Break and Mend

"O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart."
 - "As I Walked Out One Evening" by WH Auden

 The above poem inspired the title of an Anne Lamott novel, "Crooked Little Heart", which I read about a year ago. Hearing the title made me want to discover it's origins. It's a bittersweet poem: at first glance I found it rather gloomy, yet as I reread it I imagined it being read by someone with a sad smile, shaking their head at the way life is, those raw and often painful honesty of it, while finding reasons that life is still good and even wonderful. The poem begins exultantly, with a man singing about love that is endless and unbreakable. Then the clocks of the city remind him that no one can conquer time, going into almost depressing anecdotes about how time steals away your life and everything good. But just as the reader might want to give it up as too morose to care for, it quips the unexpected sentiment: 'Life remains a blessing'.  Then a command is given without apology or compromise: 'You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.'

I like this verse. "Crooked" is thought to be a bad thing. A crooked path or a crooked person are things you are told to avoid. Yet in this context, I think of it as a heart that's been broken, and though time has healed it, there are still scars. Some parts may always seem just a little askew. As children, we think that things are difficult and unfair when we can't have a cookie, or have to go to bed before we want to - anything that involves not having our way - and it isn't until we grow up a little more and experience loss and heartbreak that we understand how the world holds such a vast array of good and bad and intangible things that are what hold life together or break it apart. When we are children, innocent and open to all possibilities, are hearts are elastic. They bounce around like rubber balls and fill eagerly with all the love and good things and there is always room for more. Meanwhile, pain has all the subtlety and grace of a sledgehammer. When it strikes, our elastic hearts aren't ready. They don't believe that what is told in the songs is actually as painful as the singer admits. Hearts break. Yet, if we let them, hearts then do a beautiful thing. They mend. They won't have the same rubber-ball newness, but they can still fill and fill and fill with more love and sadness and hopes and memories than we could ever think possible. They may be a little crooked, a little askew, but if we let them, they will mend nevertheless. 

So, love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart. I like to remember that no one is perfect, not me or the people I love who delight and disappoint me and make life incredible and complicated, or the person cutting in front of me in traffic or the unhelpful customer service person or the author of a favorite book or anyone anywhere at all. We're imperfect. We're a little crooked. But there is beauty in scars and and the way things break and heal, and we can see this if we remember that God's fingerprints are everywhere. There's another poem that reminds me of this God-is-everywhere fact. The last lovely line goes:

"And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)"

 - E.E. Cummings 

  Our love might not be perfect, but His is. That poem is one about love between humans, but I like to think of it not as the emotion coming from our crooked little hearts, but as His perfect love that engulfs us and carries us on and on and forever. That is why I believe, even so, that life remains a blessing.