something or someone has just pulled the rug out from under you and nothing is as you thought it was; you're in good company. Every community that is willing to be honest about who we are and the stories we tell knows what it is to break, to fail, to suffer disappointment. Most of us are nothing like who we thought we would be, back when we were making our plans. We all have gaps in our resumes too.

We have lived "the unruly flood of life;" we have been to that "place past the bend where the flood turns into plunging falls," as Kimberley Patton described it. These are the forces that made us who we are: floods and falls, where we knew we were in over our heads. Where like the lobster and the crab from our story, we were tossed about by waves, only to realize that our boat was full of holes, and we were sinking.

These are the places where spirituality begins, Kimberley Patton pointed out to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. When we have fallen into the gap in our resume - when our little boat was full of holes and we realized we were sinking - that is when we are initiated into the life that makes us who we are as spiritual beings. "The religious imagination reveals the broken heart as the very best means to wisdom and growth," Kimberley Patton said, "even when it disrupts the dreams and goals that have inspired us . . . . Far from being distractions, these times of apparent anarchy are the most important times in our lives . . . ." This may seem like false comfort to you if you are filled with grief, or fear, or confusion right now. Brokenness often comes to us as failure or rejection, experiences we've all had but are too embarrassed to admit. We compound our pain with our shame, try to hide it, and feel alone. Or people notice it anyway - and we feel even more alone.

I stayed in a small hotel in Princeton, New Jersey, last summer, where I was visiting my mother shortly before she died. The hotel staff all knew me, as I had arrived early in the morning after a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, rumpled, anxious, and weary, and then changed my room three times the first day. It was as if I was trying to make something - just one thing - right, while everything else was going wrong.

My mother died the next afternoon. When I returned to the hotel that evening, the young Princeton student working at the front desk greeted me and asked me how I was. It was one of those mini-moments of truth. I could have lied, but I wasn't able to. "My mother just died," I told him.

I could see he didn't know what to say. I felt so embarrassed - for this young man, unfamiliar with death and grief, and the odd way we behave when we are in the middle of it. I also felt embarrassed for myself, lacking the composure to spare him this awkward moment. I stayed in the hotel for several more days but always felt sheepish and self-conscious whenever I passed the front desk. I didn't want to put anyone else to the compassion test.

This is how one kind of brokenness can feel. We muddle through with our guard down, abandoned by the smiling, composed selves that see us through most social encounters. Kimberley Patton said that it is precisely at these times - these wounded and vulnerable times - that we are initiated into spiritual growth, and discover our true selves.

I think about the awkward encounter with the Princeton student at the hotel. I replay it, to see what it would look like if I had lied the night I came back after my mother died. "How are you," he asked. "Fine," I might have responded, breezily. And then I would have gone to my room and realized that with this lie I had turned my mother's death into a non-event, something that hadn't even spoiled my day. I am grateful that I told the truth.

Being honest about our brokenness is likely to make someone uncomfortable, most of all, ourselves. But that discomfort, as Kimberley Patton wisely pointed out, comes from "our profound ignorance that makes us ashamed of such times . . . ." She gave her speech on the same occasion as Ralph Waldo Emerson did in 1838. Emerson's commencement speech has become an important part of our Unitarian history, offering provocative insights about spirituality that have since become the roadmap for our faith. Kimberley Patton told the 2005 graduating class that she had once thought she might have "something oracular" to impart about the future, mindful, perhaps, of Emerson's legacy. But "that day did not come," she admitted, "until all I could tell you about was the one thing that I truly can say I know, and that is the broken heart."

Reading that pronouncement made me uneasy. I had the uncomfortable feeling of being pulled into territory where I did want to go, listening to some personal revelation that was somehow not right for the occasion. Or maybe I just didn't want to hear the truth.

She continued, "Even if a broken heart does not lie in your past or present, it awaits you in your future, at some place, at some time when you will almost certainly be unprepared. But in myth, in ritual, and in theology, the broken heart is not the regrettable symptom of derailment, but is rather the starting point of anything that matters. . . . Looking deep into the religious traditions of the world," Kimberley Patton concluded, "one learns that we need not fear these initiations, these times of breaking apart. The soul cannot grow or change without them. What the human ego or the human body experience as traumas, the soul instantly recognizes as opportunities to shed what is no longer needed. When the heart is broken, the soul is released from its prior constellations. It begins the ancient process of dissolution, dismemberment, and new life. The soul rushes toward rebirth. This is not a comfortable process. But it is a normal one."

The gap in the resume? The grief that broke its silence? The failure you're embarrassed to admit? The loss that hurt so much you couldn't see how you would ever be yourself again? These are the beginning of spiritual growth, which can be gained no other way. The broken heart? An initiation no one can avoid, but one that has its own meaning and power if it is properly acknowledged.

"As both myth and cognitive psychology show," Kimberley Patton said, "failure is how one learns; indeed, it is the most important element of the natural process of learning." Yes, it is like "entering new territory one does not already control," but that is "how one keeps moving outward from the known center, how one avoids calcification, how inquiry and wonder are not stifled by self-righteousness." We do not learn - or live - in steady, confident forward motion. We learn from the missteps and the unexpected turns, the falls and the damages we suffer. We may try to pretend otherwise, but then all we do is fail to tell the truth about ourselves, fail to pass down the real stories about who we are and how we came to be that way. And then we have no spiritual life to speak of. A spiritual life is an honest life. It is a life that has learned from experience that telling the truth - about the gap in the resume, or the time we fell in over our head - is the path to spiritual growth.

A professor stands up before the graduating class and tells them about the broken heart, freeing them to live with a little less shame and a little less fear about the broken hearts they will have along the way. She is right: every heart will break, one way or another. It is not something to fear.

In the story we heard earlier the lobster and the crab share an exciting, if harrowing day. At one point, after being tossed about on stormy seas, capsizing and sinking the boat, the lobster tells the frightened crab, "Have courage, my friend. Remember, we are both creatures of the sea." They find calm on the ocean floor and the crab relaxes, revels in the thrill of the adventure, and congratulates himself on his courage.

We are like the frightened crab. We need to remember that we are creatures of our element. Even when we are in over our heads, we have nothing to fear, only something to learn. Even if we sink all the way to the bottom, we are still safely immersed in the same element that gives us life.

It is where we learn to trust. We learn it when we let go of the control we think we have and the resume we think we have perfected. We learn it when the heart is broken.

"Tell the truth," Kimberley Patton told the graduating class. This is how we come to know the stories that tell us not to fear and to trust life. The broken heart is smart. It will teach us that we are still whole.