“There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen.
Eventually, we nearly all take a reluctant stroll down the boulevard of broken dreams. If you’ve stumbled into this unwelcome place, comrades, take heart, it might just be the best thing that has ever happened to you. For above all, this is the space where the mercy of the living God freely streams, to heal broken wings that this old life has all but smashed to smithereens.
The boulevard of broken dreams is where spiritual paradox reigns supreme. For what could be more paradoxical than needing to be broken before you can get truly healed, lost before you’re found, blind before you can really see? The divine spiritual paradox is that frequently it’s not when we’re all dressed to kill—in our Sunday best—that we get most plugged into the living God. Rather, it’s when we reach the nadir of our lowest ebb, often broken beyond repair.
As Joseph Campbell says:
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
Nothing is more resistant to this low point than the ego-centric, self-centered, self-sufficient, spiritual disease that we all carry—often unknowingly—deep within ourselves. Indeed, it is this all-pervasive spiritual disorder that lands us usually unwillingly, right smack in the middle of the boulevard of broken dreams in the first place.
Once there, however, there is an opportunity for radical change. Those brittle wings of self-sufficient, self-centeredness, can get replaced with shimmering new wings of other-centered love that allow us to fly high, really high, up into the sky of peace with purpose!
Admittedly, these new wings can take a while to grow, but make no mistake when they do, they’re covered with the most glittering of all feathers, the feathers of compassion. Compassion means to suffer with the other, and it is the virtue to end all virtues. However, it is born of, and inseparable from the most vital virtue know to humanity that comes straight from the living Spirit, non-other than Agape love, which is without exception other-centered and unconditional.
Now what’s not to like about that? Shimmering feathers of compassion on gleaming wings of other-centered agape love! All of which comes undiluted from the living Divine who dwells without and deep within, and gives life and love everything.
Joseph Conrad said:
In order to move others deeply, we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried way beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
That’s just what the boulevard of broken dreams does. It carries us way out beyond our normal sensibilities and the constraints of the ego-self. Once that happens, we’ve entered the space where we can be re-winged and given a new purpose in li
There’s a brand spanking new set of tailor-made wings on offer, comrades, coupled with a God given primary purpose just waiting for each one of us. Once we find our wings and don them, we can fly high, helping other broken folks get their shiny new wings of compassion and other-centered agape love, fully airborne, too. Now it just doesn’t get any better than that!