Wholeness and Brokenness: A Conversation

Several years ago I had a conversation with a friend about wholeness, brokenness, and healing. Dr. Jackie Stinton is a psychologist and spiritual director who has thought a lot about these issues, and our interaction helped me clarify my own thoughts about them. Join us as we talk about these things, and make space for your own inner dialogue that arises in response to our conversation.

Jackie: It seems to me that part of deepening our humanity involves embracing our brokenness. Some call this sin or alienation from God while others describe it as being fragmented. How do you understand human brokenness?

David: Let’s start with wholeness, and then brokenness is easy to understand. You speak of the importance of embracing our brokenness. That embrace of our brokenness is, I think, the essence of wholeness. We often respond to our longing for wholeness with a quest for perfection. We try to fix the things in us that we sense are broken. We attempt to be less critical or more loving, to overcome our addictions, or eliminate our fears, anxieties, and depression. But wholeness is not perfection. It is, as you say, embracing brokenness as part of human existence. 

Jackie: How does this relate to sin?

David: Sin is a religious name for our mis-alignment and alienation from the fundamental truths of our being – particularly, our being in the Indwelling One who is the deepest truth of our existence. Lacking this awareness, we feel separate from a distant God and from all other beings – animate and inanimate. And we fail to experience oneness within ourselves, in relationship to others and the world, and in relation to God. This is much deeper than morality. It’s more a matter of ontology. It’s a description of our state of being.

Jackie: How did we lose our awareness of our being-in-God?

David: We lose our awareness of our being-in-God whenever we fail to pay attention to the witness of our spirits and do not trust the inner authority of our hearts. Our hearts sense wholeness and presence, and our spirits bear witness to the abiding presence of the Spirit. They point us toward the larger places of belonging in which we exist and in which we find our wholeness. But any theology that is founded on our separation from God and fails to proclaim the truth of the Indwelling God will make these things very hard to know.

Jackie: What do you mean by not being at one within ourselves?

David: First let’s look at what it means to be at one within ourselves. It’s a feeling of alignment – all dimensions of our existence being in harmony. Kierkegaard called this purity of heart and described it as the ability to will one thing. We know little or nothing of this singularity and radical alignment. Rather than being motivated by a single overarching desire that reflects the truth of our self-in-Christ, our desires fragment us and push us around like a small boat on a stormy sea. Our hearts are divided, and even our seemingly most pure motives are shot through and through with impurities. This duplicity lies at the core of our sense of alienation from ourselves. It’s an alienation that is rooted in inauthenticity and falsity. And it means that we are not at one with ourselves and consequently, not at home within ourselves.

Jackie: If God’s desire is to make us more fully human and whole, why do we so often resist knowing our brokenness? 

David: Shame lies at the core of our resistance to knowing and embracing our brokenness. It is being caught in God’s garden with your pants down and a half-eaten forbidden fruit in your hands just at the moment when you hear God calling your name. That’s naked vulnerability – something that is so intolerable that it quickly resolves into shame. When we experience it, we grasp anything available to try and cover our nakedness. Shame and vulnerability make us want to run and hide.

Jackie: Vulnerability is often understood as weakness or being defenceless and susceptible to attack. But it seems you are talking about vulnerability as uncovering ourselves, or as willingness and courage to be seen and known in our inner depths.

David: The vulnerability I am speaking of is intentional, never circumstantial. It is a choice, a willing allowing of ourselves to remain undefended at a point of acute rawness and fragility. It is choosing not to run and hide from our nakedness. It’s choosing openness and trust. It’s a vote for our true self and is always, therefore, at the expense of our false ways of being in the world.

Jackie: What does it mean to speak of something being healed?

David: Perhaps the best way to recognize that something in our inner world has been healed is when we are able to move on with our lives and beyond whatever had been blocking our continuing growth and development. Healing doesn’t remove the issue and circumstances associated with it from our history. That’s magic, not healing. Healing manifests itself when the energy we were previously investing in defending against the threat or wound can now be put into living our lives. We know we are healed when we can once again – or perhaps for the very first time – enter the flow of the river of life.

Jackie: I think of healing as a life journey towards greater wholeness, as moving through our brokenness rather than simply accepting it. This means we can still put our “broken” energy into our lives and relationships, but as we receive healing we experience deepening capacity for life and relationships. What do you think of this?

David: That’s a great way to describe it. We are all broken; wounding is inevitable. The only alternative to ever experiencing a broken heart is to have a shrink-wrapped, shrivelled heart. Daring to love may involve risk, but the costs to the soul of refusing the openness and vulnerability of love are much greater. Cautious living has its own costs, and they are very high. So, we can’t avoid wounds. But fortunately, our wounds are essential to our journey toward greater wholeness.

I love the way you describe investing our “broken” energy into our lives. It is not only the only energy we have, but in the midst of our woundedness, it is all we usually experience. Brokenness is the soil out of which we can move toward wholeness. It provides the vulnerability that makes us open, and without that openness we can never experience either healing or wholeness.

Jackie: So healing is learning to live life out of brokenness rather than trying to pretend we don’t have it.

David: This is Henri Nouwen’s notion of the wounded healer – our capacity to help others not despite our own brokenness but precisely because of it. Wholeness doesn’t come from eliminating brokenness but trusting openness to life in the midst of it. Our wounds are a gift because they make us aware of our lack of wholeness and can be a threshold to healing and further wholeness.

Jackie: We all carry our brokenness with us, and as you say, there will always be more brokenness in our lives than can be healed. Perhaps the challenge is experiencing it rather than defending against the pain.

David: I agree. We have to embrace our brokenness if we are to avoid being stuck in it. That embrace is not resignation. It’s acceptance. 

Jackie: That reminds me of the poem, The Guest House by Rumi, which speaks of offering hospitality to whatever emotions we experience. This hospitality sounds like a basic principle of psychospiritual healing.

David: It absolutely is. It’s the things about ourselves that we do not accept that become the source of our greatest bondage.

Jackie: This takes us back to our sense of alienation from ourselves and to living out of our adaptive but false selves – both clearly limiting our freedom and movement into greater wholeness. How would you describe bondage in the psychological and spiritual realms?

David: Bondage is a lack of freedom. This is why increased inner freedom is one of the most important markers of genuine healing.

Jackie: Most of us are unaware that we are making the choice to be unaware. Consequently, we have a limited awareness of the freedom available to us.

David:  This brings us back to our lack of awareness being the soil out of which our sense of alienation arises. Lack of awareness is the ground of our dis-ease and brokenness. But you are so right that we seldom think of it as a choice. We blame our circumstances rather than see that it is precisely in the midst of those circumstances that we face the choice of awareness or oblivion. Choosing awareness opens up to finding God in the midst of our present realities. And it opens up the possibilities of us growing in and through them rather than simply reacting to them. Awareness is the key to so much. This is why it may just be the single most important spiritual practice.

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2022 © Dr. David G. Benner

• Why do I resist embracing my brokenness?

• What do I know of the freedom and wholeness that can come from embracing, rather than defending against, brokenness?

• What invitations to wholeness do I sense in this present moment?

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For more on healthy spirituality, see Dr. Benner’s book, Soulful Spirituality: Becoming Fully Alive and Deeply Human (Brazos Press, 2011).

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