May 12, 2009

Broken and Tired

It wasn't a good morning for parish technology. There was no internet or any access to documents on the office server. To my embarrassment it turned out to be as simple as the server having gone in some kind of hibernate mode, which was actually a good thing because I found a lot of dust to vacuum when I removed the front panel to turn it back on.

At one point during my efforts to fix the network, I was going down the hall and remarked to one of our older friars,

"Nothing works in this tired and broken world!"

to which he responded immediately,

"Brother, that's why we're here."

But what did he mean? Are we here because we too are tired and broken? Or are we here because it is our mission to soothe and heal the tired and broken world? Or is it both?

5 comments:

ben in denver said...

You remind me of something orthodox theolgian David B. Hart, wrote in an editorial he published in the Wall Street Journal in the wake of the great tsunami of 2004:

"The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature."

I'm not sure why your post reminded me of this. But I suspect there is something of the same insght at work here.

pennyante said...

My guess is this: Only those who recognize their own brokenness can help others... We help to heal ourselves when we reach out to heal others.

for narnia said...

i would say it's both, Fr. C! PEACE! ~tara t~

A Secular Franciscan said...

I opt for the soothe interpretation of why we are here - and, of course, to clean out the computer!

kam said...

...as I've always said, it's the monks, brothers, sisters and nuns, through prayer, that keeps the Evil One at bay in this world...