Humble Miracles and Broken Blessings

One of the responsibilities that I have as a Chaplain Resident is to provide an interdenominational worship service for the psychiatric patients about once a month. Using a template, I develop a service that includes a sermon, scripture, hymns, benedictions, and blessings. I call for and raise up pleas for forgiveness, even as I plea for my own. As a Catholic woman, I never imagined this would be a role I would experience. But it’s part of my job, and I have never been one to shy away from a task.

This past week I read from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah 58:7-10. This passage explicitly instructs us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and never turn our backs on our own. In this scripture, we are told that if we do what we are instructed to do, we will be the light of the world and will quickly be healed of whatever hurts us. While I prepared a sermon to address this passage, I was sensitive to the fact that many psychiatric patients may not experience healing from their illnesses.

Mental illness is often treatable, but not necessarily healable. Psychiatric issues can be agonizing and sometimes intractable; my ministry this year includes the most acute psychiatric unit, and so I have witnessed this firsthand. How then do I stand up and preach to a room full of patients and their nurses about promises in this scripture with honesty? I did so by unpacking what it means to be the light of the world and to be healed.

What I spoke of are humble miracles and broken blessings. I explained to the participants that God is at work in simple, quiet ways. The nurse who provides a needed medication or a kind word; an act of compassion and inclusion by another patient; a workshop that provides something to take away to ponder in the dark and endless night spent in a hospital bed. These are the miracles the Divine gives to us.

Blessings spoken from a human tongue are broken before they reach the air. The best blessing I have heard actually acknowledged this fact in the prayer. We all have flaws like fissures in our hearts, which in chaplaincy are kindly called “growth edges.” In these flaws, or growth edges, are the opportunities to go deeply into our own spirits, and discover incredible light. Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack, a crack, in everything, that’s how the light gets in…” These cracks are also how the light within us comes out.

The further I go into my profession, the more I am challenged to redefine what it means to be blessed, to be healed, and to be human. The patients who I serve may never experience physical healing, yet they can be healed in spirit by humble miracles and broken blessings. And so can the rest of us.

Homework for the week: How do you experience the movements of the Divine and Sacred in your life? What kind of miracle do you seek? What broken blessing can your soul share with this old world?