"I'm broken, and it's beautiful..."

"Can someone just hold me?
Don't fix me,
don't try to change a thing.

Oh, someone just know me,
'cause underneath, I'm broken,
and it's beautiful..."

I love Kelly Clarkson's  "Broken and Beautiful."  It's the perfect musical keynote for this message. In fact, it was just the inspiration I'd been waiting for to write this post.

I grew up thinking that we start out as innocent babies -- pure and perfect. The goal, was to stay that way. That meant one of two things. Either you were born into perfect families, with parents who protected you from anything that would undermine that very vulnerable state of perfection. Or you were "good enough" to ward off anything that would break the fragile shell of innocence. Karmic bubble wrap.  Some got it, some didn't.  Broken was anything but beautiful.

By the time I was a young girl, I knew that I was irreparably broken - damaged goods. Innocence shattered. Purity violated. No matter how much healing took place, I would always be a broken someone.  At best, patched together with psychological crazy glue or spiritual baling twine.

Broken meant less desirable. Especially when you wanted so desperately to be seen as smart, sweet, kind, spiritually whole. Who'd choose broken, when they could have perfect?

When I turned eleven, my immediate family came into the study and practice of Christian Science. I loved church, Sunday School, reading the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and attending Adventure Unlimited functions. I wanted to belong. I wanted to be a puzzle piece that had found its place in the beautiful picture I'd been introduced to. But I was broken. They didn't know it. I did.

In my own eyes I was ugly. Yes, I had body dimorphic issues, and I thought that I was plain and awkward -- but the ugliness I was sure of, had nothing to do with my looks. It had everything to do with what I knew, that they did not. I knew what lay under the surface.  I knew that I had been shattered, and the there were ugly cracks in my heart.

The effort it took to hide those fissures was exhausting. I was never genuinely present in any relationship. I was hiding behind all the ways I had patched myself together. It took everything I had, to make sure that I was always showing my good side.  Always trying to deflect attention from my brokenness.

There are so many things I could share here. Suffice it to say that I spent decades disguising the still sharp edges of my shattered heart -- because a shattered heart was ugly. Broken things deserved to be discarded. If I gave the impression of wholeness, I might be kept on the shelf.

One day, I saw a photo like the one above - and below. It was of a broken ceramic bowl. It was illustrating a Japanese art form called, "kintsugi," which translates into "golden seams," or "golden repair." The broken bowl is given new life by filling the cracks with a mixture of resin and gold dust, making the bowl even more valuable - for the originality of its beauty. No two kitsugi bowls are ever the same.

When I discovered this cultural love for the broken bowl, I gave myself permission to wonder if, maybe, it wasn't my brokenness that actually made me beautiful.

Did the shattering experiences I'd endured as a child, make me more compassionate? Had the stress of circumstances broadened my perspective? Would I become a more understanding friend, because I had felt so afraid of being misunderstood? Could I value the brokenness in others, because I knew how desperately we all want to feel whole? Were the friendships I'd let fall and shatter, have even more beauty, once I poured the gold of honesty and humility into the wounds of misunderstanding and hurt.

Mother Teresa once said: :

"“May God break my heart so completely
that the whole world falls in."

Could it be that I had not been broken apart, but broken open? Open to a new and deeper understanding of our humanity as brothers and sisters in Christ?

This statement from Science and Health became a lifeline for me:

"Our disappointments and ceaseless woes
turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love,
then we begin to learn life in divine Science."

Could this really be true? Was it possible that my broken heart, my disappointed dreams, my woeful experiences were just the beginning of discovering what it meant to live spiritually -- and not an indication of a failed attempt at life? A failed life. One that I'd felt I had no control over to begin with - just a poorly dealt hand. Had those same disappointments really been a gift?

Elsewhere in Unity of Good, Eddy writes:

"Truth, in divine Science,
is the stepping-stone to
the understanding of God;
but the broken and contrite heart
soonest discerns this truth,
even as the helpless sick
are soonest healed by it."

Perhaps, I wondered, I was even more beautiful because of my brokenness? Perhaps I could begin to accept that every broken promise, every shattered trust, every sharp edge on the fragmented shards of my life, was a place to pour in the gold of compassion, humility, honesty, hope -- grace. For these were the drams of gold that were continuously being separated from the dross - through those experiences in the fiery furnace of ceaseless woe and disappointment.

God's love had never left me. I was not a discardable spiritual failure, but a beautiful creation in His loving, tender hands. Nothing that I had experienced, had ever touched the purity of the clay.

I was not something to be fixed, but someone to be loved.  Something to be held tenderly. Someone to be valued for the seams of gold, that ran like veins of beauty and compassion, through my life. We all are.

offered with Love,

Kate

"tired of failing..."

"we pray for blessings,

we pray for peace,

comfort for family, 

protection while we sleep. 

we pray for healing, for prosperity,

and we pray for your mighty hand 

to ease our suffering; 

and all the while You hear 

each spoken need, 

yet love us way too much

to give us lesser things..."

Laura Story's incredible song, "Blessings" still fractures every splinter of ego-preservation.  And this live performance is one I cannot listen to - without having the last linch pin of all pride removed.

Here goes:  I am so tired of feeling like a spiritual failure. There, I said it. There was time when I would have been afraid that if I posted a statement like that, I would have signed my own "death" warrant as a spiritual healer. I have since learned that this is not only not the case, it is actually the opposite of what is true.

There are a few things that have, over the last few decades, become supremely clear to me:

1) when judging one's relationship with God -- according to the model propounded by a prosperity gospel culture -- Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy, Gandhi, Mandela - and almost every spiritual luminary that I admire -- is a failure.

Jesus didn't heal Judas of his betrayal, Mary Baker Eddy didn't "heal" the lawsuits filed against her by her son and closest confidants; Gandhi wasn't able to stop the violence perpetrated against his people, and Mandela didn't escape from prison.

2) Measuring one's spiritual growth by human accomplishments, achievements, and the accrual of possessions is, at best, a false model. It takes only the most cursory reading of the gospels to discover that "things" are not indicators of God's love for us.  Otherwise, Jesus just didn't cut it -- no home, no camel, few possessions.

3) The spiritual can only be seen and experienced spiritually.  It is one thing to know the spiritual nature of "home," it is quite another to equate that knowing with bricks, mortar, mortgages, and deeds.  I keep coming back to "I have a body, I am not my body."  And in kind, "I have a house, my sense of home is not validated by a house."

Having once lived in a small spiritual community -- where everyone thought they knew what was absolutely and  unequivocally true for everyone else -- I discovered that although spiritual cultures grow out of a common love for a  fundamental Truth -- they often resort to judging one another to give a false sense of structure and order to their community.

What seems to have occurred, throughout history, is that cultures do what egos - individual or collective -- always do.  They form hierarchies in order the sort their "members" into bad, good, better, best.  And in order to do that, they have to decide what practices and measures will be used to assign individual placement within those hierarchies.

Within "spiritual" cultures, most of these measuring indices are based on judging the words and behaviors of "others" in ways that that can be quickly sorted by one's compliance to culturally determined policies and rules.  Instead of temperance, we rely on abstinence.   Abstinence is easy.  Abstinence allows us to make a black or white assessment based on what we see -- or assume. We can look at someone and quickly determine if they are practicing abstinence.  In contrast, temperance is almost impossible to judge from the outside.  It is a practice that relies on self-knowledge and self-control.  It is contingent on one's relationship to an inner moral compass.  Only the person his/herself truly knows when they are being temperate in their consumption of chocolate -- vs. gluttonous or abstinent.

For example:  Imagine that your model is temperance. And the behavior in question is drinking coffee.  You walk into a restaurant and see a member of your community sitting in front of a cup of coffee.  You might even see them pick up that cup and take a sip.  Where abstinence is the model, you can immediately judge that person's compliance to the cultural "rules."  But where temperance is the model, you have no idea whether it is their first or fifteenth cup of coffee.  You can only trust that there is divine sovereignty governing their every choice.  You greet them, smile, and turn to your own practice of what is right - for you!

It is relevant here to note, that in her definition of the word "Moral." on page 115 of Science and Health with Key the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy lists these qualities of thought, word, and action:

"Humanity, honesty, affection,
faith, hope, compassion,
meekness, temperance."

But cultures resist accepting these qualities as the true standard of free moral agency.  Primarily because they cannot be measured from the outside -- only from within the sanctuary of one's relationship with the divine. Not having an easy measuring stick for where someone fits, is frustrating to cultures that thrive on hierarchies of behavior to determine place and power, achievement or failure. How do you know if you are better than someone else, if you can't decide how good (or bad) they are.  Cultures feed on comparisons.

Now let's take it a little further -- with an experience I had some years ago.

Being in the public practice of spiritual healing is humble work.  Our daughters were navigating the twists and turns of a community -- one that truly believed it had established its standards - for judging one another - on Jesus' teachings.

An opportunity to participate in an activity was presented to the girls.  But it was one that was costly.  The girls were concerned that the expense was more than our modest family budget could absorb. We prayed about how to proceed. When they were asked if they would be participating, they said, "probably not, this might be too much for our family."  The person in charge of the activity said -- without hesitation:  "Then your parents might want to pray more diligently about how to demonstrate the supply necessary for you to go."

There was no recognition that our daughters had prayed, and that they had been given the humility and grace to say "no," to the invitation, and that they were bringing remarkable courage to the moment.  There was little appreciation that this was an opportunity for "growth in grace' -- one that far-outweighed the activity in question. There was no acknowledgment that our family was demonstrating abundance -- in how we shared our resources and lived simply -- a lifestyle that honored our highest reading of scripture.

What if, as Laura sings, our blessings come as tears -- not peals of laughter.  What if our healing comes in the form of a deeper peace, rather than the "fixing" of a human situation that we have deemed as a spiritual failure.  What if, what society measures as a failure is actually the highest achievement in Christ -- the opportunity for growth in humility, patience, meekness, charity, forgiveness.

I am reminded of another statement that Mary Baker Eddy makes in Science and Health:

"Our disappointments and ceaseless woes,
turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love,
then we begin to learn life in divine Science."

What if, our disappointments and ceaseless woes are not an indication of our failure to understand the Science of Being, but are actually the starting point for learning deeper lessons of spiritual consciousness -- the impartial and universal law of Love.

I refuse to let a false measure of what constitutes life in divine Science, make me feel like a failure any more.  I demonstrate my love for God, by my love for God -- not in any other way.  I demonstrate my understanding of Life through my moment-by-moment trust in the eternality of consciousness, not by more human days spent in this particular chapter of my eternal story.

I refuse to let the measuring stick of a culture - any culture - tell me anything about the strength of my relationship with God. This human experience is just a laboratory. It is not my "home." And at the end of any day spent in this laboratory, I return to my "home" -- my consciousness of Love.  It is here that I am loved and nurtured - impartially and universally. This is where the only true measure of my worth is found in the eyes of my first Love -- my Father-Mother God. Here I am enough. And that is enough for me.

offered with Love,

Kate

"You will miss these days…"

"suddenly,
there's a shadow
hanging over me…"
- Lennon/McCartney

"There will come a time, when you will miss these days," he said with a sigh. I was sure he was either as mad-as-a-hatter, or worse yet, just-plain-mean, for saying this to me.

When I think of that conversation, and my mentor's sigh, it's not so much the lyrics from Lennon and McCartney's, "Yesterday," that come to mind, but its tone that rings true.

I'd called my friend because my life was falling apart. Everything -- my marriage, my career, my body, my dreams -- were all coming loose at the seams and I couldn't hold it together. I was afraid and empty.  And the only thing that took away that feeling of total panic and hopelessness, was a book: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.

I'm not saying that everything between the book's covers made sense to me, just that reading it seemed to lift the fog that engulfed every other moment.  I was tired, I'd been very ill, and I was feeling more alone than I'd ever felt in my life. I didn't have a job, and I didn't know how to navigate this landscape -- at all.

I needed to be useful, so I begged a friend to let me volunteer in her department.  Those hours spent in service to others, kept me from going mad. I sat at a desk outside her office, answered her phone, did odd office jobs, and read from the copy of Science and Health that I kept in the top right drawer  - laying open on top of pens, pencils, paper clips, and rubber bands.

It helped, but I wanted more than relief. I was hungry for healing. I was aching to find peace from the pain. I was starving for the Truth that would make it all go away -- the sorrow, the confusion, the emptiness.

All the truths I'd thought I understood -- about being a good human -- had just dissolved before my eyes. I couldn't believe that I had studied scripture, prayed daily, served my church faithfully, and was still facing such a "dark night of the soul."

But I was. And my friend was right. There would come a time when I would miss those days. There would come a day -- in the not too distant further -- when I would miss the raw ache of wanting a deeper spiritual understanding, in the midst of human delusion. And there have been days, since then, when I have yearned for the kind of "on my knees, begging for spiritual nourishment"  moments which I so sorely felt in those weeks and months of spiritual hunger. But there have also been days when I wondered why I missed them so. 

They still come, but today, I know enough to not be so afraid when I am facing the darkness. I have discovered that these are "the best of times," in what my human sense of things calls, "the worst of times." 

And I understand my mentor's sigh now. I think back to how every word of Scripture felt like a drop of water on my cracked and thirsty heart. I tear-up with gratitude for having walked that path, and for having found the waymarks left along the way by Biblical (and contemporary) spiritual travelers who must have known that others -- like me -- would follow, and need their encouragement to keep going.

And I did find a new view of things. It's funny, recently someone told me that I never remember to say, "and the healing came…" I am often remiss in acknowledging that there was a shift in my experience because I get so caught up in the stark beauty of the spiritual journey.  But there was a shift -- many shifts.

And I am so very grateful. There were so many fingerposts along the way. Small messages of encouragement that kept my head above water, and saved me from drowning in despair.

For example, I remember the first time I read this Beatitude, from Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount," in the book of Matthew with new eyes:

"Blessed are they
which do hunger and thirst
after righteousness:
for they
shall be filled." 

To realize that the primary blessing was in the hungering and thirsting. And that the "being filled," was almost an after thought -- "oh yes, and they shall be filled." This gave me such a sense of peace.

And then there was that moment when I read this note of encouragement from Eddy's Science and Health:

"Our disappointments
and ceaseless woes
turn us like tired children
to the arms of divine Love,
then we begin
to learn life in divine Science.” 

and realized that facing disappointments and ceaseless woes wasn't the end of my spiritual journey -- the equivalent of a rejection button on my failed prayers. But that these moments were actually the beginning of learning something new about life in divine Science -- now that was a big sigh moment.

Today, having faced many moments of disappointment and woe -- my own, or another's -- I've come to accept and embrace them with less fear, and more grace. They can still shake me, but they can't touch what I know to be true: that these are not days of failure, but days filled with spiritual hunger.  And these are the days that I will miss. Because these are often the days when the light of Truth is most clearly seen in the context of human disappointment and woe.

I've also discovered that I have it in me to really love this hunger. I know that I want these experiences that lead me deeper and deeper into the fields of the Lord -- gleaning every fallen seed.  So now, it is me that is sighing - with a sweet, sober sense of expectation and love.  I sigh, because I know, that when my world seems to be falling apart, I am just beginning a new journey.

offered with Love,

Kate