Learning how to let life
break in, not apart
You will find one of my lovers tucked away in the Strid River Valley, blind and dilapidated. Its crumbling walls still soar, now roofless, into the sky. They take my heart with them, high into infinite space and mystery. The arches at either end of its nave float in the air. Bits of heaven are stuck between their mullions as they, too, point to a higher glory. The rows of massive windows with their stone colonnades waver, balancing themselves against beams of light. Through them, the eye glimpses a green and pleasant land. The entire structure hovers over the surrounding treetops like a disembodied spirit over its grave.
Looters plundered the stained glass from the windows long ago.
Their eyeballs removed, these empty
sockets open onto another world.
We owe this glory to Henry the Eighth, the English king best known for his six wives. Henry confiscated the abbeys when he became a Protestant and then sold them to boost the royal coffers. In most cases, he did not order their destruction. Local builders tore down roofs to extract lead and re-purposed stained glass and carved wood for the adornment of private homes and chapels.
British Romantics like William Wordsworth saw in their broken walls the inevitable disintegration of our bodies and in the riotous vegetation hanging from their cracks and empty casements nature’s ultimate triumph of life over death. They called this mixture of sorrow and ecstasy, the mortal with the immortal, an experience of the sublime. Beauty’s power over human souls is in its temporality. Nature will carry on after we are gone; moonlight will still bathe my lover’s scars. I will not be there to see it. We mere mortals are bound by our finiteness.
I think the Romantics were a bit short-sighted.
Their line of vision stops at the abbey walls, measures the space beyond by the space inside, and ascribes infinity wrongly to natural phenomena still governed by time’s arrow.
The beauty of brokenness, as Bolton Abbey shows, is in its sightlessness.
Broken people, like broken abbeys,
no longer belong to the world of the seeing.
They cannot depend on their eyes as guides. To survive, to endure, to soldier on, they must acknowledge themselves as places of brokenness. They must learn to wait, exposed to the disintegrative forces of nature and time and ravaged by other human beings. It is a greater, ongoing breaking, but in that space of waiting and breaking, something miraculous can occur.
Brokenness exposes more brokenness; emptiness grows into greater emptiness. Questions stop because there are no answers. There is only silence and breaking. Suddenly, in the immensity of that silence and emptiness, in the yearning for an end to broken human nature when there is no end, the broken person realizes that he or she has touched infinity.
The yearning for an end becomes the yearning for something that has no end. The loss of sight is replaced with the ability to sense the presence of what cannot be seen.
Living in emptiness is living in eternity.
I could never wish Henry’s rash acts undone. To repair these derelict structures would be to tear them from Infinity’s embrace. It would make them something less than what they have become. Similarly, trying to fix broken people is like defacing the singular beauty of these architectural ruins by re-covering them with roofs and re-enclosing them with stained glass. Our broken spaces should not be filled. We should work to keep them empty so that we might host this glorious transformation from the finite and mortal into the Infinite and Eternal.
The fine art of brokenness,
when all is said and done, is about
learning how to let life break in.
Nothing illustrates this better than my roofless, windowless, doorless lover. The British Romantics got it wrong. Brokenness is learning how to be inhabited by the Infinite—to be filled with the Spirit of God.