Internally, Logos gathers knowledge from the distant reaches of the understanding, moves it downwards toward the heart. In its heartfelt form, knowledge becomes wisdom. But it doesn’t do that without a dying of the ego. When the ego dies, we learn precisely what we can change, and what we can’t. “Broken-heartedness” is a term the culture uses to describe what I mean.
It can be said truthfully that Broken Heartedness is the wife of the Logos. On a spiritual and emotional level, people both long for the infinite and struggle with finitude. Broken heartedness is the result, and it’s a permanent fixture in every consciously-lived life. When we don’t run from broken heartedness, our learning processes are based on powerlessness and realization, rather than power and reason. We can do a little bit of work to dispose ourselves to the truth, but it is, in the end, revealed.
I’ve said it before: The nearest thing to mu (the transcendent “negative principle”) in Catholicism is “Logos.” That is to say, Logos means that we have a share in God’s being, but only in the finite way of which deteriorating creation can take advantage. It means death and suffering, enlightenment and heaven—these aren’t mutually exclusive. The elements of Logos that break us down: limitation, deterioration and death—these are just the aspects of Logos we can’t change. There’s an individual, internal aspect of this, and an external, social one. Ultimately there’s an important point to be made about the relationship of “being” to “feeling.” As the Logos is large enough to accept broken heartedness, so being is large enough to accept feelings of all kinds. Living on the level of the logos, on the level of being, we can more easily accept all of the feelings associated with broken heartedness.
Here’s the point. In terms of what we can change, then, broken-heartedness is the core of the Logos. On an individual level, the best image for this comes from the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah: From Jeremiah “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name’, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” And from Isaiah “Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’”
This finds a resonance in Zen: In Case 1 of the Mumonkan, Mumon said that Mu was like a red-hot iron ball each practitioner has stuck in his throat. This iron ball cannot be swallowed even with effort. Commentators have said that the way to deal with the situation is to own the discomfort—to transmute the discomfort by accepting it.
In short, Mu may well serve the same function Paul ascribed to God in Hebrews 12:29: “Our God,” he said, “is a consuming fire.” Broken-heartedness burns, at the very least, and broken-heartedness is God himself, at the most. On an individual level, both “working on the logos” and “allowing the logos to work on us” means not running from the discomfort of his presence.
But there’s more. Externally, broken heartedness is the amount of distance built into our longing for connection. If one is to be a bodhisattva or a saint, coming to terms with broken heartedness is important. We are not in control, and the sooner we realize it the better. Broken-heartedness is particularly involved in intimacy. In short, its the paradox encapsulated by Teilhard de Chardin’s thought: as the french theologian says, “union individuates.”
The best biblical images for this are two: first, Saint Dismas. Second, the Gerasene Demoniac. Saint Dismas was one of two thieves who defended Jesus against the abuse of the other. In all four Gospels, he is the only person simply to call our Lord “Jesus.” And as intimately as he knew the final sufferings of Jesus, (on account of being crucified next to him,) he was unable to give the savior as much as an encouraging chuck on the shoulder. His entire earthly friendship with Jesus was one of distance.
Post-exorcism, the entire vocation of the Gerasene Demoniac was one of distance. Recall that the demoniac, as Jesus was disembarking, wanted to join him. The Lord wouldn’t have it. “Go home to your friends,” he said, “and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.”
In romantic relationships, broken-heartedness has two halves. Last week, I spoke last week about the movie “When love is not enough.” In the movie, Lois Wilson gradually must content herself with being a help in, but not the end of Bill’s spiritual search. In sober coupledom, there is always a need to maintain the boundaries that guard against codependent abdication of the self for the sake of the other.
The second half of broken-heartedness is the tension between being two people and wanting to return to the primordial state of being one flesh. During the Holocaust, Etty Hillesum wrote “Perhaps that is the only real way of kissing a man. Not just out of sensuality, but also from a desire to breathe, for a moment, from a single mouth.”
At the very least, to be a saint or a bodhisattva is to act as if we are “one flesh.” Thich Nhat Hanh uses the image of hitting your thumb in the initial stages of hammering a nail. He says something along the lines of “the hand that is well immediately cradles the hand that is in pain” and says that’s how we ought to be for each other.
Jesus indicates that his way of loving has fully integrated broken-heartedness. “As the Father has loved me,” he says, “So I have loved you. Remain in my Love.” It is true that this is the kind of bond in which Jesus says “The Father and I are one” but Jesus cry of “why have you forsaken me” is no less important. Being loved, therefore is a larger reality than feeling unloved. Being united is a larger reality than feeling separate.
There’s an oft-repeated story from Catholic Social Teaching types. I’ve written about this before: A young man goes for a week to serve the poor. The poverty at his service site is extreme, and striking. After a few days, he approaches his program director and says “We’ve really got to do something about this!” The program director smiles and says “Maybe what we’ve got to do is simply allow it to break our hearts.”
This is what I mean. Working on Logos is to remain broken-hearted. Allowing the Logos to work on us is to acknowledge that broken heartedness does good, creative work. It helps intellect give way to intuition. As the Russian mystic (simply named "the pilgrim") said "we're able to descend with the mind, into the heart." The hard work is staying there. If we're equal to it, it will be by the help of grace alone.
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