This is written in response to a query from a friend of mine. Upon further reflection, I figured I might as well put it out there as a Jacksonian Contemplation/blogpost.
My experiences of brokenness have, for the most part, been with institutions, disease, and my own self.
A) Institutionally, I imagine my feedback is going to be eerily similar to that of most peoples you may have talked to who also have affiliations with the seminary or Lutheran Church. Or ... organized religion in any form. My own experiences were with my personal sense of call and being completely misunderstood or disregarded as 'valid' in my pursuit of that call. Brokenness, in this instance, deals primarily with my personal sense of expectation from the church body and the way in which those expectations were not met. As in any sense of brokenness, you can blame either the 'subject' or the 'object.' Because I have such wonderful self-esteem, I blame the 'object' in this instance (namely myself). I do however have friends and family members who choose to blame the 'subject,' namely the church as an institutional body.
B) While I myself do not have a direct experience with disease, I have witnessed someone very close to me suffer needlessly from it and finally enter the peace of death. Brokenness in this sense, is something I understand to be attached to the world on a natural level. It is something inextricably linked with creation and altogether unfathomable in any real rational sense. Disease happens. Famine happens (albeit when it is the fault of a despot, things are a little more 'rationally explainable'). Natural disasters happen. People suffer. People die. People are also born into these situations. People live through them. People choose them as instances to offer aid to others. The wheels on the bus go round and round. Brokenness, i've come to realize through this experience, is self-perpetuating. One could make this case for epidemic diseases that spread through just about any physical means possible. I don't think brokenness necessary is limited to self-perpetuation through singular means however. The brokenness of watching someone physically and emotionally deteriorate from disease can effect those who witness in such a way as to pollute or infect their own intellectual or spiritual worldview. Brokenness is wrapped up in the problem of evil and once that problem is encountered in such a personal way ... it becomes infectious in its problematicness (yes i made up a word).
C) I often wonder how many people would intentionally and instinctively 'locate' brokenness within their own selves. Lutheran liturgical use of confession and forgiveness has lots of this 'my own grievous fault' language in it. But much of my lived interaction with other Lutherans indicates that more emphasis is placed on the simul iustus rather then the peccator. One could say that this observation is itself broken, a means of feeling 'proud' that I recognize my own sinfulness. Nevertheless, I do locate brokenness within myself primarily. Even before I start worrying about the problem of evil or natural disasters. My own personal inclinations, instincts to do/think/say wrong, are things of which I am keenly aware. My location of brokenness within the self, is not limited to interpersonal sin. I am aware of the physical brokenness of flesh, as I suppose we all are, of orthopedic/orthodontic/dietary/pulmonary problems over which I have no control. Even if one accepts this 'self-oriented worldview' as valid, it is still labeled as 'broken' by Lutheran Confessions with respect to its incurvatus in se. Yay, I get to feel bad twice! What I have discovered to be the problem of brokenness (in regards to locating it within the self), is that when one orients themselves outwardly toward God and the neighbor, one is still really shitty at being a good Samaritan. The brokenness isn't just an orientation you can toggle from 0 to 1. It's indicative of personhood and existence on this side of death.
Assuming (ha!), I could make any conclusions out of all this stuff, I'm going to try a bit of summation. In my encounters with brokenness, whether experientially or existentially, I find myself instinctively drawn to blame either the subject or the object of these encounters. In other words, when brokenness happens it's either the fault of God, Satan (if one's inclined to believe in the cosmological entity, another person, an institution, a systemic force, or of one's self. Within the very act of placing blame, one could see the resultant infectious nature of brokenness as having entered into the self. Personally, I understand the blaming of brokenness on something/someone as a defense mechanism. In an encounter with brokenness, we find ourselves drowning in the inexplicable. Brokenness feels familiar and in a sense comfortable due to its integral relationship with existence on this side of death. Nevertheless, it also feels unnatural. When we are confronted by its 'ought not be so' unnatural nature, we are compelled to make sense of its senselessness. So, although we can say that blaming brokenness on God, Satan, sin, or whatever is a defense mechanism, I think that to do so is a matter of defending ourselves from despair by means of explanation and not rationalization. As to the gender perspectives on all this, I do not know. Ontologically, I can only speak from the male perspective and even then am limited to my own particular existential context. I suspect, that genders have a variety of encounters with brokenness (experientially and existentially) but I also suspect that the struggle with 'ought to be' and 'identity' is common among us.
Then again, I could be wrong.
