Brokenness Aside

Being, and hiding, our grotesqueness, with references to Sherwood Anderson and Henri Nouwen's "Life of the Beloved."

Albert Bierstadt, Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm, 1869, National Gallery of Art

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.

— Charles Wesley, “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus¹”

In Dr. Hauser’s American literature class my senior year at William Paterson University, I wrote an essay about human brokenness.

We’d been reading from Sherwood Anderson’s Death in the Woods and Other Stories, one of the last things he published before dying from a gut infection he developed after swallowing a toothpick on a cruise with his fourth wife in 1941.

The collection features many sad stories. The title track is about an older woman who dies alone on a cold walk back from the butcher shop. “Doomed from the start,” I thought after reading it. That’s how people perish when they’re born orphans, marry violent men, and live as dirt-poor recluses feeding skinny cattle on derelict properties on the outskirts of town. The brokenness of their experience is so severe that feeling optimistic in their situation would be as naïve as believing a blind person might see because a street preacher rubs mud in their eyes.

I’ve always been drawn to cynicism.

Even before I opened up the Bible and read about how we’re all bad to the bone, I had a pessimistic view of humanity. At 16, when I read Anderson’s first, equally sad collection, Winesburg, Ohio², in Mr. Sweeney’s English class, I was an angsty emo kid with dyed black hair, as angry about the historical record of human banditry, barbarism, and desolation as more pressing, personal issues, like pretty girls not wanting to kiss me.

Becoming a Christian in September 2006 forced me to look beyond history textbooks and teenage acne at the inward manifestation of my messed-up nature—though it did take a while, as I felt sure God had called me up less for my failures and more for my potential in his starting line-up. Nearly two decades on, I can no longer deny how grotesque I am, and not just by events that I’ve experienced—how I grew up, who’s hurt me—or the pain caused by my own mistakes. But because of my inability, or unwillingness, to keep myself out of the badlands of my mind, behaving in ways I know aren’t good for me or anyone around me.

Take New Year’s Day, for example. The night before, we’d partied with friends. And since we enjoyed so much being around other adults, and our kids playing with their little friends, we decided to stay two hours past bedtime. Yup, I know. The kids were up as early as usual, their internal clocks set for the same pre-dawn hour despite being visibly exhausted. And before long, they were falling over themselves in a three-way race to claim the World’s Whiniest Child title before breakfast.