Blessing for the Brokenhearted

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There are so many ways for a heart to be broken that sometimes it seems we’re walking around in a world filled with sledgehammers. Are there just as many ways to put our hearts back together? I’m not sure. But the path Jan Richardson offers in “Blessing for the Brokenhearted” seems to me one of the most compelling—and most difficult: daring to go on loving anyway.

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

by Jan Richardson

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

From the collection, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief (Wanton Gospeller Press, 2016).