broken.

One of my favorite songs from 2018 so far is "broken" by Lovelytheband. It is the refrain that gets me every time:​

​I like that you're broken
Broken like me
Maybe that makes me a fool
I like that you're lonely
Lonely like me
I could be lonely with you.

The solidarity of brokenness is palpable in this seemingly random meeting. The willingness to risk making a fool of oneself by finding comfort in another person as wounded as ourselves is what makes these words so powerful. 

Loneliness may also be shared. This is the twist that pulls me into this song: "I could be lonely with you." This is the hope of every friendship, drawing us into another person. This song could easily be a prayer for our times, and definitely an anthem for recent months in my own life. 

My reading of Belden Lane's The Solace of Fierce Landscapes engages the idea that brokenness is part of what it means to be human:

"Our culture substitutes the glamorous for the grotesque, denying this awkward vision of the imago Dei. Our definitions of the human rule out bizarre and broken forms. People dying of cancer possess none of the power or beauty that we assume to be the principal marks of human worth. If we define the person exclusively in terms of rational ability and productivity, someone with Down's syndrome will inevitably appear to be less than whole. The eccentric, the ugly, the abnormal lie beyond the measure of our societal norms. We're left with a stylized and truncated humanity, dangerously imagining itself complete."  (1998, page 33)

There is a wholeness that comes only through brokenness. Healing does not need to happen before the wound. There is hope in brokenness, entered into through finding oneself alone and honestly appearing before the other. In this moment of clarity, loneliness finds a friend, and brokenness begins to collapse into something more complete.