Topic: spirituality
Nancy Biele, MSW, spoke to a group of survivors of clergy sexual abuse (mostly Catholic) at a Linkup conference back in 1994. I was in the audience.
Nancy talked about the beauty of being broken, though she never came close to minimizing the pain and suffering. I have often gone back to her illustration. In great detail, she described a gorgeous urn that was shattered into a thousand pieces. It's heart-broken owner decided that she could not part with it, so began putting it back together piece by piece. Finally, she sat back and looked at the finished piece, with all of the cracks. It had taken on a new shape and still had jagged edges. It really didn't resemble the old treasured urn at all. Yet, she admired the work of art that she had put together, piece by piece, herself. Suddenly, it dawned on her that she now loved the new piece far more than she ever loved the old.
How I can relate to the artist, though my "urn" was far from re-assembled in 1994!
What I've come to realize is that I need to sometimes take a hammer to parts that need to be re-examined and put back together again. Yet the sense of wholeness and balance remains, for I am comfortable knowing that I will always "know in part" and operate in a state of incompleteness.
