Broken

Martin had come into the office bright and early Monday morning. He was working on his resumé, feeling excited about his prospects. He was in love with a woman who had changed his life. On Tuesday morning, he was in early again, and again on Wednesday. Thursday he was dead. He had been on the way to a job interview with his friend Mikey. A guy approached them on the street. Words were exchanged. Suddenly the guy pulled out a gun and opened fire.

It has happened again. That is the sickening feeling that runs through the offices at Homeboy Industries, where Martin had come, like so many other young men and women from East Los Angeles, to try to make a new start, to break free from the violence and despair of gang life. He was breaking free. Already, he was beginning to live into a new life. And there is something beautiful and hopeful in this that even his sudden, violent death should not be allowed to obscure. Yet for those who knew him and loved him, the harsh reality remains: he is gone, and nothing can bring him back or restore to him the life that was beginning to unfold before him.

"Martin had been abandoned. . . ." These were the first words out of Greg Boyle's mouth when I asked him about Martin. It was clear from his tone of voice that he was describing not only Martin, but also so many of the kids who move in and out of gang life in East Los Angeles. Abandoned and bereft and desperate for a place to call home, which is so much of the appeal of belonging to a gang. Greg has been working with these kids for years, helping to create a different kind of place to belong, a different way of belonging. A sense of belonging rooted in love, and self respect, and hope. Spend a day at Homeboy Industries and you will see this vision of belonging flourishing. You will see kids with nowhere to go and nothing to live for beginning to live into a richer, deeper life.

Still, there is so much brokenness, so much fear and despair in the lives of these kids. And suddenly it flares up and a young man is dead and the question comes down like a hammer: why did this happen? What meaning can we possibly find in this terrible waste of a life? And though the temptation is strong to venture an answer, to find some meaning in this awful event, you know this is not really possible, at least not in this moment. You know you will have to live with this question for a long time before responding. And that for the time being, all you can do is open yourself to the reality of all that brokenness.

"I saw the body bleeding copiously, the blood hot, flowing freely, a living stream, just as I had before seen the head bleed. And I saw this in the furrows made by the scourging, and I saw this blood run so plentifully that it seemed to me that if it had in fact been happening there, the bed and everything around it would have been soaked in blood." This is the way Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century English mystic and anchorite, describes what it meant for her to open herself to the place of brokenness. Her encounter with the bleeding and broken Christ stands at the center of a remarkable vision of encompassing love and hope whose power derives in large measure from her refusal to look away from that brokenness, or to assign it a meaning that would enable her or others to avoid facing up to its disturbing truth. Rather, she looked into it, she opened herself to it asking over and over the question that inevitably arises in such moments: what was God's meaning?

It is this same question, or a question very much like this, that haunts us when a young man like Martin is cut down. Or when corpses from a war continue to accumulate. Or when the heaviness of existence...