We are all broken angels

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · November 9, 2014

Some time ago, my friend came to visit and brought her young daughter with her. One of the things little Abbi noticed was my porcelain angel on one of the side tables. It was a gift from one of the volunteers I lived with in Germany in 2005 and therefore carries a special sentimental value for me.

A Pieta by Antonio Montauti (1734) in St John Lateran basilica in Rome. The broken body of Christ is a necessary reminder of the resurrection on the third day. (Photo: Gunther Simmermacher)

When Abbi noticed the angel, her mom said she couldn’t touch it. The next day, the temptation was too great and Abbi asked to hold the angel. At first her mom watched her to make sure she didn’t drop it, but then as we started chatting, our attention moved to other things and we forgot that Abbi still had the angel. Until we heard it come crashing down on the hard tiles.

As my friend began to apologise, I told her not to worry because the angel had suffered a previous accident. When I first moved away from home, I had left the angel at my parents home for safekeeping and took it with me only when I moved to Cape Town in 2013.

When I removed the angel from the bubble wrap, I noticed a fine crack along the base of her wings. I mentioned this to my parents and one of them admitted that the angel had fallen and her wings had broken off. My dad had glued the angel back together and hoped I wouldn’t notice.

This time the damage was far more severe. The angel had broken into three neat pieces. I picked her off the ground and quietly put the pieces away in the hope of fixing her later.

But as I contemplated the pieces, I wondered if we aren’t all like this broken angel. We are all broken people. The knocks of life have left their scars, and even if we pick up the pieces, glue them together and carry on, the marks will remain.

In our consumerist throwaway society, we have forgotten the value of fixing something that is broken. Instead, we quickly replace what was broken without trying to fix it.

We do the same with people. When they don’t live up to our expectations, to the perfect image we may have of them, when their woundedness and hurt are too painful or exhausting for us to bear, we also push them away, discarding them for a newer, better model.

We don’t take the time to sit through the pain, through the hurt, through the sin, through the imperfection. Yet Christ, who was perfect, allowed himself to be broken and made imperfect, so that we could be healed and our imperfections be blotted out.

Every time we walk into a church we are called to contemplate the wounded body of Jesus on the Cross, so that we can also be reminded of the glory of the living Christ three days later and who remains present today in the Eucharist. Real life includes both the perfect and imperfect, good and bad, wholeness and brokenness.

Sometimes we need to hold the broken pieces of our lives, the lives of the people we encounter, and contemplate the brokenness. The broken pieces make us focus on the desire for wholeness, for perfection. It is only when we look at the brokenness of our lives, that we can reach God’s mercy to heal us, to glue us back together.

God’s healing doesn’t make us perfect. We will still bear the scars of the fall, the cracks in the place where we broke. But it is only through our imperfections that we can reach out in humility and compassion to the brokenness of others, to truly appreciate God’s love, mercy and forgiveness. It prevents us from becoming too confident, too arrogant, too proud.

I glued my angel back together and she is once again watching me quietly from the side table in my lounge.

Abbi’s accident turned out to be a gift in disguise, because my patched up ornament reminds me daily that we are all angels with broken wings. And that we need our loving Father to piece us together every time we come tumbling down from our pedestals.