Say that a person is “broken” and watch what your mind does. Either it reaches for a picture you do not really mean – a snapped bone, a body collapsed on the floor – or it gives you no clear picture at all, only a grey sense of trouble with no edge and no location. The word borrows the vividness of something physically breaking and then points at nothing in particular. That may be why we reach for it so often.
I have spent most of my working life in faith formation and leadership programs, at the university and across the Church, and for years I have watched this one word grow louder. ‘Brokenness’ has become so common that we rarely ask what it carries. It has drifted from describing something to standing in for almost anything, and when a word can mean anything, it begins to mean nothing in particular.
It is worth asking how the word became so natural to us. The deepest root is likely liturgical, and there it is exact: at Mass the bread is taken, blessed, broken and given, and “broken” names a specific action performed on a specific body.
Tethered to the altar, to the body of Christ broken for us, the word does precise work. The trouble begins when it leaves the altar.
In 1992, Henri Nouwen published Life of the Beloved and built it on that same fourfold movement: taken, blessed, broken, given. Nouwen then made the breaking of the bread capacious to our suffering.
His move runs from the one broken body outward to the particular wounded person, so that each reader is sent toward his own named ache rather than away from it. I do not think the abstraction of “brokenness” is really Nouwen’s. It belongs to those who inherited his vocabulary and ran his move backward.
A popular Catholic writer assures her readers that God is “always with us, working in the brokenness to lead us to life”, while a ministry essay titled ‘The Gift of Brokenness’ could just as easily have led with the particulars it later names: divorce, addiction and loneliness.
One faith-and-psychology blog is especially revealing: It lists cancer, addiction, chronic pain, anxiety, depression and burnout, then sweeps them into one word: “it is our brokenness that connects us to others”. Where Nouwen moves from the one broken body out to the particular sufferer, the blog runs the other way, from real particulars back into a single blank.
The pattern reaches into preaching and song. A Gospel refrain promises that God “can mend your brokenness”, naming nothing in particular so that it can mean everything to everyone. A worship anthem has the singer confess, “I am broken and unworthy”, brokenness as a whole self-description unmoored from any specific fault or wound.
The clearest case is the one where the careful word and the careless word stand side by side. Pope Francis, preaching on the wounds of the risen Christ, said: “a church with wounds can understand the wounds of today’s world and make them her own.”
He chose “wounds” for a reason. A wound has an edge and a place, and it can be found by a hand, which is the whole meaning of Thomas being told to put his finger into the side of his Lord.
You cannot probe a “brokenness”; it has no location to touch.
I am not pretending “wounds” solves everything. “Woundedness” can go abstract too. The real problem is abstraction itself. The habit of “brokenness” has become an excuse for not addressing our actual, incarnate realities: this grief, this betrayal, this illness, this sin, this fear.
A word that names only an undefined fracture also drifts toward a picture of the person we do not actually hold, a sense that to be human is first of all to be collapsed, defined by our inadequacy. That is not the Catholic picture.
We are wounded, yes, and also made in the image of God, also redeemed, also capable of glory. God did not take on brokenness in general. He took on flesh, and was hungry, and wept, and bled from named wounds in his hands and his side.
So here is the small but stubborn invitation: The next time the word rises to your lips or your pen, pause and ask what specific thing waits underneath it.
Keep “broken” at the altar, where it is exact. Everywhere else, dare to say the real thing. Our healing never came through a general condition. It came through a particular body, and the closer our words stay to what is real and incarnate, the closer they stay to him.
Leonard J. DeLorenzo is a professor of the practice in the McGrath Institute for Church Life and concurrent professor in the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame. You can find his writing at leonardjdelorenzo.com.
