We're all STILL broken, aren't we?

We're all STILL broken, aren't we?

Ned Lunn, 4 October 2012

This ‘session’ was called to make myself (the convener) available for therapy/counselling/spiritual direction/healing but ended up being a general conversation about brokenness:

Some initial questions were: Are we all broken? Isn't brokenness at the centre of art? Is ‘broken’ a negative term and how do we redeem it for positivity?

The conversation circled around the image of healing wounds and when and where they need to be aired.

If we air our wounds too quickly we can hinder the healing and this may lead to further infection and pain. It also may lead to infection of others and can lead to further destruction. If we keep the wound covered too long this too can lead to infection and so we need to be able to air them but in a clean and safe place. After the wound has healed it leads to some scarring and this is where the beauty can be seen; a sense of comraderie as we share stories and healing for others currently going through pain, etc.

We talked about my faith as an Anglican minister and how divisions in communities/the Church must be named and the source diagnosed in order for healing to occur. The wound may remain visibly present as a scar as healing doesn't necessarily mean ‘fixing’/'solving'. We discussed that our virtues in the Christian faith

centres on the brokenness of Christ and how we are called to follow Him into that as the path towards healing. The Christian faith proclaims an embrace of brokenness and vulnerability and this is what is needed for us on a personal, local and global arena.

We also talked about how we can be sources of healing and the confusion around how we do this. We think it's about communal discernment between one and another. This helps to understand the transaction that takes place in theatre between the performer and the audience. We discussed how the rehearsal room is a place of healing of airing and covering wounds to lead to that healing and that performance is a showing of scars as the source of beauty. How the audience is to respond to scars needs to be permitted or guided by the performers. Several people spoke of experience where they watched performances where wounds were aired and not scars and that the wounds have a great impact. The response to that performance was context based; was it a healthy and safe environment that will lead to healing or not?

It was decided that we are still broken... all of us... and we need to continually name and tend to our wounds to wait for them to become scars which should be shared and that is what art is!

Tags:

Performance, redemption, performance, Christian, Christ, scars, cross, wounds, broken, rehearsals, healing, resurrection, faith