To be broken

On crumbs & children & cancer & communion

“When you break bread, you can never put it back together perfectly.”

He tosses these words off-handedly, as if crumbling them onto the counter. He is speaking of toasts or biscuits, bits of breakfast left behind on plates. But my head does the slow turn in his direction, ears perking, eyes searching, soul sparking.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I see the world through different lenses. Sometimes a telescope, other times a microscope, never the right-sized readers. This makes me terrible at small talk and delightful at deep conversations and your go-to-girl when plans for your life shatter and you’re searching for meaning among the shards.

So when this child of my heart, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, pronounces a benediction like this before burrowing back in the couch to cuddle with a fresh stack of books? I sit right down and think hard about broken bread for five full minutes before two fighting children interrupt my reverie with protests of injustice and injury.

Every day they save me, these small ones. They will never know how much.

Here is the tangled truth about having cancer and children: you do not get to rest in all the ways that people want you to rest, but you get to live in all the ways you want to live. They need breakfasts and lunches and dinners and hugs and laughter and discipline and laundry and rides and shoes and stories and Kleenex and baths and attention and vitamins and kisses and desserts. They ask blunt questions, and they want true answers. They need you, and they accept no substitutes.

They also bring you shining gifts. Fistfuls of backyard flowers, construction paper cards with crayoned hearts, Lego creations on the windowsill and stuffed animals tucked beside your pillow. Water bottle refills rattling with ice, hilarious texts on their phones, inside jokes and late-night conversations long after bedtime.

Once in a while they bring you the divine, too—direct and dizzying. Which is what my nine year-old did, without warning this morning.

What’s more, he added this zinger as a coda:

“When you break bread, you can never put it back together perfectly. Because of all the air that’s inside.”

So now we have Eucharist and Spirit and Trinity and Resurrection. It is all the same story, everyday as bread, extraordinary as divinity. He offers me this gift as he passes, and I am left in his wake, always.

What happens when you start to see, really see—cancer and children and God and resurrection and your whole holy life in your beloved broken hands—is that you come to stumble upon truth everywhere. The story is the same because the story is sacred, and holy hides among us. The child tells me about broken bread on his breakfast plate, but he is preaching about Eucharist. The nurse helps me knot my oversized scrubs, but he is teaching about the ties that bind. The doctor peers into my parched mouth and promises relief after surgery, but she is healing me through another way.

Cancer makes you a different person and also solidifies the same you were. The only way through is as you. So I can only do what I have tried to do all along, with the hollow whole of my life: to be a channel. To write you an essay on wisdom from children on communion. To scribble a poem about knots and knowing. To offer a prayer for what unites us—our need for water and health and hope and rest.

What I want to say to you about broken bread is the same thing I want to say you to every time I sit to write or stand to speak. The holy is thick around us. God is tucked in corners and details, found in cells and flung in the cosmos. We are loved and held every instant, a surrounding grace that changes us.

Because when bread is broken—when a holy body gives itself out of love, when suffering and death come for each of us, when the end looms large and daunting and dark—it cannot be put back together the same way. That would be mere magic, or a quick fix, or simple repair. Resurrection is entirely other. The Spirit blows through the room with a mighty wind. Christ’s body returns bearing wounds. Nothing we knew is the same anymore but it will save our lives.

My body will be cut and scarred and changed by cancer. My children will be shaped and scared and changed by cancer. And our suffering won’t stop here; it never does; if we only admitted we were human and vulnerable, would we stop being shocked by the relentless roll of what we cannot control?

Because we will be broken, yes, but this does not mean the end. Jesus took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it. He took his body, blessed it, broke it, and gave it. We take communion, bless it, break it, and give it. We take our lives, bless them, break them, and give them.

It is all the same story, the same wind whipping round the locked room, the same Sunday taste of bread on our tongues, the same benediction that blessed us with creation. No, we never leave here the same; we cannot put back together what is broken because now there is more life inside.

But we can speak the truth out loud to each other. We can receive it and chew on it. We can crave more of it, start seeing it everywhere, dig deeper into the darkest mysteries that hold the most light, share it with each other and see what happens.

You can never put anything back together perfectly. That is the point, and even the crumbs bear witness, and every single small truth is worthy of our attention.