Broken Bodies

I wake broken today. It is barely light outside, my weekend, my rest, and I feel unrested and restless. I go back to bed. I read for an hour, then pull on a flannel shirt, find my way to a cloud covered lake and wish, like Joni, that I had a river to skate away on.

This brokenness, it is present in ways that prick and pin me against myself, against the mirror of my soul, showing me myself and the ugliness within.

I call a friend a few hours later to confess the brokenness, but she has had a hard day and she tells me stories for forty minutes and at the end I am too tired to say the simple words: I'm broken. And so I tell her instead the good news belonging to some friends and I leave my brokenness out. I am ashamed to be broken and ashamed to have it so tight around my throat, constricting and felt.

Tonight I am meant to stand at the front of our sanctuary, our place of rest and worship, and I am meant to serve the bread and the wine alongside another. And perhaps they will have felt their brokenness today too. Perhaps they will know their humanity constricting and tight. Perhaps their heart will feel as fragile as the wineglass they hold, as broken as the bread I hold.

Here is what I know of brokenness and here is what I know of communion: it cannot be done alone.

As He has entered into our sufferings, born a babe in a cruel manger in a cruel world, body broken and bruised, we enter into His. And as we enter into His, we enter into others. And as we enter into theirs, they enter into ours. We share the broken body, the poured out blood, we partake of Him but we do it with one another.

We cannot do it alone. Any of it.

But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. I Peter 4:13