The Broken Beloved

Part of this week's series on love...

It is morning and I grind flax. Kernels, brown and earthy, stream into whirling blades. I brace, anticipating the growling grind of the crushing. In a moment, hard outer shells are shattered against the metal. I pour the crushed seeds into a line of waiting bowls. In this fracturing, each flaxseed releases immensely healthful, renewing omega-3 oil.

Whole and unbroken, each seed is useless, waste that simply passes through. To bring health, there is no other choice. The hard outer shell of each seed simply must be broken, each kernel ground up.

But do I want to be broken? It’s a foolish question. This brokenness already is. I know it. I am a broken Mother of broken children.

I’ve tried to fix me, endlessly, oiled perfection slipping impossibly through these fingers. So it is: “I am like a broken vessel” (Ps. 31:12).

Nor can determined efforts completely repair the glaring cracks and chips of the damaged children and spouses who brush against the wounded self. I know that too. The bandages of manipulation, the splints of control, the casts of anger have healed little and hurt more. We live the pain of bruised souls pressed close.

I weary of it. This array of days broken, to various and sundry degrees, with sloth, squabbles and selfishness, inflicts its own pain.

Can’t we just be well and whole?

And in the groans of our cumulative woundedness, comes the whisper, “You are my beloved. My Broken Beloved. My Beloved Broken.”

It’s all okay.

This brokenness. This cracked life. This damaged family. Yes, we are broken, but not discarded; cracked, but not rejected; damaged, but not junked. We are the broken. And yet we are, incomprehensibly, unfathomably, the beloved.

Not so many days ago, our eldest opened the upper cupboard to put away Sunday’s pewter candle holders only to have my grandmother’s gilded-edged burgundy plate slip from atop the cake stand and shatter into countless shards, it’s tiny painted flowers scattering like crushed blooms about our feet. The beloved, smashed. Through brimming tears, I sweep the fragments of memory up into the dustpan and dump remnants into an indifferent garbage can. The trashed beloved.

Father cannot conceive of such an act. Trash heaps are foreign to this God of Redemption. He takes up His own body and breaks it for the broken: “This is my body broken for you” (1 Cor. 11:24).

His crushing heals us; by His wounds we are healed.

Our crushing releases His oil out upon a hurting world; by our wounds we are used…and find our own wholeness.

So I accept it, embrace it: we are the broken. And yet we are gathered and beloved, His special possession, the broken ones to whom He draws near.

How does a broken mother parent in a home of brokenness? As He does. Bend down to gather up the broken. Draw close our fractured (raging, selfish, stubborn, proud) beloved ones. Forsake fixing. Love the wounded, kin of our own brokenness, the fruit of a fallen, skinned world. And pray for Jehovah Rapha, Healer, to come to “bind up the brokenness of His people” (Isa. 30:26). He, and He alone, can fix the “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 21:13).

He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave. And so a mother patterns her life after her Lord’s: she knows she is taken, chosen and called. Yes, she is the beloved, openly soaking in His blessings showered upon her. Yet she accepts her life as broken, cracked. So she gives, pouring out through the fractures, for she knows, painfully so, what it is to be broken.

I take the bowls of porridge, with flax stirred through, to the table bathed in morning light.

There is healing in this brokenness.

Further reading: Henri Nouwen's thoughts on the Broken Beloved