In Ash Wednesday’s First Reading, God tells us to break our hearts.
“…return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.” (Joel 2:13)
To the listening Hebrews, rending garments expressed grief, repentance, or holy fervour. In the Prophet Joel’s time, there was great turbulence in the land and among the people. Drought, infestations of locusts, livelihood and lives were at risk. The people were tearing their garments out of fear, desperation and in supplication to God to save them.
God’s response to their suffering is to tell the people to stop tearing their garments and instead to (rend) break their hearts, warning that the only way out of their crisis-ridden times is to change themselves, personally and collectively.
And what of our times? Are we not in a time of crisis as a planet? As people? This Ash Wednesday, God is also telling us to break our hearts, as the only way out of our own turbulent times.
When has your heart been broken? Did it leave you more open or more self-protective? Breaking our hearts doesn’t sound like something we would pursue of our own volition. Usually, our hearts are broken for us by other people. It’s very painful and may cause us to close our hearts from fear of being hurt again. For what does a broken heart do, but make us vulnerable?
To break our hearts is to risk ourselves.
Breaking our hearts risks our comfort, our perspective, our resources, our time, being approved of, our opinions, our comfortable way of life. Even our sense of self; for heart-breaking requires that we dismantle our self-protective infrastructure.
What does God mean by breaking our hearts? We see a clue about God’s idea of broken-heartedness in Jesus’ extraordinary Gospel teaching, the Beatitudes.
Each beatitude paradoxically links suffering with blessedness. Each state is attained by being heartbroken.
Being poor determines a whole life’s pathway, characterised by exclusion; limited by lack of resources and opportunity; poorer health and shorter life expectancy outcomes. Spiritual poverty, the deadening lack of meaning and purpose affects many people, even, or especially, in wealthy countries. People try to alleviate this suffering through gambling, eating disorders or shopping to fill the void inside. Personal value is based on wealth, power, fame, status or beauty rather than an awareness of our inherent dignity and value as children of God.
Mourning creates a hole in us that nothing can fill. Most people lose someone they love during their lifetime. Some mourn for their country and the plight of their people caught up in war or famine, flood, political instability, environmental destruction or catastrophic climate events. Mourning is an experience of powerlessness since we cannot bring back who or what we have lost.
The meek are not born with an extra dose of humility and lack of ego. They are prepared to face their own violence, judgement, othering, fear, and allow it to be transformed into a free and freeing spirit where they no longer seek power over, but power shared for the benefit of all.
Those who passionately struggle for peace or against injustice know the terrible pain of the indifference of the powerful and the silent complicity of the many, who allow injustice and division to continue (all of us in one way or another at different times) either from self-interest or from fear of engagement.
We become merciful because our suffering teaches us to see the suffering of others with compassion. The merciful know their need both for forgiveness and comfort (eleison) and recognise that need in others.
Those who are pure of heart must undergo a transformation from self-hood to Oneness. That is why they will see God.
Suffering in Jesus’ name requires a preparedness to face the consequences in a violent world of refusing and opposing violence and its rewards.
Watching the violence in Gaza; the plight and death of young Israeli’s and the hostages; the utter destruction of Palestinian homes, hospitals, mosques and churches; the deaths and maiming of children; systematic starvation; young Israeli’s refusing to fight, enduring hostility and prison for their stance; the unfathomable lack of international resolve to stop the injustice and suffering; the unacceptable collusion of economies profiting from arms deals; the lack of commitment to work for a final and just peace for all people; I pray for God to break our hearts of stone.
Author Megan McKenna writes in Blessings and Woes, 1997, p3:
“… it was as servant that he (Jesus) would take his last stand, hung on the cross, nailed to the evil we can do to one another when we resist truth and imprison ourselves in our own kingdoms based on selfishness, greed, insensitivity and violence.”
God knows us and knows that we have self-interested hearts until, with the Jesus’ help, we finally dismantle our self-protections, or they are broken for us by life. Then, opened, we can receive from the Spirit the courage, wisdom, insight and love to become who God intends us to be: people who risk loving each other as our first response, refusing violence, exclusion and self-protection.
Sr Helen Prejean CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking and Spiritual Advisor to people on Death Row in New Orleans, USA, describes her shift from caring about others to breaking herself open to them, speaking to Fr James Martin on ‘The Spiritual Journey’ – America Jesuit Review:
“I saw the suffering and I let myself feel it… I saw the injustice and was compelled to do something about it. I changed from being a nun who only prayed for the suffering world to a woman with my sleeves rolled up, living my prayer.
“I let myself feel it.”
Perhaps, we fear letting the suffering of others in, because it hurts, or because it demands something we don’t wish to give: Our time, our resources; ourselves.
Is it also possible that we close our hearts to the suffering of others because we mistake it for our own suffering, becoming anxious by all that we see wrong with the world so that we become the suffering ones? Perhaps, the suffering of others triggers in us our own suffering? We are frozen by the overwhelming problems of our day.
Breaking our hearts is not about taking on the suffering of others. Jesus has already done that and liberated us, showing us that suffering is never the final word. We are not expected to be Jesus. We are followers of Jesus. Like us, Jesus’ apostles and disciples were very ordinary people. He showed them by his presence, actions and words, how to live as God intends. He shows us now.
When we encounter the suffering of others, broken-open hearts allow us to be in compassionate solidarity with them.
Not taking their suffering as our own, but respecting that they are the suffering ones. We stand with them. We are safe, we are fed, we are not in prison, we are free, we are housed, we belong somewhere. We have rights that are respected.
Breaking our hearts also means letting go of our judgemental natures. We live in an age where my opinion is fact and it is my absolute right to express it without recourse. Unexamined judgement is a curse because it makes us right and others wrong. Often, when we judg,e we are looking through the plank in our own eye, finding something unacceptable about the splinter in the eye of another. Breaking our judging hearts allows us to see the humanity of others because I also see my own frailty.
Turning judgement inwards creates a harshness against our very being. We become unable to hear or receive the tender understanding of our merciful God who sees so much more beauty in us than we dare believe. Just as the Spirit comes upon the earth ‘like the dewfall,’ God’s action is all around us. Self-protective hearts cannot see the life-giving action of God-with us, through all the seasons of life, expressing a special love for us in hard times.
We do try to live out of the love in which we are held. We often fail, repeatedly, monotonously, to act as we would like to act. My desire to love as I am loved is carried in a very earthen vessel, with many cracks not-yet lined with gold.
Embracing the vulnerability of a broken heart enables us to know our need for God. We can be comforted, for God’s comfort is tender and freeing.
This Lent, as in the time of the Prophet Joel, God is asking us to break our hearts because, unless we do, things can get worse. Our planet and its people surely cannot sustain further suffering.
Is God calling us to a deep conversion to one another?
Inviting and helping us to a deeper connection with my own poverty and the real, denigrating, life-limiting poverty of the poor, excluded, marginalised, dismissed, difficult, politically-opposing, annoying others, who are not like me?
Breaking our hearts requires an openness to being present to others for our mutual benefit. With whom do we need to make peace; listen to understand; share power and decision-making; sit with in reverent silence; strive for justice? God’s Word and signs all around us, gives us the courage to act.
Megan McKenna again writes:
“This season is not just for us, but for the reconciliation and communion of the whole world. These forty days are for becoming the very holiness of God, for radical alterations in the society and life we dwell within. We all become fellow workers receiving grace and the power to reconstitute human life and the universe. Our response must be immediate. We must bend our wills and grab hold of one another and walk together again as we usher one another into the presence of God.” (Lent: The Daily Readings, Reflections and Stories 1997 p3).
We can’t strive to break our hearts, life usually does it for us. All we need to do, as Sr Helen Prejean discovered, is to let in our shared humanity. To listen and act as Jesus shows us in the Gospel stories of the broken-hearted. Then opened to receive God’s comfort, liberation and abiding peace, we open ourselves to one another, so that together, we can change our suffering world.
Catherine Whewell was Director of People in Ministry and Chancellor in the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide. Cathy now writes and is based in Denmark with family. Used with her permission.
