more on "broken" and "broken open"

"What is the difference between being broken and being broken open?”

Recently I was asked to unpack this question with a group of people in training to be grief support group facilitators.  The phrase has such powerful meaning for me that I was lost at first as to how to describe each feeling and the relationship between them.  Ultimately, the way that felt most respectful was to go to my journal and find how I described my own experience of both.   

So, this is what my being broken sounded like . . .

          “crying on the outside, screaming on the inside

            stumbling & grasping

            searching and trying to focus”

            “my days feel like burdens”

            “a piece of my heart is gone

            something central to my breathing is missing

            I can’t figure out how to be me”

            “Tears are my only words.”

            “The world feels blank in places – empty of the beauty you radiated

            jagged, torn, ragged . . . familiar but with holes in it

            I’m singed, seared, burned around the edges of my life.”

            “I’m gasping for spiritual breath.”

It seems fair to say that being broken is something that happens outside our control, shattering life as we know it.  Loss obliterates gift and is an honest, full body response to being at the mercy of indescribable sadness.  

Then, this is what my being broken open sounds like . . .

          “whose to say how long a life should be -

            it was long enough to love deeply and that is no small legacy”

            “this has pushed all the negative emotions out of me . . . and left me with only love and tenderness”

            “I will miss him every day of my life

            it is that simple and that strong 

            his life – either here or there – is woven into and through mine”

            “living wide open seems the only way now

                        without protection or fear

                        being vulnerable

                        as honest as I can be

                        but kind”

            “I want to live with the door of my heart open . . .

            let this make me soft and strong all at once”

Being broken open, is something we allow to happen.  It feels all the devastation but doesn’t turn away . . . and as it feels, it drops small seeds of healing into the shattered heart.  What was surprising to me was that both seem to happen simultaneously - at first in an uneven jerky movement with no rhythm or predictability.  But in time, as healing takes hold, the unevenness smoothes out and life begins to flow again – having learned to absorb this part of truth into our being. 

So maybe when we submit ourselves to the depths of grief, at the same time, we open a door to healing.   There is wisdom in this painful experience that we can touch, look at, learn from and eventually absorb. And when we do, the hurt will begin to ease.  Not that being broken will be fixed, but rather that it will be transformed into something we cannot yet see.

So, then, could  “broken open” be a way to live ? 

If we continually allow life to open doors, to surprise us, to suggest another way to imagine something or someone, then Truth can be invited to grow wider, deeper and intimately more compassionate.