The Broken- Open Heart Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap by Parker J. Palmer edit

The Broken-
Open Heart
Living with Faith and Hope
in the Tragic Gap
by Parker J. Palmer

If reconciliation is going to happen... there must be people who are willing to live in
the tragic gap and help the two sides understand each other.

Becoming Civilized
overcoming the tyranny of the primitive brain

aspire to a gospel way of life.

When primitive brain dominates, Christianity goes
over to the dark side

first calling is to love one
another

When the primitive brain is in charge,
humility,
compassion,
forgiveness,
and the vision of a
beloved community
do not stand a chance.

primitive brain contains the hardwiring for
the infamous “fight or flight”

danger
real
or imagined, that hardwiring induces a state of
tension that we want to resolve right now,

either
by eliminating its source or by removing ourselves
from its reach

Learning how to hold
life’s tensions in the responsive heart instead of the reactive
primitive brain is key

What are some of the cultural inventions meant to help us
hold tension in a life-giving, not death-dealing way?

Language

allows us to
respond to tension with words instead of actions

words... can be inquisitive and exploratory

Can
suffering
become life-
giving rather
than death-
dealing?

Language leads to the possibility
of understanding, and thus to a true resolution of tension,
something that is never achieved by fighting or fleeing,

arts are a civilizing institution
(the arts)
share(s)
animation by the
tension between their elements, a tension that not only
attracts the eye, the ear, and the mind, but draws us into the
experience art offers, the reality it has to share. Entering into
the tension of great art, and allowing that tension to pull our
hearts and minds open, is

a time-honored way of becoming
more human.

Education
designed to help
us hold tension creatively.

teaches us to
respect that which is “other” than our experience, our
thoughts, our certainties, our world.

helps
us embrace complexity, find comfort in ambiguity, entertain
contradictory ideas, grasp both poles of a paradox.

(Autodidact) ❤️🍀

challenges
the primacy of the primitive brain, drawing on the larger
capacities of the human self to hold the multiple tensions of
thought, and life, in ways that invoke the better angels of our
nature.

Religion and the Broken Heart

Wh e n t h e p r i m i t i v e b rain takes charge we are
in thrall to the fallen angels, and the outcome is
altogether predictable: we contribute to the
dynamic of violence that constantly threatens life itself.

Why
do we persist in trying to “solve” problems with violence,
despite the fact that violence threatens our survival?

key function
of the spiritual life: violence arises when we do not know what else
to do with our suffering.

from... brain stem/brain stem to policy
options in the White House and the Congress.

Can suffering become life-giving rather than death-dealing?

the great traditions
at their best aim at helping us hold tension and the suffering
it brings in ways that enhance spiritual creativity and build the
beloved community. They do so by focusing on the inevitable
experience of heartbreak.

two ways for the heart to break—the core of our sense of self.
the core of our sense of self.

The heart can be broken into a thousand shards,
sharp-edged fragments that sometimes become
shrapnel aimed at the source of our pain

the broken heart
an unresolved wound that we carry with us
for a long time

sometimes trying to
“resolve it” by inflicting the same wound on others.

Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart
“broken open” into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold
one’s own and the world’s pain and joy.

heartbreak... a source of com-
passion and grace

as people enlarge their capacity for empathy and
their ability to attend to the suffering of others.

Hasidic tale. A
disciple asks the rebbe, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these
words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these
holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers, “It is because
as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy
words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts.
And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the
words fall in.”⁄

Sufi master
Hazrat Inayat Khan: “God breaks the heart again and again
and again until it stays open.”¤

a heart that can be opened so fully it can hold every-
thing from despair to ecstasy

spir-
itual shadows of both masochism and sadism.

learn how to stand
in the tragic gap with faith and hope.

the gap between what is and what could and should
be, the gap between the reality of a given situation and an
alternative reality we know to be possible because we have
experienced it.

That alternative reality

I can hold the tension between reality
and possibility in a life-giving way, standing in the gap and
witnessing with my own life to another way of living, slowly
and patiently calling myself and my part of the world toward
something better. But if I cannot abide that tension, I will
try to resolve it by collapsing into one pole or the other—the
same quick “resolve the tension” reflex that creates the fight-
or-flight response.

collapse into the reality of what is, I am likely to
sink into corrosive cynicism: “Community is impossible, so I’m
going to focus on getting my piece of the action and let the devil
take the hindmost

When I collapse into pure possibility, I am
likely to float off into irrelevant idealism: “Oh, how lovely it
would be if….” Corrosive cynicism and irrelevant idealism may
sound as if they are poles apart, but they take us to the same
place: out of the gap and out of the action, out of those places
we might make a life-giving contribution if we knew how to
hold the tension.

The gap is “tragic
Shakespearian sense (oh that "shakes the heron" rag it's so elegant so intelligent ~T. S. Eliot)
inevitable, inexorable, inescapable

there will always be a gap between what is and
what could and should be

When
we do not know how to live creatively in that infi-
nite regress, we cannot live in a way that brings
new life into the gap.

how do we learn to live that way?

spiritual practices

help us tran-
scend the primitive brain and hold tension in
our hearts, allowing it to break our hearts open
rather than apart?

communities
are the context in which some of this learning could and
should be happening.

helping church members understand the impor-
tance of learning to hold tension

if a congregation does
not embody this practice in its own life, its own “hidden cur-
riculum,” there is not a sermon or a lesson plan on the planet
that can change the dance.

being around
love in action

being around others who
keep learning how to do it and invite us to try it for ourselves.

that “hidden curriculum"

, Jack Nicholson movies😁
Carol Kane movies

But the misery rarely ends with the vote because the
Heart-
break can
become a source
of compassion
and grace

process is essentially adversarial, which is how the primitive
brain wants it.

When fifty-one percent can tell forty-nine
percent where to get off, the latter may try to subvert the
majority will for months, years, decades, or generations to
come.

decisions by consensus
different “habits of
the heart.”

decision
(a different and more reach-
able norm than requiring everyone to feel positive about it).

listen to one another in a col-
laborative, not adversarial manner

affirm in “the opposition’s” viewpoint—because if we don’t,
we will stay stuck.

learn that doing so
can open us, individually and collectively, to a new and better
way of resolving the issue at hand.

Dropping
information into people’s heads will not do the trick, nor will
telling them what to think and believe

dialogical teaching and learning, in which people are
required to listen to differences, hold ambiguity, and learn how
to engage in creative disagreement challenge the dominance
of the primitive brain and help us learn to hold tension in the
capacious mind and heart.

transformation
transformation of congre-
gational practices go transformed individuals, clergy
and lay, who have spiritual disciplines that help them
stand in the tragic gap with faith and hope

turning this “vale of tears” into a “vale of soul-making (growing)

“world of pains and troubles” ~John Keats/a
school of the Spirit, the heart, the soul.

learn to acknowledge and name our suffering honestly and
openly to ourselves and to others.

“becoming vul-
nerable”—

a hard thing to do in a culture that does not respect
the shadow, where even among friends we are at constant risk
of someone trying to “fix us up,” an act that drives the suf-
fering soul back into hiding no matter how well-intended.

find a trustworthy friend or two who knows what
it means simply to receive and bear witness to our pain.

named and claimed our suffering,
we must move directly to the heart of it, allowing ourselves to feel
the pain fully, rather than doing what our culture teaches—
numbing it with anesthetics, fleeing from it with distractions,
or fighting it off by blaming and attacking the external source.

The only way to transform suffering into something life-giv-
ing is to enter into it so deeply that we learn what it has to
teach us and come out on the other side.

cre-
ate a micro-climate of quietude around ourselves, allowing the
turmoil to settle and an inner quietude to emerge, so “that of God
within us” can help us find our way through. Nurtured by
silence, we can stop taking our leads from the voices of ego
and world and start listening instead to the still, small voice
of all that is Holy.

Bonhoeffer called “costly grace"

pearl of great price—a chance to participate in God’s con-
tinuing creation of the beloved community.