"The idea of taking what was broken, what many would consider useless, and transforming it into something more lovely haunted me on my return airplane trip to Boston. The poet Edward A. Robinson says that 'most things break,' including people. We all break down at some point in our lives either with physical or psychic illness. This is a fact of life. But great things can emerge from such breakage. I think of the poet Theodore Roethke who suffered a nervous breakdown but on recovery said, 'That wasn't a breakdown but a break-up!' because he became a saner and more whole person, perhaps even a greater poet. Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus after an illness and a spiritual crisis. John of the Cross wrote his greatest poetry while in prison, as monks of his order tried to break his spirit. The poet Francis Thompson, broken by his addiction to opium, emerged from his dark night to compose his luminous spiritual autobiography, The Hound of Heaven. T. S. Eliot emerged from his brokenness chronicled in The Waste Land to write his spiritual masterpiece of faith, The Four Quartets. C. S. Lewis left behind his atheism and loneliness to write Surprised by Joy. Dorothy Day, out of her brokenness, converted to Catholicism, and founded the Catholic Worker movement and later wrote The Long Loneliness. . . .
"We are all God's prodigal children. We have the potential to transform our brokenness into something quite beautiful simply by returning home to the Father. No vociferous mea culpa is necessary. The father sped to his son before he heard one word of contrition.
"And now I come to Henri Nouwen. Of all the spiritual writers I have read in my life, no one understands brokenness so acutely, compassionately, and wisely. He deeply delved into his own woundedness, so profoundly that he could subsequently refer to himself as a 'wounded healer.' By walking with Nouwen, I've come to understand his wounding and how he transcended it. He is a model for all of us when he says that our wounds are our greatest gift. If we accept them in the right spirit, they break us into beauty."
