In Pursuit of a Broken Wholeness

Maybe Healing Isn't What We Think

I hear you singing, my soul, but how can it be that 
God’s voice has now become 
my own?

“That is just a wedding gift for our
Divine Union,”

my Beloved said.

— St. Francis of Assisi 

I used to think that I was hideous … a shattered perversion of whatever a person was supposed to be. Unworthy of love or even anyone’s time, the closest I could get to free was to hide my disfigurements and pretend to be someone who belongs.

I still remember that younger version of myself. He lives still in the deep places of my soul. 

And I love him. 

I stand guard over his tender heart. I tell him the things he always longed to hear: that he belongs, that he is loved, that he was always beautiful and fully accepted just as he is, and that he has every right in the world to be here. No harm will ever come to him now that I am here.

This is how I’ve come to see healing really works: The broken places in our hearts never really heal. We carry them around inside us as younger versions of ourselves. We gather them in secret rooms deep in our soul that no one else can find. They huddle there in the dark, each one holding in their tender bodies awful wounds inflicted on us in the past.

For a long time, I hated them all. I judged them. I shamed myself for having them. I pushed them away, shoved them deep into the seedy crevices of my heart. I tried to smother them under the pillow of my performance. I tried to starve them by pretending they were not there. 

None of that worked. All that hate just locked me away in a prison from which I could never get free.

Eventually, I found that, if I love them, if I speak to them tenderly and mind their wounds, if I sing to them with the voice of God who also lives within my heart, then little by little I start becoming someone new, someone more like the one I always wished I could be. 

That mighty one I am becoming, steadfast and free, now stands in the gap between the world and all my broken parts. I keep them safe, and comfort them in their grief. I love them well so they can finally let down their guard and lay their burdens down. 

Maybe freedom isn’t about discarding all the parts of us that got broken somewhere along the way. Maybe what it’s really about is learning to accept the wounds we have received as teachers sent to show us how to love ourselves and everyone else with a mighty, merciful love like God’s.