The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on April 17, 2024 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
There is a difference between heartbreak and allowing one’s heart to be broken-open.
Both come with achiness. Both have their origins in longing. Both come into being due to an eruption of passion. Despite these similarities, there is also a difference between them.
Heartbreak is like a noun. It is a thing—a thing that can happen to you, most likely unbidden. If it remains as a “thing,” an object hurled unbidden into your life, it becomes static. As an unbidden thing, unattended to, it can get stuck. It can block other things up. It can cause all sorts of stuff to come out sideways: Judgement. Bitterness. Need to control. Anger. Resentment. These are a pile of “things” that will accumulate if the “thing” of heartbreak is left unattended.
Allowing one’s heart to be broken-open is more like a verb. At first, much like heartbreak, it likely happens to you, unbidden. Yet, as a verb, it keeps happening—and this ongoing happening is a choice. It is an opportunity for prayer as being broken open.
When the heart breaks, the work of allowing one’s heart to continue to break open can be an exploration, a dive into curiosity about the hidden parts of ourselves. It can be a reckoning, a facing of wild and unruly parts of ourselves that we would rather not see. Heart-being-broken-open can be a reaching out, a surprising recognition of an aspect of ourselves that bursts forth through an encounter with an other.
There is a difference between heartbreak and heart-being-broken-open. The difference is a choice for the active work of allowing, exploring, reckoning, and reaching, which we bring into the healing space of transformative prayer.
