April 18/Good Friday
For all my foes I am an object of reproach, a laughingstock to my neighbors, and a dread to my friends; they who see me abroad flee from me.
I am forgotten like the unremembered dead; I am like a dish that is broken. ~ Ps 31.12-13
The other night as I was unloading the dishwasher, a bowl slipped out of my hand, hit the floor, and broke cleanly in two. Without giving it a thought, I tossed it into the trashcan. After all, a broken bowl is a useless bowl, isn’t it? How poignant, then, that the psalmist describes himself, at the nadir of his grief and isolation, as a broken dish, useless and expendable. Throughout our lives we will inevitably have “broken dish moments,” when we feel unimportant or dispensable, unseen by others, ashamed of our isolation or sense of failure. We don’t inhabit such moments comfortably, surrounded as we are by a culture of winning. We don’t dare let on that we are overwhelmed or struggling, for fear that we, like the psalmist, might become a laughingstock to our neighbors and a dread to our friends. But such vulnerability may be the gift that God is giving us in our trials. Christ demonstrated it on the cross, crying out in the agony of abandonment, and ultimately committing his spirit into the hands of God. There is a holiness and beauty to our brokenness, which is a shadow of the holiness, and the profound beauty, of Christ broken and suffering on the cross. And as Pope Francis has shown us in the course of his illness, times of weakness are precisely the times in which we acknowledge our need for God and for other people. The 13th-century Persian poet and theologian Rumi observed, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Sooner or later, the flimsy façade of competence that we have erected will collapse. And at that moment, the light of God’s love will pour through the wreckage, and illuminate the beauty in our brokenness. Do we dare open ourselves to his light?
O perfect God, Give me the courage today to show my frailties and vulnerabilities to you and to others. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/041825.cfm
To hear “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded,” sung by The Gesualdo Six, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_OBbjAfVrI
