Living in the Tragic Gap

words for a Friday we dare to call Good

“Transforming heartbreak into new life is the aim of every religious tradition at its best, as witness this Hasidic tale. A disciple asks the rebbe, ‘Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?’ The rebbe answers, ‘It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.’ The same point is made by the Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan: ‘God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.’

“In Christian tradition, the broken-open heart is virtually indistinguishable from the image of the cross. It was on the cross that God’s heart was broken for the sake of humankind, broken open into a love that Christ’s followers are called to emulate. In its simple physical form, the cross embodies the notion that tension can pull the heart open. Its cross-beams stretch out four ways, pulling against each other left and right, up and down. But those arms converge in a center, a heart, that can be pulled open by that stretching, by the tensions of life—a heart that can be opened so fully it can hold everything from despair to ecstasy. And that, of course, is how Jesus held his excruciating experience, as an opening into the heart of God.”

—Parker J. Palmer

The above paragraphs are from the article The Broken Open Heart: Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap. Many thanks to Professor Judy Skeen of Belmont University for sharing this article with me on a recent visit there.