Heartbreak: Lent Two

Our small Lenten community this week sought to accompany the Compassionate One through heartbreak that is ours and his.  We considered the words of poet David Whyte on Heartbreak, (read below) and laid our ear against the heart of Jesus.  We could hear it beat, we could hear it break.

We know heartbreak in our own life but can we imagine the great break in the heart of Jesus, the break into which we ourselves are poured?  Can we bear this quality of Love?  Can we be vulnerable to it?  Can we attend the One who follows the path of our lives and takes that path into his heart so that whereever we find ourselves on the road we know ourselves in the heart of Love.

We listened to this breaking through the words of Matthew 26:36 -40.   As we found ourselves committed to the Lenten Journey, we sought this text of heartbreak near the end of its path in order to draw us closer, heart to heart, to Compassion.

You can read Matthew 26: 36-40 in the Revised Standard Version here .

You can enter it more deeply through this guided meditation.

Heartbreak, says poet David Whyte, is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control. [ . . .] heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life.  [. . .]  
Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong; [ . . . ] Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, [ . . .] but heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way. [. . . ] Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is not alternative path.  It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.   (Whyte, Consolations).