By Janet Davis
Walk in: Losing Our Lives by Letting Our Hearts Break
To receive this blessing
All you have to do
Is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
So that you can see
It’s secret chambers,
The hidden spaces
Where you have hesitated
To go.
Your entire life is here,
Inscribed whole
Upon your heart’s walls:
Every path taken, or left behind,
Every face you turned toward, or turned away.
Every word spoken in love
Or in rage,
Every line of your life
You would prefer to leave
In shadow,
Every story that shimmers with treasures known
And those you have yet to find.
It could take you days to wander these rooms,
Forty at least.
And so let this be a season for wandering,
For trusting the breaking,
For tracing the rupture
That will return you
To the One who waits,
Who watches who works within
The rending
To make your heart
Whole.
Lent prayer by Jan Richardson from Circle of Grace
“The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
– Stanley Kunitz
Questions
What is breaking your heart right now? Where is your life breaking apart or dis-integrating into compost like this decaying log?
Does that look like loss? pain? the suffering of others? fear? regret? bitterness? vulnerability? What might you need to let go as you open to God’s gentle and transforming touch?
Center: Meeting the Holy One in Heartbreak
“I take my guidance from the forests, who teach us something about change. The forces of creation and destruction are so tightly linked that sometimes we can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. But all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that overstory: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world.”
From “Braiding Sweetgrass,” by Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer
Questions
Where do you identify resistance to new life? What old patterns that no longer serve you well seem to be taking too many resources and energy? Which are ready for release?
Where do you notice the disruption or death or the breaking open of forces of power and “domination” that have impacted your life? What might it cost you to let those powers “fall” and welcome change? How might you intentionally nurture, shift resources toward, the buried seed bank of new life?
Walk out: Saving Our Lives by Walking Toward New Life
Passover Remembered
…The stories you tell one another around your fires in the dark will make you strong and wise.
Outsiders will attack you, and some who follow you, and at times you will weary and turn on each other from fear and fatigue and blind forgetfulness.
You have been preparing for this for hundreds of years. I am sending you into the wilderness to make a way and to learn my ways more deeply.
Those who fight you will teach you. Those who fear you will strengthen you. Those who follow you may forget you. Only be faithful. This alone matters. …
Alla Renée Bozarth, From Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, revised edition, LuraMedia and Wisdom House 1988. All rights reserved.
Questions
In this season, what stories are serving to make your heart strong and wise? They can be from your own life, others, books, movies, or ancient stories from Scripture.
Do you have a sense of wilderness this Lent? Can you describe it?
What would it look like to open to learning new “ways of God” rather than resisting pain and discomfort? What can you learn from those who fight you? Those who fear you?
One Response
Thank you so much for these thoughtful prompts and questions. The poem by Jan Richardson is so meaningful to me right now…”all you have to do is let your heart break.” O yes.