What We Can Do with Sad Stories
Over the years I’ve revisited these words a wise friend and Episcopal pastor said after our support group for parents suffering a pregnancy loss or early infant death. As a Catholic school kid, I was told that both my soul and my body housing it were a reflection of God, but I never understood how heaven could possibly fit all the bodies of all the believers throughout all time, who would be resurrected on the Day of Judgment. And it had never occurred to me that in the whole sacred mystery of existence, my (and yours and everyone’s) stories of loss and sorrow beg to be continuously shaped and reshaped in an alchemy, a universal remedy. Here is how Bryan Stevenson urges us to transmute our sorrow for this planet, today:
“[B]eing broken is what makes us human….Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered 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’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken — walking away from them or hiding them from sight — ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
