As a writer, I’m continually on a quest to discover wisdom my mind’s heart has always yearned for. How to describe the juncture and journey of suffering, for one instance. I have attempted it numerous times, but I’ve fallen short compared with the following:
The following wisdom I feel compelled to share with you (with some of my own thoughts below the quotation marks):
Political and cultural commentator, David Brooks says: “We all have moments of suffering, but we can either be broken by those moments or we can be broken open by them. Some people are broken. They build a fragile shell and they curl in. They are afraid to be touched. They just shell, over the part of themselves that is hurting. Those people usually lash out in anger and resentment. There is a saying that pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.1 (Attribution here below to Father Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return)
“But other people get broken open. They get more and more vulnerable and more open. They live their life at a deeper level. The theologian Paul Tillich said that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you that you are not the person you thought you were. They carve through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul and reveal a cavity below and then carve through that and reveal another cavity below. You just see deeper into yourself than you ever knew existed, and you realize when you see into those depths that only spiritual and emotional food will fill those voids. So you begin to live life at a deeper level.”2
~~~
The amazing simplicity of life is this: those who take consistent, day-after-day responsibility for their being ‘broken open’ — those who resist being broken or staying in the broken place — these are the ones who get better.
In Rohr’s words, they transform their pain. They refuse to transmit it. They execute self-empowerment for growth by refusing to blame others. Even though they know they’re not entirely responsible for their pain, they take full responsibility for their ‘response’ to it. They prove ‘able’ to respond and are therefore response-able.
Those who heal allow themselves to be broken open, to be transformed, to lose that part of themselves they can no longer keep, that part of themselves that is vanquished.
Using Paul Tillich’s metaphor, even while it hurts, they dine on the emotional and spiritual food that nourishes their present and future. In this, they express the faith of letting go of that which can only poison them; that constraining knowledge that something reprehensible has been done to them.
They somehow understand that there is no other recourse but to work with what is, accept it, and move deeper into it, against the flow of the logical proclivity to react hard against it through bitterness and resentment.
They devour hope and their appetite is insatiable. They consume hope for the ‘return’ of a deeper peace than they’ve ever had. Back to the future, they survive and even thrive in the liminal space of a suffering that pushes them more open and more vulnerable, where they’re forced to learn the resilience of risk — audaciously, they stay there and in their suffering is the agency that could not have come otherwise.
If they’re fortunate enough, part of this feast is the Lord Jesus Christ, who Himself suffered, who proved a model of and for suffering, who was prophesied as such, e.g., in Isaiah 45-55, and who even calls Christians to a life of being driven deeper into a precious sanctification through an embracing of their suffering; for the glory that awaits those who are broken open in His glorious name.
This secret code is only learned by those who practice it, who are immersed in the baptism of fire, who are not scorched by suffering’s flames but survive and thrive. Yes, I’d agree that it sounds bizarre, but the incarnation comes alive in us by the Holy Spirit as we partake in the suffering the Incarnate One took on.
Be broken open, not just broken.
Remain open by faith,
and God will see you through it.
1. Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (New York: Crossroad, 2004), p. 37.
2. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 56; also pp. 52–63, 161–62. See also Brooks, Road to Character, pp. 94, 206.
