The Argentinian Poet Antonio Porchia has written, “To wound the heart is to create it.”
That is a truth that is difficult to embrace. We try to protect our hearts. We guard them. We don’t want to have them wounded in any way.
No one knows how to hurt each better than family members. Your knowledge of your family is much greater than your knowledge of anyone else. You know each other’s weaknesses. You know each other’s pain. You share the same story, the same memories. The closer you are to someone the more vulnerable you are to experiencing pain.
To fall in love is to leave your heart open for breaking. To give yourself to another is to make yourself vulnerable to rejection, to the deepest and greatest pain there is.
In the film Moonstruck, there is a baker who serves as the holy man of the movie. With great wisdom in one scene he declares, “Love don’t make things nice, it ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes a mess.”
Do you have a heart? Have you ever been in love? If you have answered “yes” to either of those questions than you know that love can make a mess and it can mess up our nice, neat and orderly lives in, well, in a heartbeat. Leonard Sweet reminds us: “The only hearts that never break are those that beat behind closed doors.”
Maybe the greatest thing Jesus did for us, for the world, for everyone, was open his heart. When Jesus goes to the cross on Good Friday, he will die, not from the wounds in his hands and feet, not from the spear that is thrust into his side. He will die from a broken heart. His wounded and broken heart made room for love to fully make its way into the world, to once and for all time proclaim that death is not the end.
To wound the heart is to create it. Is your heart breaking? Is it already broken? Well, good. Maybe now there is room for love to make its way in.
Grace and peace to you,
-Glen
