Spiritual illness or brokenness is all pervasive in our world, and it was ever thus. To a large degree, this goes unchallenged and most often undetected. Its symptoms, in my experience, ultimately boil down to the self-centered ego in its multiple manifestations, going on the rampage.
Inspired by the killer line, “broken people heal broken people,” I heard delivered recently in a movie, I just had to add my two cents’ worth on the Twitter.
To be clear, we’re talking here about the healing game, comrades, the spiritual healing game! Although hardly recognized nowadays in this beautiful but broken world, without doubt in the realm of the Spirit, this is a wonder to behold. And it is core misfit mystic business.
They must have walked the long-dark-night in order to find the healing light.
When my ongoing spiritual illness has been most acute, it’s been folks who can identify with this ego-centric brokenness through their own experience of the same, who have been the carriers of spiritual healing. They are the healing game compassion doers, who get spread just as far and wide as the suffering the rampaging ego produces. Simply put, they are everywhere. Like veritable walking, talking, listening angels of light ever ready to hold out a healing hand to fellow broken shore people.
What makes them special is that they are entirely ordinary and completely accessible. The only vital qualification that they possess is that they must have walked the long-dark-night in order to find the healing light.
Sign up hook-line-and-sinker with the exceedingly ordinary, warts-and-all, broken healer gang.
What if our real purpose here on earth is not to rest as much satisfaction and happiness out of this crazy life that we can seize with grasping hands along the way. But to sign up hook-line-and-sinker with the exceedingly ordinary, warts-and-all, broken healer gang. To make this viable, however, we need more than just brokenness. We have to get fully plugged in to the living God who is the source of all spiritual healing.
You may think this is just a fanciful notion of a wacky misfit mystic, but it’s not. I’ve written previously that we are all, without exception, created in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). This is a birth right supreme, a gift if you will, that can always be re-birthed, recovered, discovered anew. To a large degree, that’s what the spiritual journey is all about! And it’s open to everyone who wants to play in the: you heal me, while I heal you, broken people heal broken people, other-centered healing game.
One of my favorite quotes from the Dalai Lama is:
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Now, compassion means “to suffer with.” Therefore, it is entirely reasonable to translate the great man’s quote as meaning: If you want happiness, walk the talk of suffering with others and it will be yours in plentiful supply. Or you might say, practice being broken with the broken others, because broken people heal broken people! It’s a compassion doing healing thing, comrades, for this beautiful but broken ego ravaged world.