The abstraction of ‘brokenness’

Say that a person is “broken” and watch what your mind does. Either it reaches for a picture you do not really mean — a snapped bone, a body collapsed on the floor — or it gives you no clear picture at all, only a gray sense of trouble with no edge and no location. The word borrows the vividness of something physically breaking and then points at nothing in particular. That may be why we reach for it so often.

I have spent most of my working life in faith formation and leadership programs, at the university and across the Church, and for years I have watched this one word grow louder. Lately I notice it even as I grade. “Brokenness” has become so common that we rarely ask what it carries. It has drifted from describing something to standing in for almost anything, and when a word can mean anything, it begins to mean nothing in particular.

It is worth asking how the word became so natural to us. The deepest root is likely liturgical, and there it is exact: at Mass the bread is taken, blessed, broken, and given, and “broken” names a specific action performed on a specific body.

Tethered to the altar, to the body of Christ broken for us, the word does precise work. The trouble begins when it leaves the altar.

In 1992, Henri Nouwen published “Life of the Beloved” and built it on that same fourfold movement: taken, blessed, broken, given. Nouwen then made the breaking of the bread capacious to our suffering.

His move runs from the one broken body outward to the particular, wounded person, so that each reader is sent toward his own named ache rather than away from it. I do not think the abstraction of “brokenness” is really Nouwen’s. It belongs to those who inherited his vocabulary and ran his move backward.

A popular Catholic writer assures her readers that God is “always with us, working in the brokenness to lead us to life,” the definite article treating it as a known and shared quantity needing no description. A ministry essay titled “The Gift of Brokenness” rests its thesis on the word, though the author could have led with the particulars he later names: divorce and addiction and loneliness.

One faith-and-psychology blog is especially revealing: It lists the particulars plainly — cancer, addiction, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, burnout — then sweeps them into one word, “it is our brokenness that connects us to others.” Where Nouwen moves from the one broken body out to the particular sufferer, the blog runs the other way, from real particulars back into a single blank.

The pattern reaches into preaching and song. A Gospel refrain promises that God “can mend your brokenness,” naming nothing in particular so that it can mean everything to everyone in the room. A worship anthem has the singer confess, “I am broken and unworthy,” brokenness as a whole self-description unmoored from any specific fault or wound. The word does real emotional work. It gathers a room together, and it gathers them around a blank.

The clearest case is the one where the careful word and the careless word stand side by side. Pope Francis, preaching on the wounds of the risen Christ, refused to let the Church hide its hurt behind anything vaguer: “a church with wounds can understand the wounds of today’s world and make them her own.” He chose “wounds” for a reason. A wound has an edge and a place, and it can be found by a hand, which is the whole meaning of Thomas being told to put his finger into the side of his Lord.

You cannot probe a “brokenness”; it has no location to touch. And yet a writer passing that very homily along, summarizing it warmly, kept the comfort and quietly traded the word, telling readers that “accepting our brokenness” lets us turn to Christ. She meant only to help, which is what makes the moment worth dwelling on: the pull toward abstraction is strong enough to dissolve a wound in the retelling of a homily that refused to do exactly that.

I am not pretending “wounds” solves everything. “Woundedness” can go abstract too, and often does. The real problem is abstraction itself. The habit of “brokenness” in particular has become an excuse for not addressing our actual, incarnate realities, the bodily and spiritual particulars of a given person on a given day, this grief, this betrayal, this illness, this sin, this fear. We encounter something real then climb up into “brokenness,” and the specificity of our incarnate life goes misty.

A word that names only an undefined fracture drifts toward a picture of the person we do not actually hold, a sense that to be human is first of all to be collapsed, defined by our inadequacy. That is not the Catholic picture.

We are wounded, yes, and also made in the image of God, also redeemed, also capable of glory, and we are bodies in time and in particular trouble, which is precisely the creature God came to save. He did not take on brokenness in general. He took on flesh, and was hungry, and wept, and bled from named wounds in his hands and his side.

So here is the small but stubborn invitation, maybe more needed now than ever, when so much of life is lived at one remove, in generalizations that ask nothing of us. The next time the word rises to your lips or your pen, pause and ask what specific thing waits underneath it.

Keep “broken” at the altar, where it is exact. Everywhere else, dare to say the real thing. Our healing never came through a general condition. It came through a particular body, and the closer our words stay to what is real and incarnate, the closer they stay to him.

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