K i m b e r l e y   C .   P a t t o n
Grace Under Fire:
When the Wounded Emerge as Healers

Editor's note: Kimberley Patton is a Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard University. The following excerpt is from a Commencement Address she delivered at Harvard Divinity School in 2005.

The one thing that I truly can say I know is the broken heart. Even if a broken heart does not lie in your past or present, it awaits you in your future, at some place, at some time when you will almost certainly be unprepared. But in myth, in ritual, and in theology, the broken heart is not a regrettable symptom of derailment, but is rather the starting point of anything that matters.

The religious imagination reveals the broken heart as the very best means to wisdom and growth, even when it disrupts the dreams and goals that have inspired us; even when it overshadows the résumés we craft or the faces we publicly present; even when it scatters the ducks we have so carefully lined up in a row. ... But there have been or will be times in all of our lives when the ducks will not line up. They scatter and squawk, or they are devoured by a starving coyote. Far from being distractions, these times of apparent anarchy are the most important times in our lives, and again, this is an ancient idea. For it is highly likely that during such brokenhearted, disorienting times, illusions will shatter; old ideas and attachments will be burned up; old ways of being will dissolve; and the one thing or person or way of life we thought we could not live without will be taken from us. These are times when we will learn compassion, what in Buddhism is called bodhicitta, the awakened heart, times when the unbearably wounded will themselves emerge as healers.

My students say to me sometimes, as they apply to doctoral programs or jobs in parish ministry, "How shall I account for the two, or the ten, missing years on my résumé? How should I explain the gap?" And how I wish I could always answer them, "Tell the truth. Say, 'I took in a child whose mother was in prison and sang her to sleep every night while she cried. I worked the night shift in a rifle factory. I battled an addiction, and I won. My husband was crushed by a boulder that fell in our own backyard, and I tended his grave. I worked as a stripper to save money to go to graduate school. My marriage made in heaven turned to hell. I fled to Caledonia. I fled to Paraguay. I lived in a monastery in Thailand where I came to see that all things, all things, are empty and undeserving of our outrageous attachment to them. I swapped dirty needles for clean. I took photos of skulls left by the Khmer Rouge. I cut down trees all day and made them into tables.' "

These are all true stories of the things my students have done during the "gaps" in their résumés. These experiences are how hearts are broken, and re-made; how souls are forged; how we become human beings with credible beliefs about existence itself.

The gaps on the résumé are the abysses into which we fall from time to time, and in the process, fall into the hands of the living God. The gaps are when the initiations take place. It is our profound ignorance that makes us ashamed of such times, living as we do in what storyteller Michael Meade calls this "uninitiated, out-of-control country."

Over and again, the world's religious traditions speak of the preciousness and power of the broken heart. The Aztecs called it tlazotli noyol, "precious, perforated, bleeding heart," without which the sun could not even rise one day. Its successor in Mexico, the image of the bleeding heart of the self-offering Christ, remains central in Catholic devotional piety. The prince Siddhartha Gautama escaped his protected palace compound in disguise, only to encounter burning suffering and mortality for the first time, and with his heart broken, set out in the middle of the night upon his path toward Buddhahood. He left behind his wife, Yashodhara, and their newborn son, Rahula, little "Fetter," who also awoke to their own new lives of broken-heartedness. The psalmist reminds God that even if He turns in disdain from burnt offerings and elaborate sacrifices, He cannot ignore a broken and contrite heart. And on the Day of the Resurrection, writes the Sufi commentator Maybudi, God will welcome into the house of His friends only the burnt, the broken, and the grieving, only those washed and purified by their own tears.

Tears are the holy water of the broken heart. "All through history," writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, "tears have done three works: called the spirits to one's side, repelled those who would muffle and bind the [simple] soul, and healed the injuries of poor human bargains."

Harvard is a place of astonishing light; but, even at the Divinity School, it is also a place where, in the shadow, very poor human bargains can be made. I have made many such bargains myself, and my tears have not yet healed them. The shadow side of Harvard's obsession with excellence is the relentless fear of failure, insecurity, and the reluctance to ask questions that might reveal one did not come to Harvard already knowing everything. But as both myth and cognitive psychology show, failure is how one learns; indeed, it is the most important element of the natural process of learning. And entering new territory one does not already "control," without a passport, is how one keeps moving outward from the known center, how one avoids calcification, how inquiry and wonder are not stifled by self-righteousness.

The shadow side of Harvard's obsession with productivity is compulsion, the inability to relax or to rejoice in what has already been accomplished, or even more, to see the value in latency, dormancy, or rest. As Martha Beck observes, Harvard is a place where lovers sign letters to one another, "Wishing you a productive summer." How can we learn not to panic as future ministers or scholars or mothers when we are "not getting any work done" or when we lose direction altogether, when there is no plan, when the manuscript is delayed or the child is ill, when the love affair sours and there is no point in getting up, when the beloved sister or brother unexpectedly dies, or when we are suddenly called to make pots, to sit with dying people, or to go to Brazil? Or when the sheer cruelty, racism, and blindness of the world can be kept at bay no longer, but storm our inner barriers, making normal productive life impossible? Yet in these "degree detours," and later, in these career detours, lie gestation and receptivity, what the Japanese call "hollowness" to the divine. In these nonproductive times, new things are hatching, being born in the darkness, if only we do not panic.

Like the wider American culture, Harvard also lionizes the loner, the brilliant individual who has won some high-level game of musical chairs where 150 players contend for 8 seats and the music is by Mahler. But the shadow side of this individualism can be a lack of appreciation of collaborative work, coupled with a malignant sense of scarce resources: a zero-sum game whereby your victory somehow diminishes me, and if you are recognized, I am robbed. Lost in such shadow are the unique gifts and the unique destiny belonging to each of us, which no one can take from us.

In the words of Jalaja Bonheim: "[M]ake no mistake: those who tell us we can have whatever we want, be whoever we want to be, and have full control of our lives are merely playing into our desire to avoid the discomfort of feeling our vulnerability. True wholeness has nothing to do with getting what we want. Paradoxically, we achieve true wholeness only by embracing our fragility and sometimes our brokenness. Wholeness is a natural radiance of Love, and Love demands that we allow the destruction of our old self for the sake of the new. 'If anyone needs a head, the lover leaps up to offer his,' says the mystic and poet Kabir. Life did not intend for us to be inviolable, but to be used for fodder for its workings. We are meant to be chewed up and digested and transformed into the blood and sinews of the world."

Life did not intend for us to be inviolable. Instead we are to be transformed into the blood and sinews of the world. To this end and purpose we can turn, in love, without fear, without ambivalence, letting the ducks break rank when they must, letting them fly where they will, into the air, into emptiness, into the breast of God, whose mighty and broken heartbeat joins with our own until the end of our separate lives, when the sound will become one, when we will see that all our ideas of self and emptiness and God were not enough.