Breaking Open the Heart

 I will begin this "blogspot" with this rather wonder reflection from Parker J Palmer

“An Invitation to Heartbreak and the Call of the Loon” by Parker J Palmer

Heartbreak is an inevitable and painful part of life. But there are at least two ways for the heart to break: it can break open into new life, or break apart into shards of sharper and more widespread pain.

A brittle heart will explode into a thousand pieces, and sometimes get thrown like a fragment grenade at the perceived source of its pain — there’s a lot of that going around these days. But a supple heart will break open into a greater capacity to hold life’s suffering and its joy — in a way that allows us to say, “The pain stops here.”

The broken-open heart is not restricted to the rare saint. I know so many people whose hearts have been broken by the loss of someone they loved deeply. They go through long nights of grief when life seems barely worth living. But then they slowly awaken to the fact that their hearts have become more open, compassionate, and welcoming — not in spite of their pain but because of it.

So here’s a question I like to ask myself: What can I do day-by-day to make my heart more supple?

In the poem below, Mary Oliver invites us into heartbreak — not because she wants us to wallow in suffering, but to help us become more open and responsive to a suffering world.

I spent last week in a part of the world where loons like the ones Mary writes about make their summer homes. If ever there were a sound that could break your heart open, it is the cry of a loon late at night on a moonlit lake.

“Lead” by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

It has been a sad time in our house in the last couple of weeks. We had to say goodbye to Poppy our much loved Labrador Springer Spaniel. It has affected us all is different ways. She was such a loving and lovely dog, just the best. It has been particularly distressing at times watching the little dog Charlie come to terms with the loss of Poppy, I believe it is fair to say she is somewhat heartbroken. There has also been some family loss and all kinds of other griefs too. It is hard for me to watch those I love in pain. I can live with my own suffering, but that of others I find harder. To know love is to know grief.

We have all experienced a variety of griefs these past few months, even if it is not the loss of a loved one but instead the loss of some of the things that we love to do in life. The whole globe, to a greater and lesser degree, is experiencing many forms of grief and it does not appear to be coming to an end. To some degree or other we are all going through heartache. We are all heartbroken. Grief is something that we are all living with.

I have led a grief group for a few years now, it has been some of the most important work I have done. I have hosted it on Zoom fortnightly ever since the beginning of the pandemic. Yes there is always grief, there is always sorrow and there is always heartbreak in all of our lives, these feelings though have been amplified these last six months.

All of us belong to the largest community on God’s sweet earth, the community of grievers. Grief is the price we pay for love, it is a price worth paying, for what is life without love? It is nothing, it is meaningless, just an empty vessel. The only way to escape grief is to totally armour your heart and deny love. Now who would want to do that, to live without love, to live the life of a zombie?

Grief changes you. That said it is not really the loss that does this, but the love that is at the core of grief. When we lose someone that we love, it changes us forever. Life will never be quite the same again. We do not rise above the pain of grief, we cannot pretend that it is not there, we don’t simply get over it. What happens is that we are changed by it and as a result our hearts are enlarged and we grow as human beings, if the love has truly been realized. You see grief is really about transformation, rather than transcendence, by the way this is the true nature, the purpose of religion. Grief is not an attempt to explain the loss or even understand some meaning locked into what happened. Instead, it seems to me that grief is more about finding meaning in the absence of an explanation.

Grief is about finding meaning in the absence of an explanation. This is what the transformative power of love is about too. As I look at my life and my ministry it is really about meaning rising once again from the ashes of defeat and loss and suffering and doing the work I am here to do. I know why I am here today, there is no despair, for I have a life rich in meaning despite the very real experience of suffering, of loss and grief. My heart has been broken open many times and no doubt it will continue to be done so.

Who among us hasn’t known heartbreak? No doubt throughout our lives our hearts have been broken, perhaps broken open. Here is lovely little poem by Gregory Orr “Some Say You’re Lucky” about a heart that has been broken open and not broken apart. It beautifully reminds us that loss can allow us to experience beauty, as well as both give and receive love. The fact that our hearts have been broken open allows us to do so.

Some Say You’re Lucky
by Gregory Orr

May it be so for all whose hearts are broken.

Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs.
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It’s deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It’s one of the places
Where the beloved is born.

Unless we live with armoured heart it is inevitable that we will experience heartbreak. In fact, the only way to avoid it is to immune ourselves from love and who would want to live that way?

We cannot prevent heartbreak; it is natural consequence of love and care. It is something that we begin to experience very early in life and something that continues throughout our lives. David Whyte put it this way: 

“Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.”

Heartbreak cannot be avoided and perhaps it is the very essence of our humanity. We feel it deeply too. I know how much I carry my suffering in my body, grief is particularly heavy. It does seem to weigh you down at times, it certainly eats away at your energy levels.

Our hearts, of course, do not only break due to things close at hand. We can feel the ache of the world at times, I know I do. As Sarah Rudell Beach has stated, “Some days, the world breaks our heart. We turn on the news and we learn of another act of violence and anger and hate and rage. Our stomach sinks. Our heart aches. Our throat clenches. Our bodies do feel the suffering of the world.” I have certainly felt the world aching, in my own body these last few months. I know that I am not alone in this.

Of course, sometimes this heartache comes out in anger, which can become dangerous if it means our hearts begin to harden. Something the great religious traditions warn against. A constant biblical theme is a warning against hardened hearts. The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche suggest that to become a true spiritual warrior means

“renouncing our hard-heartedness and allowing ourselves to be tender, sad and fully present.” This true courage and compassion. You see the breaking open of the heart is about expanding our ability to love. Our broken hearts have the potential to open us to the wider world, to see beyond the confines that keep us separate from others and the world.

The key is to keep our hearts open, to live with broken open hearts. You see love, kindness, generosity, companionship, joy, delight and happiness are rooted in the very same place that sorrow, pain, loss and heartbreak grow. They are rooted in the very same soil, you cannot know joy without knowing sorrow, or perhaps sorrow without joy.

There is a deep love there within each of us, a love that needs to be given birth to. As Wayne Muller so beautifully put it in “A life of being, having and doing enough”

"Here is the final thing we must know. We carry within us a fierce grace that will not be extinguished, does not break, cannot ever leave us comfortless. It lives in us. This life force, whatever it is that allows a blade of grass to push up, up through concrete to reach for sun and warmth, this lives in us, this is what we are made of. If we trust in this impossibly resilient capacity to bear all we are given, and recalibrate our speed in such a way that we allow ourselves to feel the searing burning loss of something or someone precious, then we can stand passionately and honestly before one another and offer our most deeply impossibly suffering heart's fearless, honest, loving kindness. And it is from this shared kindness, born of our own sorrow and loss, that we find, with and for one another, in shared, loving companionship, some tender budding fragrance of enough."

Heartbreak is a part of life, the price that we pay for love. We cannot avoid it, in fact in trying to do so all that we do is armour our own hearts and somehow cut ourselves off from the love present in life whilst also ensuring that the love present in our own hearts cannot be given birth to. Heartbreak can actually lead to a new kind of opening; our hearts can actually be broken open and we begin to give to one another the greatest gift we have and one our world so desperately needs us to share.

There is no immunity from heartbreak, such things are a part of life. All we can do is remain open so that we can continue to touch and be touched by life.

So, let’s give our hearts to one another and to life.

I am going to this morning with a short poem of India origin I am told, an ancient piece on beauty.

I know a cure for sadness:
Let your hands touch something that
makes your eyes
smile.

I bet there are a hundred objects close by
that can do that.

Look at
beauty's gift to us —
her power is so great she enlivens
the earth, the sky, our
soul.