BROKEN

I don’t write honestly when I’m content. It’s a difficult part of the creative process for me, but the reality is that – at least when it comes to writing – frustration, want, heartache, confusion, discouragement, disillusionment and pain prime the pump on the wellspring of my deepest, most pure thoughts and feelings. I think this is how I have been made. I think it is how a lot of people have been made because the more I observe my favorite artists, the more I am acutely attuned to their stories of hurt and loss, their struggles with invisible illness, their wrestling with inner demons – nearly every great painter or writer or musician I know was or is broken.

It isn’t the carefully crafted vessel, but what is splashing around loose inside of it that is precious to God.

It’s almost a cliché, but I’m not sure that you can have the insight or the honesty that it takes to make really great art unless you have suffered – unless you have held hot, searing pain in your wide open hands, given yourself to it and let it brand you, given thanks for the name it burns onto you and sincerely blessed it.

I don’t know that you can impart soul to anything you create unless you are willing to first have yours torn. It is part of the birth process – part of pushing a separate living thing out of your own body and setting it free into the world.  You help it to its feet and then you let it go, and that created thing takes a very real part of you with it that you will never again have control of or fully know.

I think about this when I think about creator God in Whose image we are – not only how God creates, but why and out of what dark, deep wellspring. Why it is that God doesn’t draw anything in straight lines and why God is so abhorrent of fake. Why it is that Jesus befriended prostitutes and made enemies of the religious right, and why it is that we so don’t.

Following Jesus is not supposed to be about perfection – it is about not hiding your own particular brand of imperfect inside of a beautiful jar. Some of us are filled up to the brim with sweet, pleasing perfume, but Lord knows we aren’t all. Some of us left the perfume sitting too long in the jar and it turned sour. But following Jesus is about smashing that shell to the floor anyway, spilling out whatever is stored up inside and saying to God, Here. It’s Yours. I know it’s rancid – I can barely stand the smell of it myself. But it’s all that’s in me. Please take it and make it into something that pleases You.

It’s the beautiful paradox written all throughout the God-story – it’s the way of the cross. You must lose your life to find it.  

I thought I understood what that meant – losing your life. I spent a lot of years really, really working at it. I thought it meant renouncing – putting to death and burying what only seemed like the most honest parts of who I am inside. I thought that the spilling out was just for the beginning, but that somewhere along the way I would get to be pieced back into a whole vessel again – something gilded in the cracked places, sitting modestly on a shelf, pouring out in generously measured portions from time to time as the Spirit led.

I thought losing my life meant dissolving all longing into the walls around me and creating a void – a cosmos – in the space where desire lived, so that there would be room in my heart for God. I thought my body-temple sat over an unmarked tomb – the burial ground of my old self – and that whitewashing the walls on the inside was a sign of simple consideration to the God who was invited to inhabit it. I thought my soul was Pandora’s Box – a dark, demented place filled with unimaginable wickedness to be kept under lock and key lest I should destroy myself and the peace of the world through my own curiosity. I thought the sacrifice, the dying to self, was on the inside.

 But I don’t think that anymore.

Dying to self is not about denying who you are – it is about being willing to be who you are. It is about living fully as the person you truly are, and denying your desire to people-please, to save face and self-preserve. It is about doing away with tombs and walls and boxes altogether, and allowing yourself to be the costly thing that splashes around freely inside the void that God has shaped within the Divine heart for you. It is to not question the Creator should you find yourself suddenly fallen, naked, with a hard shell in pieces around you on the floor – not to run around clamouring for a fig leaf, or for a mop and pail, but to simply receive and accept that your life has never, ever been more precious.

It is about turning back towards the Garden – the place where we were created to live bare and unembarrassed. It is about getting on our knees soberly in that Garden and praying for the strength to be true to who we were made to be, and to the purposes for which we were made, without regard for the cost. It is to neither grieve nor take pride for what is inside of us but to live without walls, with integrity, with dignity, with reverence for the One Who tore and broke and spilled out for us when we were created, Who breathed soul into us and Who covers us with Love.