I've died enough by now I trust
just what's imperfect or ruined.
...And a million others might be like me, our hopes
a kind of illegal entry, a belief in smashed windows...
- from God the Broken Lock
by David Rivard
I believe in smashed windows. I believe in ruined bodies and limping minds. Not just in hope for their healing (sometimes), but with deep conviction in the preciousness of the bearers of brokenness themselves - which is all of us, in some regard. Brene Brown puts it this way, "what makes me vulnerable is what makes me beautiful."
Most of the time, though, I don't act like what is broken is beautiful - especially in myself or in the society in which I live. I can have a gaze of such grace and loving-kindness for another, but forget to turn it on myself -- or harbor such anger about injustice or dysfunction in society that I forget to applaud the weeds and wildflowers that break through the concrete.
David Rivard's poem, excerpted above, reflects on himself as a young boy breaking into a concert hall with friends. Crawling around and then falling asleep, they awake to the sounds of a famous soul quartet warming up - not on their own hits, but on gospel songs about Jesus. Jesus, who spent his whole life turning his gaze not on the whole, the beautiful, the acclaimed, but on the ugly, humiliated, broken, and cast out.
Talib Kweli says it this way: "I approach it from another angle / I stay in the streets and notice the gutter rainbows." Gutter Rainbows of spilled oil and sunlight, even though "the pain that you will discover is making the angels shudder." Beauty doesn't take away the pain of our experiences, nor does it make them 'okay.' Beauty can be our survival mechanism, however, our way of looking with fresh eyes, and creating with a spirit of hope. Seeking beauty in the mess is our resistance to despair.
Gutter Rainbows by Talib Kweli. Lyrics HERE.
In our Advent waiting, it can be hard to keep this double vision of hard truth-telling about our brokenness and need, and also our belovedness and beauty. Our world was created good, and though we've invented a thousand sad ways to pervert it, the fundamental goodness remains. It can be vertigo-inducing to practice "seeing double" during Advent, but it's the most honest way to remember what we still can't see at all:
"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known." - 1 Cor 13: 12
Double vision, actually, is a difficult 'handicap.' It is tiring, requiring slow movement and frequent rest. It can cause headaches, nausea. In the end, it is supremely uncomfortable to see two views of the world at the same time. Yet the side-effects themselves teach us the fundamental truth of our own vision: we always see double, and it's our minds that condense the images into one. For a season, therefore, we seek more diligently for a double perspective so that we might carry forward the remembrance that we are hard-wired to see two things at the same time -- to hold the paradoxes of brokenness and beauty, pain and possibility, as one.
In the season of Advent, may your double vision grow stronger, may you discern silhouettes of grace and beauty in even the most craggy passes.
- Anna
**This week, we'll take YOUR suggestions for what songs help you Seed the Hope or Resist the Sleep. Post a YouTube link with your thoughts and we'll re-post them all on our Saturday post.**
