Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide
Excerpt from Adam Bucko’s book “Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation” pages 34-38. (Used with permission of the publisher, Orbis Books)
A few years ago, I was invited to give a talk at an old church in London. This particular church had a very intriguing modern history: in the 1990s, it was bombed by the IRA. After being rebuilt, the bishop of London decided to turn it into a Center for Peace and Reconciliation. Today, it is a place for many young seekers who may not always feel at home in the church but who find a home in that particular one, as they seek a spirituality that can help them address some of the wounds of the world.
After my talk, a young woman approached and asked if she could speak with me. We went outside and sat on the floor of a big Bedouin tent located in the church’s courtyard. She had some serious questions that she wanted to talk about, questions not so unusual for a person her age. Questions about what a young person is to do with one’s life in our seemingly broken world. Questions about how to respond to everything that is not working in our world without feeling paralyzed by overwhelming worry. Questions about living with integrity and decency. Questions about our future, and the fact that sometimes it feels like the future is being stolen from our youth, by all of us who so willingly dismiss any dreams of a better tomorrow as impractical, as soon as we realize that any real societal change will require us to change.
And so, we sat there on the floor of that Bedouin tent and talked for a while. At some point in our conversation, as we talked about her specific vocation and calling, and how people often encouraged her to follow her passion and do what makes her feel good, I remembered the advice of one of my own mentors, Andrew Harvey. He said-and I’m sure he was responding to a famous bumper sticker from the 1980s still seen on many cars: “Don’t ‘follow your bliss.’ Look at the world and see where following our bliss has gotten us to. Instead, follow your heartbreak.” So that’s what I said to that young woman that day in London: “Look at the world. What breaks your heart? And let your heartbreak be your guide.”
I had mostly forgotten about that conversation until months later when I received a message from her. She said that she had sat with that “What breaks your heart?” question for a long time until she could not sit with it any longer. Somewhat frustrated, she turned on the TV and saw the stories of Syrian refugees arriving on the Greek island of Lesvos. Women, children, men, all scared and broken and some barely alive. Escaping the violence of war, hoping that they can survive the journey across the ocean, hoping for a new life. When she saw that, she knew that she needed to do something about it. Immediately, she got on the internet, bought a ticket, and without telling a soul, went to Lesvos the next morning to be there for those who were reaching the shores of the island. Being there broke her heart and brought her to her knees. But it also gave her a new life and a new joy. Not a false kind of joy that is the result of avoiding life’s discomforts, but rather a joy that knows difficulties and heartbreaks and yet still survives A joy that is an assurance that you are doing what you were born to do, an assurance that you are saying yes to the person you are meant to be. A joy that points to the truth of an old Hasidic teaching, that a person is only whole whose heart is broken.
This young woman eventually went back to London and helped organize her friends and colleagues at the church where we had originally met, helping to turn that church into a training center to prepare people to go and serve in refugee camps and become advocates for refugee families coming to the United Kingdom, who are otherwise often unwelcome there.
Advent, December, and Christmastime are heartbreaking for many of us, for often complicated reasons that go unsaid. Every year, I think of the familiar words of the prophet Isaiah that come up in the readings for Advent. The prophet reminds us that God is near. Isaiah says:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.
The Lord has appointed me for a special purpose.
He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has asked me to proclaim comfort to those who mourn.
He has sent me to repair broken hearts, And to declare to those who are held captive and bound in prison,
“Be free from your imprisonment!”
-Isaiah 61:1, The Voice
It is for this reason, in the same spirit, that the Christian message is called the good news. It is good news because it is an announcement of joy to all people, especially those among us who feel hurt and broken and who feel like they don’t belong. The season of Advent (leading up to Christmas), in fact, is about waiting for the coming of this good news. It is a time of preparation when we are invited to sit with everything in our lives that has not yet been touched and transformed by and into this good news. We sit with it in expectation, taking account of our joys and sorrows, looking at what’s wrong and what’s right with our world, learning to trust that God intends our wholeness, learning to trust that even this darkness we are experiencing may somehow be pregnant with light.
It was the theologian Matthew Fox who said:
There is grave danger… in sentimentalizing Advent and Christmas and using these festival occasions to look back exclusively at the birth of Jesus. Jesus was born; he did live; he did teach as a rabbi would; he did overturn frozen values of religion and society; he did pay an ultimate price for doing so. But honoring his birthday is, in my opinion, not the deeper meaning of Christmas and of its lead-in, Advent. To me, and to many people before me, Christmas is not so much about the birth of the baby Jesus as it is about a birth going on in us. Hopefully. A birth of the Christ in us.
One of the great medieval Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, said something similar in the talks he gave frequently to nuns and others. One of his frequent themes was the greening, birthing essence and purpose of God, who wants nothing more than to be born in us.
So, sooner or later, each of us, like that young woman whom I met outside the once-bombed-out church in London, may discover a new life and a new joy. Perhaps when you echo the prophet Isaiah, it will include joy such as this:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has appointed me for a special purpose.
He sent me to preach the good news to those who are suffering in my neighborhood.
He told me to offer comfort to those whose lives and livelihoods were devastated by the pandemic.
He asked me to question and re-imagine our old tired systems that are based on violence.
He asked me to take a risk and be vulnerable with my community.
He told me that my heartbreaks can lead to joys.
Click the link to purchase Adam Bucko’s book “Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide” on the OrbisBooks.com website:
This year, Shalem is honored to award Adam Bucko with the Contemplative Voices Award. Join us Nov. 17th, 3-5pm ET on Zoom for this special event. Register for the event using the link below.
Profoundly moving for me in the midst of post U.S. Election need for hope.