When a friend was told she was brave to bring her Spode dinner plate, filled with homemade cookies, to a church potluck she responded, "Everything has a life. I broke a plate last Christmas and I've already broken one this year. It's okay, everything has a life." For my sister, with whom I am bound by the bonds of perfection, this was a big deal.
Our family Christmas tree sits in the corner of the living room which in the imagination of a 10 yr. old boy is the perfect hideout. He even trimmed the lower branches to ease the way as he slide in on his belly. I was in the back of the house when I heard the crash. Shards of broken ornaments were visible among the unbreakable ones when we righted the tree. My son was howling in his bedroom anticipating the impending doom. After taking a moment to exhale and regroup, my husband and I calmly called him out and asked him to help redress the tree and clean up the broken pieces. I explained that for years the cats had been knocking over our trees by leaping up their trunks; if we spared their lives surely we could spare his. As I helped him clean up I was relieved to discover that the broken ones were not really of great value to me, until I found the ballerina. It was one of a matched set. The cream colored porcelain figures I had given to my daughter and her cousin when they were both taking ballet while I was in seminary. I loved the shop I had bought them in and I loved that time in my life. It was the most precious of all the ornaments I've collected over the years. Everything has a life, everything, I said to myself as I picked up the armless, headless ballerina. Out she went, to buried in some landfill somewhere for all of eternity with the bones from the last night's wings.
The boundaries of this temporary life are pretty clear. We live life, make life, save life, give life, take life, spare life, and negotiate life. The stuff that surrounds us gives joy or misery, creates energy or uses it, prolongs life or ends it, enriches life or limits it, feeds us, entertains us, promotes healthy life or damages it, intrigues, threatens, teaches, thrills and challenges us. But only for a little while. At the end of the day, us and all the rest either perishes, corrodes, rots, gets lost, or breaks.
While this might seem a fatalistic perspective, it is actually freeing. When people we love die, relationships we value come to an end, and things we treasure break we are reminded of the finite nature of all creation. Whether staggering or simply stinging, these painful moments give us pause to appreciate both the imperfect nature of life and the limited power and potential of our stuff. We focus intensely on what endeared us to those people or bonds or things in the first place. They are rediscovered and deeply appreciated even as they are passing away, or falling apart, or fading from sight.
The essence of this focused appreciation was captured by Christ in the meal he shared with those closest to him just before his arrest and execution. "This is my body, broken for you." For us to truly understand what we have been given, the gain, first we have to experience it as lost, broken, undone, dead and buried. The gain is a window that looks out on all that is and ever has been. A window that sees us and our place in the eternal flow of God's beloved creation. The gain is being seen not as perfect creatures, but broken, as Christ was broken. He, like us, was broken by being born, broken by breathing, giving, trying, losing and dying. The gift we have received is the renegotiation of expectations; the gift of a new starting point. We start out grounded in temporal brokenness and move toward eternal wholeness, but never perfection. Perfection doesn't belong to us, it belongs to God.
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