Brokenness is more common than we admit. . .BROKENNESS IS NOT AN OPTION; IT’S A GUARANTEE. . .
Years ago, I sat in on a VA presentation about post-traumatic stress. A retired military speaker said anyone who had “boots on the ground” carried it in some form of PTSD. Then a woman raised her hand and said, “I never served. I never had boots on the ground. But if you have a heartbeat, you have wounds; you have PTSD
THAT stayed with me.
Was she right? Would you have defended or debated her?
Maybe not everyone carries the same kind of trauma. But everyone carries something—loss, disappointment, regret, grief, loneliness, fear. There isn’t a person reading this who doesn’t know what pain feels like.
That is where being A Caring Catalyst begins.
A Caring Catalyst understands that your hurt is not separate from mine. Your suffering is not foreign to me. Behind every smile is a story, and behind every door is a pain deeper than words can explain or ever want to experience.
We spend so much of life trying to hide the cracks. But often those cracks are what make us gentler, wiser, and more able to recognize another hurting soul.
Maybe brokenness is not the end of the story. Maybe it is the place where compassion begins.
Because sometimes the people who have been shattered the most are the very ones who know best how to hold others together, which makes Ellen Bass’s poem so very vulnerably powerful. . .
I’d like you to experience a poem. . .for a few seconds dare to IMAGINE:
IF YOU KNEW
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slow through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk a the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
–Ellen Bass
THE SOIL OF SORROW IS ALWAYS FERTILE. . .
THE ANTIDOTE:
K I N D N E S S
S I M P L Y
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