Monday, November 18, 2013

The Gift of Brokenness and Vulnerability

With tears in the corners of both our eyes, she told me how my vulnerability was a gift to her.  How seeing me full of emotion, sometimes with tears even as I spoke from the pulpit, had brought comfort and allowed her to open herself more.  She wasn't the first person to tell me this, and as she spoke I was reminded too of my minister in a former congregation I attended a few years back.  I was reminded of how her frequent tears and emotional expressions were for me a salve, an expression of our common humanity.  They provided a compassionate connection between people, a link from minister to congregant, a knowing that my spiritual leader was not a superhero or a savior but a human being filled with a brokenness and pain similar to mine.

I am not an ordained minister.  But I have been told by many that they look to me as a spiritual guide.  It was this affirmation and repeated asks for companioning that allowed me to recognize my call as a spiritual director.

As I consider my own emotional fragility, I recognize that I might be a little embarrassed.  I have made great strides into living a more whole and integrated life. I have done this with the aid of many good friends, counselors and spiritual guides....  But I still have pieces that are in need of healing.  As I've grown closer to integrating parts of myself into more public light, I have not wanted to be seen as broken, never fully getting this one piece of my life that needs healing into balance. I have not wanted to be continually weak and dependent, and have been embarrassed that I cannot step fully into the person I imagine myself to be. I have not wanted anyone to see me as less than that image- that persona- a spiritual guide, full of light and life and wholeness.

But can there be wholeness without the recognition of shadow? And there is a shadow.  I see that shadow, I know her.  She is not everything, but she is a part of me.

In recent weeks I have pulled away from some of those good friends, counselors and spiritual guides who have helped me. I have felt I must learn to rely on myself because in the long run I am the only one I can depend on.  I recognize the unhealthiness of this thinking and write it now simply as a way of catching it in action.

In fact I write all this now as confession, as ways of acknowledging the foolishness of pride.  I notice this false thinking that has everything to do with ego and a lack of self-acceptance.  I notice and I catch it and I seek to redeem it with a written act of contrition that embraces the wholeness of who I am.

It is the woman who told me what my tears meant to her who reminded me... that there is room- and often necessary space- for a broken heart.  There is room for my vulnerability and pain- not to get lost in my story- but for the compassion to shine through.  It is compassion built on seeing that recognizes a kindred soul that has known its own  brokenness and loss, and risks connection.

And so it is, as this woman's words remind me, that the vulnerability and brokenness that I have been trying to hide are in actuality the gift- the gift to myself and to others, waiting to be opened, to be revealed, to be seen.


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