Broken Spirituality

   One of the most interesting metaphors that was introduced in the Media, Education and Evangelization course was that of broken spirituality: the sense of having a spiritual life that allows for one's sinful nature, or at least the ability to make mistakes. This is also perhaps the one area where most people struggle, because we tend to bifurcate our practices into good or bad, 'pure' or 'sinful', and this can sometimes be a judgment on oneself or others.  But an interesting question which might emerge from the dialogue on 'brokenness' is: is the broken aspect only a provisional form of forgiveness which allows the wheels to turn, as it were, or is the brokenness itself an essential aspect of spiritual life?
   I tend to depart from others in this answer, because I tend to think that 'broken' is not necessarily doing something wrong. It has more to do with what in Buddhist traditions is sometimes referred to as being in a dense thicket or a fog. If you think about it, it's not that one cannot see anything in a fog or a dense forest, or one's seeing itself is defective. Quite to the contrary, being in a fog, one suffers from seeing too much, so much that it obstructs a clear view of things. In the same way, the 'broken' aspect of spiritual life may not so much refer to something that is 'damaged', but more so could be about things which are deeply complicated by conflicting factors. Just as a stick will appear bent in the water unless one discerns the influence of water on light, so also things appear broken when they are enmeshed in deeply complicating factors which render things ambiguous and hard to discern.
    Brokenness, then, is an element of life where one fully acknowledges the creaturely, messy and interdependent aspects of existence. It's not about being defective and needing to be fixed, unless one subscribes to a kind of technical rationalist view of things. Rather, it relates to the tension between beholding complexity and being able to transcend complications through a larger view of all complexity. Ironically, to transcend one's brokenness is to enfold it within the arms of something greater yet inclusive.