11 July 2008
Where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. 2 Corinthians 3:17
Brokenness
What does it mean to be truly free? How can one be broken and at the same time filled with proper confidence?
My friend posed this question to me during an intimate time of sharing about the pain and suffering she has encountered this summer. She has accompanied Chris and me through the exploitative red light districts of Bangkok; the graveyard of Chennai filled with orphan children and victims of AIDS who died too soon; the impoverished streets of Kolkata; and the dusty roads of Kathmandu where abandoned children of all ages gather and beg for their daily bread and rice.
Our visit to South and South East Asia brings us face to face with girls, boys, women and men living in the clutches of extreme poverty, vulnerability, oppression and violence.
My friend continued her questions. Is brokenness weakness? What's the point in entering their pain and weeping over their suffering, if there's seemingly nothing I can do?
I was struck in Kolkata by the way in which the WMF community there is so obviously born out of brokenness. It has been my experience that God truly creates beauty out of brokenness.
Brokenness and weakness are not the same thing. Weakness is demonstrated in the fear to be broken. Brokenness is about trust. Brokenness is the courage to see ourselves for who we truly are. Our friends living in poverty offer us this gift of self-revelation. They have a way of exposing who we are.
When we find the courage to accept the relationships of pain we're invited into, we find the grace to surrender to our fallibility. There IS little we seemingly can do in the face of global poverty and systems of injustice. But this does not deem a resignation; rather this awareness becomes an invitation to brokenness.
As we recognize our sin in the face of crucified people, Jesus can begin to do something with us. The invitation is to die and rise to new life. The invitation is let Christ live in us.
As we die to the false selves that tell us we are what we have, do or what others say about us (as Henri Nouwen reminds us); or to the false self systems of power and control, affection and esteem or security and comfort (that Thomas Keating brings to light) the true self is free to emerge. The true self is the life of Christ in us. Living into this freedom brings a proper confidence that is based in the life of Christ in us.
Brokenness that leads to self-dying births new life that is free from what we have, do or what others say about us. We are free to live, to respond, to love. We are properly confident in this love. The revolution can now begin—within us and in the world.
Revolution
Father Stephan Kovalski in the bestseller, City of Joy by Dominque Lappierre, reminds us of the difference between the revolution of Christ and that of a number of violent revolutions that often break out among the disenfranchised and marginalized peoples of the world. Though both Christ and a number of revolutionaries rebel against that which represses the poor and vulnerable, Christ's revolution is a revolution of love (p. 209). Before we can be free to live this kind of revolutionized life, we must be broken.
In our North American, affluent age of constant noise, information and opportunity, the global reality of an impoverished humanity does not surprise most of us anymore. We are a privileged people full of world-knowledge and experience. Who is there among us who is willing to come down from the lofty place of head knowledge and enter into the suffering of humanity and the suffering of Christ? Mother Teresa was often reminded us that there is much talk about the poor but very few people know the poor.
I believe our freedom is found in the gift of relationship with those who suffer. Who of us has the courage to enter those relationships? Who of us has the courage to see ourselves for who we truly are in the reflection offered us from our friends in poverty? Who of us has the courage to find redemption in the embrace of friends who have no options and often no bread?
Jesus said that the poor are blessed. Do we have the eyes to see this and the heart to understand this? We think so much of ourselves—thinking we have so much to offer a world in need. Until we are broken we will continue to live a shackled existence of trying to do good; rather than a life of freedom, free to love.
Tonight I am grateful for the embrace of my Nepali friends who have received into their family orphaned girls and abandoned elderly women (affectionately called "Amma") from the streets of Kathmandu and surrounding villages. Their invitation to relationship is an invitation to greater freedom in my life.
Thank you for journeying with us down the path of brokenness and into the freedom of Christ. A new world is being born among us through the revolution of love. The Kingdom of God is at hand.
from the foothills of the Himalayas, phileena & chris