Until We Are
Broken, Our Lives Will Be Self-Centered
Monday, August
30, 2010
True strength
does not come out of bravado. Until we are broken, our life will be
self-centered, self-reliant; our strength will be our own. So long as you think
you are really something in and of yourself, what will you need God for? I
don’t trust a man who hasn’t suffered; I don’t let a man get close to me who
hasn’t faced his wound. Think of the posers you know-are they the kind of man
you would call at 2:00 A.M., when life is collapsing around you? Not me. I
don’t want clichés; I want deep, soulful truth, and that only comes when a man
has walked the road I’ve been talking about. As Frederick Buechner says,
To do for
yourself the best that you have it in you to do-to grit your teeth and clench
your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst-is, by that
very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still.
The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your
life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and
transformed. (The Sacred Journey)
Only when we
enter our wound will we discover our true glory. As Robert Bly says, “Where a
man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.” There are two reasons for
this. First, the wound was
given in the place of your true strength, as an effort to take you out.
Until you go there you are still posing, offering something more shallow and
insubstantial. And therefore, second, it is out of your brokenness that you discover what you
have to offer the community. The false self is never wholly false. Those gifts we’ve been using are
often quite true about us, but we’ve used them to hide behind. We
thought that the power of our life was in the golden bat, but the power is in us.
When we begin to offer not merely our gifts but our true selves, that is when
we become powerful.
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