Beyond the Broken Heart

“What would I see up there?” I asked my friend Jim.

“Um…God?” he replied.

Maybe he said it more definitively: “God.”

We had just wrapped up a meeting (more about that later) and were all going our separate ways. But the day was beautiful, in an impossible-to-ignore way, and straight ahead, behind the house, a steep, well-trodden hill beckoned. Jim had hiked to the top once and was highly recommending it.

I was on the verge of entering my car to drive away, but I impulsively  grabbed my walking stick and turned around. I thought I’d go just a short distance up. Shoved along by curiosity and lured by wonder, I kept going further, past a shed and a tractor, through intermittent woods, pausing at a redwood tree that appeared to have been used as a scratching post for a bear, beyond a field of luminous green grass, ascending to a ridge with long views of the landscape.

And Jim was right. I saw God.

I saw God in the bluest bluebird bursting from the brush, in the lacy ceanothus blooming on the ridge, in the tufts of white clouds and the porcelain-blue sky, in a shaft of sunlight filtered through the sycamores and the dappled ground beneath. A stray brown leaf was carried by a passing breeze, a butterfly darted from the chapparal, and the hum and chitter of life thrummed against a majestic silence. The light filled me until perhaps I disappeared, and I saw God unequivocally in the grace of the world I beheld.

There was magic in that morning. Ironically, I had started out distraught. It’s getting to us, the cruelty and senselessness, the relentless assault. Two of my own siblings are already being directly hurt, but I’m concerned for us all, and I woke up with a sense of foreboding and sadness. As Cory Booker said, “If America hasn’t broken your heart, then you don’t love her enough.” I have discovered that I love her even more than I knew, this flawed and aspirational place, and my heart is broken indeed.

But as a partial remedy to our shared anguish, my friends and I are organizing a community gathering and fundraiser, an afternoon of music and spoken word, and there were songs to be practiced. So we hauled our heavy hearts and met as planned, and I listened as the voices blended in harmony and the lyrics told the stories of the journeys to America, the righting of wrongs, the hopes and ideals still shining. Maybe God was there too, in the music and the friendship. I listened as old songs were reshaped and reborn, as the singing became yearning and prayer, as sunlight slanted through a window and the world shimmered in its greenness beyond, and we were all connected in our love and commitment. I felt a kind of healing then, and the broken places stitched together stronger than they were.

It isn’t easy…is it? Suddenly it’s harder than we expected. Suddenly the days arrive with an infusion of disbelief and revulsion if we dare to look, and we’re no longer young but we can’t sit this out.  We find our ways to fight, and sometimes song and poetry help fortify the spirit, but it’s more than just kumbaya moments: we will be persistent, brave, and strong.

And sometimes in a blizzard of blossoms, we remember we are blessed. We are visited, in the words of Mary Oliver, by the strengthening throb of amazement.

Sometimes we even see God.