brokenness

The illustration shows a woman holding a candle sitting in the darkness, with blue, cloud-like shapes surrounding her on the edges.

Illustration by Lauren Wright-Pittman 

ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, people will soon be preparing for Thanksgiving. We’ll name what we’re grateful for and then, in an ironic turn, let “Black Friday” convince us we need more. “Cyber Monday” will catch all the credit cards that made it, un-maxed, through the weekend. “Giving Tuesday” lets us pay the virtue toll to keep spending guilt-free on the yet-to-be-named following Wednesday. Whew! The consumerist drive in November and December makes the temporality of liturgical living difficult. But let’s try. November marks the end of both Ordinary Time and the church year. Ordinary Time is the day-in, day-out rhythm of everyday life as we await Christ’s second coming. In these final weeks, we’re not quite waiting on Christ, then — as we do during Advent — so much as we’re preparing ourselves to wait.

Come Advent, the scripture readings will be filled with anticipatory hope. But, as the old church year ends, the passages are full of anxiety and dread. The Hebrew Bible selections spotlight the escalating threat of the coming judgment. Paul’s letters pour out end times panic. Or, as songster Leonard Cohen put it, “Everybody knows it’s coming apart.” In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus forces us to ponder which side we are on. It’s not easy to sit with all this. I want to skip over to Advent hope (or even Christmas joy). But I invite us to hospice the old year’s death throes before welcoming new life at the stable door.

Olivia Bardo 8-02-2023
A picture of the book cover for "You Could Make This Place Beautiful" by Maggie Smith over a pink backdrop. The book cover features the title neatly cut into paper with the flaps opening to expose flowers and leaves poking through the letters.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir, by Maggie Smith / Atria/One Signal Publishers

OUT OF DARKNESS, the Lord lit a flame — then shaped humans by the glow and placed them in a garden, charging them to tend it and make it beautiful. In her new memoir, poet Maggie Smith promises that this is possible: You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

Smith explores her rise to fame after the publication of “Good Bones,” deemed the “official poem of 2016” by Public Radio International and the source of her memoir title. In the poem she writes, “Life is short and the world / is at least half terrible, and for every kind / stranger, there is one who would break you, / though I keep this from my children. I am trying / to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, / walking you through a real shithole, chirps on / about good bones: This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.”

According to Smith, her rise in popularity contributed to the end of her marriage. In her memoir, she shares how she forged her way back to herself. She realized her marriage was structured around patriarchal gender roles: She’d spent years of her adult life with a man who saw her writing as an activity for her “spare time,” outside of housework and child care. At the end of her marriage, Smith asked, “What do I have now? What do I have to hold on to?” She goes on, “When I looked down, I saw the pen in my hand.”

7-26-2023
The cover for Sojourners' September/October 2023 issue, featuring a blue illustration of a woman praying. You can see tendrils of her nervous system glowing through her skin. She's surrounded by black bramble, stained glass windows, and a church building.

Illustration by Ryan McQuade

Healing from religious harm: Why compassionate community is part of the journey.

Sharon V. Betcher 3-22-2021
An graphic illustration of human body chest-up that looks like a statue. The statue body has cracks in it, and in the cracks are growing white flowers and moss and green grass.

Illustration by Kylan Luginbuhl

AS WE ENTER the second year of the pandemic, craving juices our throats. We just want to feel alive again: to hear spontaneous laughter and song; to lay our eyes on one another without the mediation of Zoom; to smell a grandchild’s neck without the filter of a mask; to brush against the crowd, breaching the numbness of isolation. We just want to get back to normal, we say. But normal, as science writer Ed Yong observes, is precisely what led to this. Even epidemiologist Michael Osterholm worries that we are “trying to get through this [pandemic] with a vaccine without truly exploring our soul.” Curiously, that puts the depths of soul on the public health agenda.

Insight therapy

COVID-19 has been an epiphany. It has given humanity a first comprehensive, planetary broad brush-up. The pandemic likely was set in motion through ecological disruption, when viruses were loosed from their wild hosts into human sociality, then proceeded to shatter along our nation’s habituated social fault lines—economic, racialized, gendered, and generational.

Every aspect of the coronavirus pandemic first exposed and then exacerbated the United States’ devastating inequalities, reports one investigative journalist after another. The biases of societal racism, classism, and sexism become, in turn, endemic to housing patterns, employment, and access to health care and healthy food. Compounded by the accumulated effects of environmental inequality, such biases become diseases of the body and its generations. Those we cheer on as “essential workers,” the U.S. has come to recognize, were often people whom it first dehumanized—people of color and women working in precarious scenarios of exposure and at low wages. As our planet heats up, each consequent emergency threatens to exacerbate the same fault lines.

While COVID-19 has turned out to be a far more cruciform epiphany than we might have desired, it has, if we are lucky, shaken our sense of invulnerability: Our well-being is entangled, one with another—from how we treat the environment to wearing masks and social distancing. Bodies aren’t born innocent, but from birth carry unequal burdens.

Julie Polter 1-04-2021
Mako Fujimura holds a bowl with golden kintsugi cracks.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

Artist Makoto Fujimura uses materials and techniques from nihonga, a Japanese style of painting. The pigments are pulverized minerals and precious metals applied in multiple layers, in what he describes as “a slow process that fights against efficiency.” Prayer and contemplation are woven into the work. The tiny mineral particles refract light, often creating subtle prismatic effects. It is a style of art made for the type of long, unforced gaze that slowly reveals evermore depth. Deceptively simple and quietly extravagant.

Fujimura’s thoughts on art, theology, and culture are, like his paintings, many-layered and refractive, celebrating God as love, beauty, and mercy while also contending with pain and desolation. He is a mystic as well as a painter, and in his latest book, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, he speaks out of his spiritual and his artistic practice.

But Fujimura also builds on three decades of reaching far outside his studio to evangelize on the necessity of art for human thriving and the call to shift from fighting over culture to caring for and nurturing it. He founded the International Arts Movement in 1992, which facilitates connections and communication between groups seeking to creatively and positively impact the culture, whether they are from the arts, music, business, education, or social change organizations.

1-04-2021
The cover of the February 2021 issue features a photo of artist Makoto Fujimura painting a cup.

Artist Makoto Fujimura on loving what is broken and the holy work of repair.

Kirsten Lamb 6-06-2016

I’ve never been more aware of my brokenness than in motherhood. Yes, I’m sinful and bent toward destruction (not unlike my toddler, it’s worth noting). But my brokenness also plays out in a general reality that I’m not quite in working order.

Like a tricycle with a wobbly wheel, I just can’t get the job done gracefully. I leave laundry in the washing machine for too long, I meal-plan for only three days out of the week, I forget to brush hair and wipe faces for picture day. It’s not graceful, but it is grace-full.

Joe Kay 12-15-2014
A typical Christmas manger scene. Image courtesy nomadCro/shutterstock.com

A typical Christmas manger scene. Image courtesy nomadCro/shutterstock.com

Figures in nativity scenes are pretty weird, aren't they? This is true of most manger scenes, whether we’re talking about the ceramic one under a tree or the statuesque one in a church or the plastic one on a lawn. First off, there’s Mary, always looking very fresh and calm and full of reflection — which is quite impressive considering that she just gave birth without any sedative. Then there’s Joseph, doing some kind of man-thing off to the side — holding a lantern or a large stick. He looks totally composed, too.

And there’s the baby Jesus with a full head of hair, wide-open eyes and arms outstretched like he’s ready to belt out a song.

Not to ruin anyone’s Christmas spirit here, but what the heck?

If our manger scenes were realistic, Mary would be recovering from a painful labor full of sweat and blood, with a look on her face that’s anything but serene. And Joseph — wouldn’t he be a nervous wreck, too? His hand too shaky to hold a lantern?

And about that newborn. Shouldn’t he be red-faced and screaming? Eyes clenched closed and wisps of hair stuck to the top of a head that‘s still odd-shaped from all the squeezing?

Instead, we’ve sanitized and romanticized it. We’ve removed all the blood and sweat and tears and pain and goo. It’s no longer something real. We’ve left out all the messy parts. The oh-my-God-what-now parts. The I’m-screaming-as-loud-as-I-can-because-it-really-hurts parts. The oh-no-I’ve-stepped-in-the-animal-droppings parts. 

The real parts.

Martin L. Smith 9-01-2012

(Stephen Orsillo / Shutterstock.com)

Reflections on the Common Lectionary, Cycle B

Julie Clawson 8-26-2011

In reading some of the responses to my last post Embodied Theology, I was reminded of an essay I wrote for a class last semester, so I've rewritten part of it as a blog post to help clarify my position.

Embodied theology is rooted in the doctrine of creation. Why did God create us? As some have proposed, God couldn't not create or love us -- it's just part of God's nature. As a relational giver and lover within the Trinity, God couldn't help but be the same thing in relation with humanity. Who we are comes from God. We are not by nature sinful broken creatures, but creatures shaped in the very image of God.

Christine Sine 8-24-2011

Yesterday afternoon I found out that ABC news plans to dedicate it programming today to "Hunger at Home: Crisis in America." It precipitated my writing of this post which I had planned to add as a later addition to a series on tools for prayer.

One important item in our prayer toolkit is knowledge of our hurting world. Not knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge that equips us to respond. Becoming aware of the needs in our world can lead us into a deeper understanding of the ache in God's heart for our hurting friends and neighbors. It can also connect us to our own self-centered indifference that often makes us complacent when God wants us to be involved. And it can stimulate us to respond to situations that we once felt indifferent to.

Betsy Shirley 7-19-2011

Ingus Kruklitis / Shutterstock.com

oh yes I amphoto © 2007 Laura Askelin | more info (via: Wylio)Though I like a rousing round of ave maria's as much as the next person, the past few centuries of church prayer trends have eschewed Latin in favor of the vernacular -- that is, the language of the people. And to the tune of 450 million copies in more than 70 translations (and counting), it's clear that people the world around speak the language of Harry Potter. Or rather, the story of Harry Potter speaks to them.

So as I watched the final Hogwarts Express depart from Platform 9¾ in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II this past weekend (slightly teary-eyed, I confess), I started to wonder: What might it sound like to pray in the language of Harry Potter -- language that clearly resonates with folks around the world? Would it be cheesy? Probably. Profane? Perhaps. But I figured the God who relied on earthly parables about wineskins and fig trees to explain the Kingdom would understand.

Rose Marie Berger 4-01-2011

Addiction is not an individual disease; it's a family sickness.

Chris LaTondresse 3-01-2011

"Farewell Rob Bell." With this three word tweet John Piper -- senior pastor at Bethlehem Baptist church in Minneapolis, Minnesota and elder statesman of the neo-reform stream of American Christianity -- triggered an online firestorm over the weekend.

Nadia Bolz-Weber 1-07-2011
I have a pastor friend who collects a lot of crèche scenes. He especially likes really bad ones.
Nadia Bolz-Weber 10-04-2010
There is quite a strong tradition in the Old Testament of complaining to God about injustice and suffering. It's lamenting -- and we should perhaps reclaim this part of our tradition.
Chris Rice 4-05-2010

"We're not desperate."

Rachel Burton 3-09-2010
My heart has been burdened the past several weeks by the hurt and pain in a place I call home: UC San Diego. Through my studies at UCSD, but also my community, I grew and was challenged.
Gareth Higgins 2-22-2010
Joe Biden appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows last week to defend the Obama administration from Dick Cheney's disgraceful attacks, which appear to suggest his earlier bloodlust has not yet be