I read those words of Bryan Stevenson, from p. 289 of his magnificent book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which has been the source of several of my recent posts here, and began to weep and shake, even though I am sitting in a public place, in the corner of my local Starbucks, with my back to the plate glass window.
I have been wrestling with my own sense of brokenness in recent days, so those words hit me like a sledgehammer, yet also like an embrace - the power of a sledgehammer to shatter what remained of any illusion that I might not be broken, and the warmth of an embrace that it was okay.
Then I read the next four paragraphs, stopped, and realized I wanted to share them with a larger audience, even if in posting them here they are not read by many. Maybe they will speak to one person.
Please, please, follow below the squiggle.
I offer these words without further commentary, other than to say in the Quakerly fashion, this Friend speaks my mind.
My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, execution, and cruel punishment didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You cannot effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it.
We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn't pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt - and have hurt others - are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.
Paul Farmer, the reknowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and as a result deny our own humanity.