Lectio
“Everything is a grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father’s love — difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul’s miseries, her burdens, her needs — everything, because through them, she learns humility, realizes her weakness. Everything is a grace because everything is God’s gift.”
— St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Thoughts of Saint Thérèse
Meditatio
Some days we will be beaten down by the brokenness of the world. In fact, some weeks, months, and years we will be beaten down by the world’s brokenness. Life is difficult and we will suffer. But the promise of the cross is the Resurrection. The promise of our suffering, in, through, and with Christ, is that suffering is not the end of the story.
Our suffering does not define us. Our brokenness does not get to name who we are. The trials we go through do not get the final say on our lives.
But all too often, it does not feel this way. All too often, our pain feels permanent, our trials feel like they will go on forever, and the brokenness we experience from others and within ourselves feels like our ultimate reality, like everything else, before this and beyond it is a lie.
And yet, in silence and solitude, when we are quiet and still, something more real than our suffering is revealed, something truer than our brokenness emerges from and as the depths of our beings, and something more eternal and infinite than the trials we face unfolds within us.
In this stillness, we hear the quiet whisper of love telling us that, although things are not okay, although our pain is very real, all is well and all will be well. We sense that, amidst our agony and confusion, we are being gently held by the source of this wellness, by love and goodness itself, and that, if only we do not give in to our brokenness, if only we do not allow our hearts to be hardened by the world, and if only we do not become cynical, hateful, and vengeful, by the very love and goodness that holds us, we too will be well and, in fact, already are.
And then, we get to look into the eyes of those who hurt us and to see, not an enemy, but someone who is broken like we are broken, someone who suffers like we suffer, and someone who is being tried like we are being tried, and we get to say to them, whether with our words, our deeds, or merely our presence, that all is well and all will be well.
Oratio
Let go my child
my beloved
my chosen one
do not worry
be not afraid
my love will sustain you
my love will never abandon you
I am with you always
from the beginning
until the end
I have always known you
from before you were born
until you return to me
let go my child
my beloved
my chosen one
do not worry
be not afraid
I am in you
you are in me
Contemplatio
Can you recall a moment when stillness revealed something truer than your pain? What did it feel like to be held rather than fixed?
Related Scripture
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” — Romans 8:38–39 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like In God And God In Us: Reflecting On Divine Union And The Brokenness Of Our Hardened Hearts, which explores Julian of Norwich’s insight into faith as union with God and traces how brokenness and the softening of the heart become pathways to recognizing the indwelling presence of God within us and through us.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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