Two

Re-Membering Your
Broken Pieces

But, first, remember, remember, remember . . .

C. S. LEWIS

The day after we’d held on to each other in the kitchen, this package came in the mail with three words—“Open Me Carefully”—as if it could be a soul.

I have no idea how this happens. How in the thick of ache you can be this solid dam—yet you catch bits of a song on a radio somewhere or the light falls a certain way across the floor or you lean the mailbox forward and a package slips right there into your hand—and in a moment, the loss of it all breaks you wide open.

Maybe it’s because we never stop hoping for the best, waiting for the best like it got lost in the mail—and then one day there it is, unexpected and with our name right there on it.

I trace the ink across the top of the package—I don’t recognize the handwriting.

The package is largish—and way too small for the shoulder-crushing load of questions about what the bloody point of all this is. I keep forgetting, me with the chronic soul amnesia.

A mourning dove coos out in the maple to the west of the kitchen. It calls out bravely, unafraid in its lament.

Hurt is a contagion. When one person hurts in a family, everyone aches. And this is always the choice: pain demands to be felt—or it will demand you feel nothing at all.

I slice the box open. Whatever it is, it’s wrapped in tissue paper, a thin swaddling. I lift it from the box and this note falls to the table. It’s from Peru, found in a shop that a friend was wandering through. She writes it across the embossed note-card: “Saw it and thought of you.” The tissue paper feels like mummified dressings wrapped around something old enough to have the greatest story to tell. What do they say—that the great stories are the ones you need to hear again, the ones that call you back to find the wholeness of yourself again?

I unwrap slowly, hoping. There it is—something clay. Red clay. A base about eight inches long. Painted along its edge to look like thin bricks. Like a foundation, like the foundation for a story that might rejoin broken pieces. Unwrap it slowly, carefully—full of care for what might be. Thirteen small figures, earthen and primitive, kneel around the perimeter of the base, and it takes me a moment.

The Last Supper. The Great Story. A bent Jesus kneeling with His disciples, each of them kneeling before their own small cup and darkened loaf of bread.

This is the wholeness, right here in my hands, like my beginning and middle and end; this is the great story that defeats lostness and loneliness, that grows your heart larger. Maybe even large enough to break wide open.

There’s something left in the box? Pieces roll around. And then I see the hand.

The hands of the Jesus are snapped right off. The Jesus has no hands.

I sit down. Jesus’ hands lie there in front of Him, in front of all the disciples, two hands broken off, lying there palms open like an invitation.

The jug in front of Him is knocked over. Poured out.

How many times in your life do you get the Last Supper delivered to your very doorstep? Hadn’t this been the story I’d been unpacking for the last five years? Hadn’t I just been searching for an answer to the question of how to live with your one broken heart? Where is the abundant life? And how in the world to find it?

“And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them . . .”¹

I had first read it slowly, years ago—how in the original language “gave thanks” reads eucharisteo. The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning “grace.” Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks.

There was more. Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, also holds the Greek word chara, meaning “joy.” Joy. And that was what the quest for more has always been about—that which Augustine claimed, “Without exception . . . all try their hardest to reach the same goal, that is, joy.”²

Deep chara is found only at the table of the euCHARisteo—the table of thanksgiving.

I had sat there long . . . wondering . . . is it that simple? Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depths of my eucharisteo thanks?

So then as long as thanks was possible, then joy was always possible. The holy grail of joy was not in some exotic location or some emotional mountain peak experience. The joy wonder could be here, in the messy, piercing ache of now. The only place we need see before we die is this place of seeing God, here and now.

I’d whispered it out loud, let the tongue feel these sounds, the ear hear their truth.

Charis. Grace. Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving. Chara. Joy.³

A triplet of stars to reveal the outline of the fullest life, thanksgiving, joy. Five years of living thanks, of counting and giving thanks for one thousand everyday gifts, of struggling, miserably failing, and then purposing again to take everything as grace, gift—charis—give Him thanks for it—eucharisteo—and therein find joy in Him—chara.

But now, what of brokenness? And what did it mean that “bad brokenness is broken by good brokenness”? Had I only been scratching the surface? What if there was more to full abundance? And isn’t the answer right here in my hands?

I hold the broken Last Supper in front of me, a Jesus with broken hands. What did Jesus do after He gave thanks?

“And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them.”⁴

He took it and gave thanks. Eucharisteo.

Then He broke it and gave.

How many times had I said it: “Eucharisteo precedes the miracle”? Thanksgiving precedes the miracle—the miracle of knowing all is enough. And how many times had I read it—how Jesus “took the seven loaves and the fish, and when he had given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and they in turn to the people”?⁵

Eucharisteo—Jesus embracing and giving thanks for His not-enough—that preceded the miracle. But why hadn’t I been awakened at the detonation of the revelation before? What was the actual miracle?

The miracle happens in the breaking.

Not enough was given thanks for, and then the miracle happened: There was a breaking and a giving—into a kind of communion—into abundant filling within community. The miracle happens in the breaking.

I wonder if . . . if this is the truth that might make sense of so many questions—of all the pain? Not that I have any groping idea yet what that means—or what it will take to find out. But something about this unexpected moment, this gift, makes me want to try?

If eucharisteo had been the first dare, the first journey of discovery into a life of letting God love me and counting all those ways, could this be a dare for the next leg of the journey, the way leading higher up and deeper in, daring me to let all the not-enough there in my open hands—let it be broken into more than enough? A dare to let all my brokenness—be made into abundance. Break and give away. The broken way.

What if this were the safest embrace—the way of being wanted and held and found in the midst of falling apart? What did Jesus do? In His last hours, in His abandonment, Jesus doesn’t look for comfort or try to shield Himself against the rejection; He breaks the temptation to self-protect—and gives the vulnerability of Himself. In the sharp edge of grief, Jesus doesn’t look for something to fill the broken and alone places; He takes and gives thanks—and then does the most countercultural thing: He doesn’t keep or hoard or hold on—but breaks and gives away. In the midst of intimate betrayal, He doesn’t defend or drown Himself in addicting distractions; He breaks and is given—He gives His life. Because what else is life-giving?

Out of the fullness of the grace that He has received, He thanks, and breaks, and gives away—and He makes a way for life-giving communion. A broken way.

How does this make any rational sense? It doesn’t. But maybe that’s the only way you ever know the greatest truths: The greatest truths always are the greatest paradox. And what could be a greater paradox than this? Out of feeling lavishly loved by God, one can break and give away that lavish love—and know the complete fullness of love.

The miracle happens in the breaking.

Somehow . . . the miracle of communion, oneness, wholeness, abundance, it happens in the exact opposite—in breaking and giving.

Somehow . . . the miracle, the intimacy, of communion comes through brokenness.

I run my fingers along the three cracks across the base of the sculpture.

What if a kind of communion is found in a trinity of brokenness—through broken places and broken people and being broken and given.

The hard clay feels like it’s shaping something here in my hands. Like Someone is touching the rawness of the stinging wound.

When our own brokenness meets the brokenness of the world, don’t we enter into and taste the brokenness and givenness of Christ?

And isn’t this is the actual abundant wholeness of communion?

Somehow I wonder if it’s in shattered places, with broken people, we are most near the broken heart of Christ. What if we only find our whole selves through this mystery—the mystery of death and resurrection, of brokenness and abundance? Could this be what it means to live in the encircling embrace of communion: brokenness giving way to abundance—and then abundance, which is then broken and given . . . gives way to an ever greater abundance? I think this—is the ring of the fellowship of communion. I move the broken pieces of the Last Supper closer together.

“WHAT MATTERS IN LIFE
IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU
BUT WHAT YOU REMEMBER
AND HOW YOU REMEMBER IT.”

Why are we afraid of broken things? I can think of a thousand raw reasons. But touch the broken and the hungry and the hurting and the thirsty and the busted, and you touch a bit of Christ. Why are we afraid of suffering? What if the abundance of communion is only found there in the brokenness of suffering—because suffering is where God lives? Suffering is where God gives the most healing intimacy.

What if . . . what if I made a habit of every day pressing my wounds into the wounds of Christ—could my brokenness be made into a healing abundance for the brokenness of the world? A kind of communion? Could all brokenness meet in the mystery of Christ’s brokenness and givenness and become the miracle of abundance? Wouldn’t that be good brokenness breaking bad brokenness?

The strength of the reality weakens the knees here a bit. A paradigm shift—more like an earthquake, like a foundation is breaking. Breaking open.

Is this way realest life—or is life really this way? Am I saving myself . . . or dying—or both? Oh, God.

Picking up the broken hands of Jesus rolling about the cracked Last Supper, those two clay hands suddenly look like the offering of a gift, like an opening in the palm of my hand.

Jesus had said to do this in remembrance of Me—“to do,” the Greek word poieo, a present imperative. The present tense indicates continuing action and can be translated “continue to do this.” Continue to do this literally, with bread and wine—and continuously do this with your life, with the bread of your moments, the wine of your days.

A preacher’s words had grabbed me by the lazy jugular: This is the one and only command Christ gave to do continually over and over again. This is the practice He gave for us to practice our faith, to practice again and again. In remembrance of Him. Continuously do this at the sink, at the stove, at the street corner, at the setting of the sun and at its rising again, and never stop continuously doing this.

Did I know anything about this? How was I doing the one command Christ asked to do continuously?

And continuously do what? Remember Me. We, the people with chronic soul amnesia, are called to be the re-membering people. The people who remember—and have their brokenness re-membered.

The shaft of light falling across the floor, falling across my feet—it’s fractured by shadows from beyond the window.

Remembrance—it comes from the Greek word anamnesis.

The only four times this word anamnesis is used in Scripture, it is in reference to the sacrifice that Christ made and is “remembered” in the Last Supper (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24, 25; Hebrews 10:3).

The little clay-sculpted loaves in my hands feel like a memory I’m starved for. Like a memory become real between fingers.

I had read it once that anamnesis was a term used to express an intangible idea moving into this material, tangible world. The philosopher Plato had used the word anamnesis to express a remembering that allowed the world of ideas to impact the world of our everyday, allowing something in another world to take form in this physical one.

That was the point: remembrance, anamnesis, does not simply mean memory by mental recall, the way you remember your own address—but it means to experience a past event again through the physical, to make it take form through reenactment. Like the way you remember your own grandma Ruth by how your great-aunt Lois laughs, how she makes butterscotch squares for Sunday afternoons too, how she walks in her Birkenstocks with that same soft heel as Grandma did, her knees cracking up the stairs the same way too. The way your great-aunt Lois acts makes you remember in ways that make your grandma Ruth real and physically present again now.

There’s a cupping grace to it—how remembering becomes a healing. We welcome remembering, we hold remembering, we let remembering wrap around us and carry us like a dance that need not end.

We are never abandoned when we hold on to remembrance.

Gabriel García Márquez had scratched it down once, like words sealed in a bottle and sent back to the world: “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”⁶

That’s it. What matters in your life is not so much what happens to you but what you happen to remember—and how that will influence how your life happens. What and how you remember will determine if your broken, dis-membered places will re-member you in your broken places.

So how to continuously re-member? Re-member your broken and busted heart, remember Him crucified and who you are and your real name: the Beloved.

“Continuously do this in remembrance of Me.”

The truth of anamnesis is “to make Me [Christ] present.” That’s the truth of what He was saying: “Continuously make Me present.” How in the world do you make Christ, who is always present, to be visibly present through this shattered chaos?

I turn the broken hands of Jesus over in mine. Be broken and given in a thousand common and uncommon ways. Live given a thousand times a day. Die a thousand little deaths. This feels like a dare that is choosing me. I don’t know if I know how to do this. I don’t know if I want to do this.

The sun pools. It’s like the clay Jesus with no hands ignites mine with light.

The floor lights, everything lights: there is no physical body of Christ here on earth but ours. We are now Christ’s only earthly body—and if we aren’t the ones broken and given, we are the ones who dis-member Christ’s body. Unless we are the ones broken and given, we incapacitate Christ’s body on earth.

Maybe—there is no breaking of bad brokenness unless His people become good brokenness.

Something burns like a funeral pyre up my throat. What do I know about the Via Dolorosa? What do I know of this suffering and sacrifice of the broken way?

It’s as though His broken hands beg me with a new begging dare.