A broken tulip

I wrote my last post, “Broken Body”, a while ago. It was at a time when I was losing hope that men and women could strengthen each other and build each other up rather than destroy each other, knowingly or unknowingly. At the time I was facing my own pain from man+woman conversations gone wrong and I was laser focused on the injustices done to women. Then I heard an American abbot speak about the engulfing “toxic shame” young men live with today.

It undid me. For the first time I started asking men what their experiences were.

Here I was, believing that if only men could see and understand what’s going on, how their actions and beliefs affect women, if only they could be held accountable, maybe there could be change—-I never realized that men, themselves, are drowning in their own ways. Women in our culture are finally, too-late, gaining a voice. So why do young men now feel silenced?

It upset me. The abbot said then that the only way out of toxic shame is to be deeply, patiently loved back into being known. Sometimes it comes from a stable marriage. Sometimes young men find it in a community, like the monastery he oversees. But it is not an easy path.

This just amped my frustration to a new level because where are the young women who can deeply love a young man back to himself, when young women today are facing their own record highs of instability, insecurity, “toxic shame”? We all need deep, patient love. We need it urgently. We need it to answer for so many, many things.

In a counselling class they told us—hurt people hurt others. You need to be healed first, before you try to help another.

So tell me where, in a world where we destroy each other, in a world where every human hurts, where do we heal? Where is there love enough? For all the lost women, the lost men?

Josh Garrels’ song, “Take, Eat” came up on my phone in the bean field, and it answered me. When we’re not sure what to do for the world, there is always the choice to accept what is placed in these hands, our own hands. Take, eat, says Jesus, this is My body.

It’s the un-easy fact of being human. Our realities are created in community, together. What we do affects others in so many ways and our own lives are inescapably changed by the actions of others, seen and unseen. It’s true.

It’s also true that we, each of us, have choices. God comes to the world and he comes to each person. In the end, we can only accept to be Mary who says yes unknowing of what it will bring, yet willing. In the beginning, there is one man, one woman, individually created by God’s hands and God’s breath, apart from each other, distinct. Each woke for the first time alone with God. In the end, we can only be another Mary who comes alone to a garden and a stone she cannot move on her own but still she comes because love draws her, and resurrection meets her there, gives her a message, sends her back to the community, to her brothers. We can only start with our own life, with the body and bread placed in our own hands, which we take into ourselves.

This is the context to “broken body”.

Maybe because one person’s small action can change the fate of nations, we are called to pay close attention to what God does for each of us, the love he has for me, for you. We are invited to live in that love and trust that it can ripple out to reach all the corners of this earth.

Featured image by Photo by Claudia van Zyl on Unsplash, South Africa.