Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. As with all good fiction and drama, you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously, I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be oneself.

Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only watched the first three episodes of Broken. I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing. Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in translation, so to speak.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the ‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed. Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers with him – again.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. There are other paths of suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in this particular case.

All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain, although it may numb it for a while.

The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also tied to a particular poem, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.

All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent. They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we see in Broken, they are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying, or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured.  God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made whole again in his brokenness. 

Goodness

Yesterday, I was told about a sudden and unexpected family

'The Lady in the Van' Independent.co.uk

reconciliation. It stayed with me all day. Later, I watched the early evening news and then an excellent film, The Lady in the Van – Maggi Smith at her best. The film was about goodness, as was my friend’s story. Both were good news in the fullest sense. They held, or contained, the events of the day. They held them together.

My friend’s story was a quiet interruption of the treadmill rhythm of world events, the continual downward thrust of life. The same is true of the story about the man who took in the van lady, in the film – and also in real life. Both are an interruption of the normal course of events. In each of these situations something good is working into the less good aspects of human nature, and thus of life as we know it.

This good must be energised by something or someone, in order for it to work. Something must enliven it, like the goodness of the created world, whatever scientists may say about the universe creating itself out of nothing. Goodness is not a created thing. It simply is. It works in the immediacy of the moment.

Something that works must have a purpose. Goodness is worked as love, which is its purpose. This is not to say that it has demonstrable reasons for working, especially in situations where goodness seems unwarranted and therefore incomprehensible to most of us. The neighbours in the film, all good people in their way, did not know how to respond to unwarranted goodness, goodness which goes beyond ‘doing the right thing’.

Goodness proceeds from something, or someone, greater than the person who is doing good to someone else. It effects a transformation. A single good act done without duplicity, or kind word spoken sincerely, effects permanent change, even if its permanence seems hard to believe in at times. Its effect does not even depend on another person’s willingness to receive it. Neither does it wait on gratitude. It is unconditional.  Goodness, or caring, as Alan Bennet tells the social worker, is about dirt, to put it politely. Or, as seems the case with the family I was told about, something which comes under the heading of revelation, a moment of truth or understanding about the way things really are.

This suggests that goodness derives from some form of original truth. Something is given which enables someone to recognise that another person or situation is in need of unalloyed goodness.  Recognising this need can take a person unawares. It effects change in the most cynical mindset. Perhaps goodness, and the change it effects in both giver and receiver, has to do with prevenient grace, the goodness lying dormant in people, the God-shaped space in their inner being.

Perhaps the good person understands at depth the reality of that grace, or re-creative goodness, which also lies waiting in the mind or heart of the suffering or angry person. They sense that it is there, waiting to be touched into life and transformed by the author of all goodness, through whatever they are about to do or say to that person.

At the same time, the purpose of any good act or kind word can also be obscured by the sometimes pre-conceived view of the person saying it. Good people are not always likeable – think of the whisky priest in Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory. Good people seldom think of themselves as good, especially when being good takes them way over their tolerance threshold for ‘doing the right thing’.

The purpose of goodness is to bring ‘life in all its fullness’ to others, or to awaken them to what they are missing when grace, as it is sourced in Love, is refused or ignored. This was the purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.