“How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?”part 3
Mending from organizational and cultural heartbreaks
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? Part 3
Has your heart ever been broken by external things you had no control over?
Broken by things like discrimination, the church, authorities, cultural values, political decisions, or marginalizing? This heartbreak may feel different from personal relationship breakups, but it has lasting effects on our hearts all the same.
Let me share a few stories of external heartbreaking experiences I’ve had that involved more public shame than private pain, and the process I used in mending these experiences. When things get public, there is a different level of pain because our story is more open to others’ judgments of us. My process of mending was therefore different in these situations since I needed to not only discover and claim my own truths but also gently assert those truths amid conflict or threats.
I’ll share these experiences with you, but first, let’s return to this familiar song that speaks so directly to the heart-breaking experience. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” sung by Al Green or the Bee Gees, both classics. Sing or hum along! Here are the first three verses.
I can think of younger days when living for my life
Was everything a man could want to do
I could never see tomorrow
I was never told about the sorrow.
And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
Tell me, how can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go 'round?
How can you mend this broken man? Yeah
How can a loser ever win?
Somebody please help me mend my broken heart
And let me live again, la-la, la-la, la.
Four stories of healing
These stories address how my heart was broken by things that were imposed on me from authorities or culture, some of which also wounded my soul. The four areas I will address are the church of my childhood and its theology, the unbending tenets of social activism, personal discrimination as a woman, and finding my voice in the fractious world of the arts and creativity.
Healing with my childhood religion, God, and the church
My childhood church expressed deep family values, reached out to many other parts of the world as missionaries, cared deeply for individual people in the congregation, and gave time and talents to marginalized people through missions in my city. The commitment to youth was enormous. We had so many activities we hardly had any time to get into trouble😊 I was even given chances to lead groups and go on several youth trips. I knew scripture backwards and forwards and I could name all the books of the Bible in 30 seconds.
On the other side of the coin was fear, shame, and threats of hell if we did step out of line. The theology was of personal recrimination for our behavior. And the constant judgment of God was hanging over our heads. The leaders were kind, caring and well-meaning and yet there were rules about everything especially out-of-bounds behavior that was mostly the fun stuff of teenage life (movies, dancing, card playing). I did my bit of rebelling by asking questions but was daunted because the beliefs I questioned had the overlay of being from God and therefore were not arguable. There was no one thing that hurt me, as I recall, but the overall result was the absence of God’s love and acceptance over time.
Three experiences helped mend my broken and shame-based heart, over the decades it took to name and mend my childhood faith. Probably the most important was a conversation with my spiritual director in which I was reiterating my childhood religious experiences of God and she said, in her gentle yet clear voice, “I’d like to suggest that you fire that God and find another.” I was shocked. No one had ever even come close to that suggestion before. Part of me wondered if I’d be punished for even thinking it. But I knew it held truth that I needed to embrace. So I did. I fired that God and, over time, found a deep and lasting relationship with a God of love, (and no judgment-ever). This, alone, was a huge change. A wise person suggested to me recently that we stop blaming God for what his people do in God’s name. That was so refreshing—and such good counsel!
The second healing experience was finding a theology of God and Jesus that I could embrace and practice in my personal life. A clergy friend and I searched for alternative theologies that would match what we experienced and believed. We found Narrative Theology, which essentially invites us to find our lives in God’s life and God’s life in our life. It asserts that God (In Jesus) has experienced everything that we have and is with us in all that life brings, caring for us and strengthening us, especially in the small details, the salt and pepper moments of our lives. There is nothing we can do that would cause God to abandon us or stop loving us.
My third experience of mending was reframing who Jesus is for me, apart from what my church taught to me over the years. To do this I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of people. Someone along the way suggested that I bypass all of that and go directly to Jesus and ask him who he is. So, I did. I said to Jesus, “Who are you?” Jesus replied, gently, “Who do you want me to be?” I said, “Well, I’d choose brother, friend or lover.” All of those were very different from my childhood messaging and I wondered how Jesus would reply. Jesus said, “I like all three. Which would you prefer?” I said, “How about all three?” Jesus said “Great.” Now Jesus is asking me to participate in the world as his sister by walking hand-in-hand in friendship as we observe, and in some cases, open doors of love to transfiguring experiences.
Now I believe that the two most important things in mending my relationship with the church and God were developing a loving image of God and accepting that I am and will always be unconditionally loved by the God who created me in God’s own image.
Mending my experience with social activism
I believe in and see the worth of collective action, like protesting and marching, in response to hideous and calloused behavior. The world shifts a bit as a result. The issues take front and center. Media, especially social media, keeps the action going, at least for a while. I am deeply grieved by the events that evoke these protests. My heart breaks for the issues. I’ve been the recipient of some of the behaviors that are being protested. Yet I must admit that, though I’ve tried on several occasions, I am not, at heart, a protester. I have felt guilt about that and have even been shamed publicly by others who say public action is the only way to move forward—the only committed way to work. “Other ways,” they say, “are just ways to feel better about yourself.” These criticisms feel like unbending rules. I’ve experienced these rules in two very different national initiatives, race relations and domestic violence. This judgment and shame have a way of dampening my spirit. It slows down my own mending process, yet ultimately invites me to claim a deep truth within myself.
That truth, that has helped me most to mend, is finding out where I do fit within social activism, since I believe it is important work. Essentially, I am a mender, a healer, a reconciler. When I was a leader in the domestic violence movement our whole initiative (The Silent Witness National Initiative) changed when we decided to be a healing force within the movement. We found and fostered local projects and programs that helped to mend those who were directly involved, or address mending within larger systems. Mother Teresa would call it doing small things with great love. These programs took more involvement over a longer time, yet they had lasting impact on the lives of those involved. The most important thing I learned about my leadership was how leading from behind enhanced the creativity and commitment that each state brought to the initiative.
In the arena of race relations and racism, I have had wise black mentors help me find my place within the healing and reconciling world. This means finding things I have in common with people of color and investing in relationships based on these interests. I have done art projects, given talks, recorded podcasts, served and eaten lots of food, made quilts, written essays, raised funds, prayed, and worshipped with these friends. Relationships lead to reconciliation. In fact, one mentor said that multi-racial relationships are racial reconciliation. So, while I may not be marching, now as I look at the world through a relationship and reconciliation lens, I see that my world view has changed. My life has changed. And now, hopefully, my story will speak to others who have similar inclinations for social action and reconciliation.
Healing from discrimination as a woman
While my experiences with discrimination before and during the women’s movement were quite difficult for me, I do not equate them to what people of color have suffered for hundreds of years in our country. However, in remembering my own experiences, what it does for me is to give me just a little bit of empathy for what shame and discrimination feel like. Discrimination came at me just because of who I was --and with few, if any, ways I could personally effect change in the structures that perpetrated this behavior, even though I was white.
When I was entering adulthood women were vasty underrepresented in law, medicine, politics, the clergy, corporate work, and entrepreneurship. We did not have equal pay. We still don’t have equal rights. When I was in my twenties, married and owning my own business, I could not get a credit card in my own name. I could not get a bank loan for my small business without my husband’s signature as guarantor (he was unemployed at the time I applied). I could not eat at three major restaurants. One searing story: I remember the elation and then shame I felt when a male business friend invited me to one of those restaurants, only to learn that there was a little back room reserved for men who met with women. Another shame experience was when my business partner and I met with corporate managers and they just assumed I was his assistant. Most had never had a woman as a colleague, just as wives, daughters, sisters or lovers!
What were my healing and mending experiences? On the personal level I looked intentionally for male allies who were supportive as colleagues and friends, I worked with clients who could respect me as a woman, and I used the three-strike rule for micro aggression! The three-strike rule goes like this: let the first insult pass and just smile; acknowledge the second one with a humorous remark or a gentle comeback; and with the third one from the same person, have a conversation about how I’d prefer to be treated. It got to the third strike just a few times, but it was memorable.
On a larger level, I was among the early joiners of an organization called The National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). Our local chapter championed a wide range of women-owned businesses and we were very active. We had to learn how to incorporate the word “power” into our annual goals (because it was intimidating) yet it ignited us to work at ways to gain more power, like electing women to office. Our own president became the lieutenant governor! I felt like I was not alone. My stories were not unique. There were options and resources (like banks that did not require my husband’s signature for my business loan). That I had friends who understood the experience of owning a business. All of this made a huge difference in promoting my healing.
Mending within the artistic and creative world
I love beauty. I enjoy observing how creativity emerges in such different ways; music, dance, cooking, textiles, painting, photography, clothing, and nature. I admire artists who can create works that change lives and ways of seeing the world. Personally, I’ve enjoyed drawing, design and textiles all my life.
A sudden explosion of creativity emerged for me several years ago when I combined my love for fabrics, drawing and faith. I remembered an epiphany I had years earlier when I visited a monastery north of Moscow and attended a service there. We all stood in a room surrounded, floor to ceiling, with gorgeous painted icons, while soft chant music flowed out from behind a sculpted wood panel. I was enchanted and deeply moved. Now, years later, my own creative explosion was evolving into a unique artistic expression, that of contemporary quilted iconography (depicting sacred images and sacred people in art form).
Then I bumped into the wider artistic, quilting and iconography worlds. Although I did have amazing support for my work from artistic mentors who I revere to this day, the larger art world was not interested, and in a few cases, hostile. I was generally too religious for the quilters, too crafty for the art world, and not traditional enough for the iconography world. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.
Many artists will agree that when you create something original you put your soul into the art. So when you are criticized it is your soul that ends up being targeted. Therefore, the way forward for me was a soul-mending way. It was a second epiphany, coming to me in a vision, in my quiet time one day. I was lamenting my loss of belonging in any of these worlds and God invited me to draw three circles, all slightly overlapping each other with a small intersection in common. Each circle was one of the three worlds I didn’t fit into: art, quilting, iconography. God said, “See that small space where all three circles overlap and intersect?” I acknowledged that I did. God then added, with a chuckle, “Well that’s exactly where I created you to be, right in that little intersection, doing what I’ve called you to do, in this unique way.” Once I realized that and opened myself to continuing with my own unique style, no matter what, doors began to open. I was invited by deeply supportive curators at a local art institute to show my work in exactly the way that my first epiphany suggested; in a small room, with floor to ceiling icons, and chant music playing in the background. It was all I needed.
The experience of speaking out on public heartbreaks
Some readers might wonder how I chose—or dare--to tell these personal and fractious stories. Sometimes I wonder how I can tell them too. The rule in the church as well as in the culture when it comes to telling truths about our personal experiences of pain, is like the family rules. These rules include not sharing your response to the searing experiences in public. It may cause conflict, may cause us to be ostracized, may silence our voices further. I tell these stories, not to claim any victim status nor to get even with anyone, but to share how difficult it is to find and claim one’s own voice amid tension, judgments, shame and conflict. And how important it is to find and embrace allies on that journey.
The results of the story telling
These external worlds have so much influence on me and on most of us. They are powerful and can, when transformed, raise us up and support us, but they can equally hurt, crush or destroy when they so choose. So it was with caution, courage, trust and support that I learned, in these four cases, to move forward with who I was created to be, instead of who someone else or an institution wanted me to be. In summary I am drawn to a personal truth I offered in a book I wrote on power, “True leadership begins with the willingness to become someone other than who the world wants you to be.” May it be so…
Janet O. Hagberg, 2023. Please pass along.
Has your heart ever been broken by external things you had no control over?
Broken by things like discrimination, the church, authorities, cultural values, political decisions, or marginalizing? This heartbreak may feel different from personal relationship breakups, but it has lasting effects on our hearts all the same.
Let me share a few stories of external heartbreaking experiences I’ve had that involved more public shame than private pain, and the process I used in mending these experiences. When things get public, there is a different level of pain because our story is more open to others’ judgments of us. My process of mending was therefore different in these situations since I needed to not only discover and claim my own truths but also gently assert those truths amid conflict or threats.
I’ll share these experiences with you, but first, let’s return to this familiar song that speaks so directly to the heart-breaking experience. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” sung by Al Green or the Bee Gees, both classics. Sing or hum along! Here are the first three verses.
I can think of younger days when living for my life
Was everything a man could want to do
I could never see tomorrow
I was never told about the sorrow.
And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
Tell me, how can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go 'round?
How can you mend this broken man? Yeah
How can a loser ever win?
Somebody please help me mend my broken heart
And let me live again, la-la, la-la, la.
Four stories of healing
These stories address how my heart was broken by things that were imposed on me from authorities or culture, some of which also wounded my soul. The four areas I will address are the church of my childhood and its theology, the unbending tenets of social activism, personal discrimination as a woman, and finding my voice in the fractious world of the arts and creativity.
Healing with my childhood religion, God, and the church
My childhood church expressed deep family values, reached out to many other parts of the world as missionaries, cared deeply for individual people in the congregation, and gave time and talents to marginalized people through missions in my city. The commitment to youth was enormous. We had so many activities we hardly had any time to get into trouble😊 I was even given chances to lead groups and go on several youth trips. I knew scripture backwards and forwards and I could name all the books of the Bible in 30 seconds.
On the other side of the coin was fear, shame, and threats of hell if we did step out of line. The theology was of personal recrimination for our behavior. And the constant judgment of God was hanging over our heads. The leaders were kind, caring and well-meaning and yet there were rules about everything especially out-of-bounds behavior that was mostly the fun stuff of teenage life (movies, dancing, card playing). I did my bit of rebelling by asking questions but was daunted because the beliefs I questioned had the overlay of being from God and therefore were not arguable. There was no one thing that hurt me, as I recall, but the overall result was the absence of God’s love and acceptance over time.
Three experiences helped mend my broken and shame-based heart, over the decades it took to name and mend my childhood faith. Probably the most important was a conversation with my spiritual director in which I was reiterating my childhood religious experiences of God and she said, in her gentle yet clear voice, “I’d like to suggest that you fire that God and find another.” I was shocked. No one had ever even come close to that suggestion before. Part of me wondered if I’d be punished for even thinking it. But I knew it held truth that I needed to embrace. So I did. I fired that God and, over time, found a deep and lasting relationship with a God of love, (and no judgment-ever). This, alone, was a huge change. A wise person suggested to me recently that we stop blaming God for what his people do in God’s name. That was so refreshing—and such good counsel!
The second healing experience was finding a theology of God and Jesus that I could embrace and practice in my personal life. A clergy friend and I searched for alternative theologies that would match what we experienced and believed. We found Narrative Theology, which essentially invites us to find our lives in God’s life and God’s life in our life. It asserts that God (In Jesus) has experienced everything that we have and is with us in all that life brings, caring for us and strengthening us, especially in the small details, the salt and pepper moments of our lives. There is nothing we can do that would cause God to abandon us or stop loving us.
My third experience of mending was reframing who Jesus is for me, apart from what my church taught to me over the years. To do this I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of people. Someone along the way suggested that I bypass all of that and go directly to Jesus and ask him who he is. So, I did. I said to Jesus, “Who are you?” Jesus replied, gently, “Who do you want me to be?” I said, “Well, I’d choose brother, friend or lover.” All of those were very different from my childhood messaging and I wondered how Jesus would reply. Jesus said, “I like all three. Which would you prefer?” I said, “How about all three?” Jesus said “Great.” Now Jesus is asking me to participate in the world as his sister by walking hand-in-hand in friendship as we observe, and in some cases, open doors of love to transfiguring experiences.
Now I believe that the two most important things in mending my relationship with the church and God were developing a loving image of God and accepting that I am and will always be unconditionally loved by the God who created me in God’s own image.
Mending my experience with social activism
I believe in and see the worth of collective action, like protesting and marching, in response to hideous and calloused behavior. The world shifts a bit as a result. The issues take front and center. Media, especially social media, keeps the action going, at least for a while. I am deeply grieved by the events that evoke these protests. My heart breaks for the issues. I’ve been the recipient of some of the behaviors that are being protested. Yet I must admit that, though I’ve tried on several occasions, I am not, at heart, a protester. I have felt guilt about that and have even been shamed publicly by others who say public action is the only way to move forward—the only committed way to work. “Other ways,” they say, “are just ways to feel better about yourself.” These criticisms feel like unbending rules. I’ve experienced these rules in two very different national initiatives, race relations and domestic violence. This judgment and shame have a way of dampening my spirit. It slows down my own mending process, yet ultimately invites me to claim a deep truth within myself.
That truth, that has helped me most to mend, is finding out where I do fit within social activism, since I believe it is important work. Essentially, I am a mender, a healer, a reconciler. When I was a leader in the domestic violence movement our whole initiative (The Silent Witness National Initiative) changed when we decided to be a healing force within the movement. We found and fostered local projects and programs that helped to mend those who were directly involved, or address mending within larger systems. Mother Teresa would call it doing small things with great love. These programs took more involvement over a longer time, yet they had lasting impact on the lives of those involved. The most important thing I learned about my leadership was how leading from behind enhanced the creativity and commitment that each state brought to the initiative.
In the arena of race relations and racism, I have had wise black mentors help me find my place within the healing and reconciling world. This means finding things I have in common with people of color and investing in relationships based on these interests. I have done art projects, given talks, recorded podcasts, served and eaten lots of food, made quilts, written essays, raised funds, prayed, and worshipped with these friends. Relationships lead to reconciliation. In fact, one mentor said that multi-racial relationships are racial reconciliation. So, while I may not be marching, now as I look at the world through a relationship and reconciliation lens, I see that my world view has changed. My life has changed. And now, hopefully, my story will speak to others who have similar inclinations for social action and reconciliation.
Healing from discrimination as a woman
While my experiences with discrimination before and during the women’s movement were quite difficult for me, I do not equate them to what people of color have suffered for hundreds of years in our country. However, in remembering my own experiences, what it does for me is to give me just a little bit of empathy for what shame and discrimination feel like. Discrimination came at me just because of who I was --and with few, if any, ways I could personally effect change in the structures that perpetrated this behavior, even though I was white.
When I was entering adulthood women were vasty underrepresented in law, medicine, politics, the clergy, corporate work, and entrepreneurship. We did not have equal pay. We still don’t have equal rights. When I was in my twenties, married and owning my own business, I could not get a credit card in my own name. I could not get a bank loan for my small business without my husband’s signature as guarantor (he was unemployed at the time I applied). I could not eat at three major restaurants. One searing story: I remember the elation and then shame I felt when a male business friend invited me to one of those restaurants, only to learn that there was a little back room reserved for men who met with women. Another shame experience was when my business partner and I met with corporate managers and they just assumed I was his assistant. Most had never had a woman as a colleague, just as wives, daughters, sisters or lovers!
What were my healing and mending experiences? On the personal level I looked intentionally for male allies who were supportive as colleagues and friends, I worked with clients who could respect me as a woman, and I used the three-strike rule for micro aggression! The three-strike rule goes like this: let the first insult pass and just smile; acknowledge the second one with a humorous remark or a gentle comeback; and with the third one from the same person, have a conversation about how I’d prefer to be treated. It got to the third strike just a few times, but it was memorable.
On a larger level, I was among the early joiners of an organization called The National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). Our local chapter championed a wide range of women-owned businesses and we were very active. We had to learn how to incorporate the word “power” into our annual goals (because it was intimidating) yet it ignited us to work at ways to gain more power, like electing women to office. Our own president became the lieutenant governor! I felt like I was not alone. My stories were not unique. There were options and resources (like banks that did not require my husband’s signature for my business loan). That I had friends who understood the experience of owning a business. All of this made a huge difference in promoting my healing.
Mending within the artistic and creative world
I love beauty. I enjoy observing how creativity emerges in such different ways; music, dance, cooking, textiles, painting, photography, clothing, and nature. I admire artists who can create works that change lives and ways of seeing the world. Personally, I’ve enjoyed drawing, design and textiles all my life.
A sudden explosion of creativity emerged for me several years ago when I combined my love for fabrics, drawing and faith. I remembered an epiphany I had years earlier when I visited a monastery north of Moscow and attended a service there. We all stood in a room surrounded, floor to ceiling, with gorgeous painted icons, while soft chant music flowed out from behind a sculpted wood panel. I was enchanted and deeply moved. Now, years later, my own creative explosion was evolving into a unique artistic expression, that of contemporary quilted iconography (depicting sacred images and sacred people in art form).
Then I bumped into the wider artistic, quilting and iconography worlds. Although I did have amazing support for my work from artistic mentors who I revere to this day, the larger art world was not interested, and in a few cases, hostile. I was generally too religious for the quilters, too crafty for the art world, and not traditional enough for the iconography world. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.
Many artists will agree that when you create something original you put your soul into the art. So when you are criticized it is your soul that ends up being targeted. Therefore, the way forward for me was a soul-mending way. It was a second epiphany, coming to me in a vision, in my quiet time one day. I was lamenting my loss of belonging in any of these worlds and God invited me to draw three circles, all slightly overlapping each other with a small intersection in common. Each circle was one of the three worlds I didn’t fit into: art, quilting, iconography. God said, “See that small space where all three circles overlap and intersect?” I acknowledged that I did. God then added, with a chuckle, “Well that’s exactly where I created you to be, right in that little intersection, doing what I’ve called you to do, in this unique way.” Once I realized that and opened myself to continuing with my own unique style, no matter what, doors began to open. I was invited by deeply supportive curators at a local art institute to show my work in exactly the way that my first epiphany suggested; in a small room, with floor to ceiling icons, and chant music playing in the background. It was all I needed.
The experience of speaking out on public heartbreaks
Some readers might wonder how I chose—or dare--to tell these personal and fractious stories. Sometimes I wonder how I can tell them too. The rule in the church as well as in the culture when it comes to telling truths about our personal experiences of pain, is like the family rules. These rules include not sharing your response to the searing experiences in public. It may cause conflict, may cause us to be ostracized, may silence our voices further. I tell these stories, not to claim any victim status nor to get even with anyone, but to share how difficult it is to find and claim one’s own voice amid tension, judgments, shame and conflict. And how important it is to find and embrace allies on that journey.
The results of the story telling
These external worlds have so much influence on me and on most of us. They are powerful and can, when transformed, raise us up and support us, but they can equally hurt, crush or destroy when they so choose. So it was with caution, courage, trust and support that I learned, in these four cases, to move forward with who I was created to be, instead of who someone else or an institution wanted me to be. In summary I am drawn to a personal truth I offered in a book I wrote on power, “True leadership begins with the willingness to become someone other than who the world wants you to be.” May it be so…
Janet O. Hagberg, 2023. Please pass along.