Magnificent in your brokenness
Florence was badly crippled with arthritis, had a hammy leg and the chemo she was on made her glorious hair fall out. The nausea was unrelenting and violent.
Florence had ‘not always done the right thing’ and that is Fr. David trying to be nice and understating it. Trouble was she knew it, was quite candid about it and ashamed. She had tried very hard to put the pieces back together as best she could, but there were some parts that were too demolished.
She also knew that she was dying and was actually relieved to give up the drips, the vomit and the chemo.
As we chatted I did not see a broken, tearful and humbled soul who had been ravaged brutally by cancer complete with the swollen belly and sunken eyes. Rather I gazed upon someone else who was magnificent in their brokenness and glorious in their simple, indisputable, unshakable faith. How?
Perhaps, dear readers, part of the answer lies in two quotes that I have unashamedly stolen. The first is from a poet called Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second is something I gleefully nicked from Dr. Who.
“In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was
what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch,
matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond”.
“What if… what if just for one moment... just one, shining moment, you can believe that you are the most important person in the whole world?”