Inhabiting a Broken Home

INHABITING A BROKEN HOME

Never before have families been so broken:
men and women are compeled to work,
not to find personal fulfilment
or to create beauty and harmony,
but to pay the debts for the car, the house,
and for all the things
advertisements tell them they cannot live without!
Fatigue, exhaustion, stress and agression
accompany the long hours to travel to and from work.

Families are displaced and uprooted
as they try to find work
or a job with more money,
but the real loss is in the quality of relationship:
men and women unable to meet each other’s needs,
expecting too much from one another.
The cry of loneliness and the need for love
can so quickly evoke hatred or a sense of imprisonment;
tenderness turns into aggression,
leading to separation and divorce.
Is it possible to love,
to be faithful to love?
Or do we exist in a chaotic world
where love is only a myth?
Is love anything more
than just seeking to fill up one’s own emptiness,
using the other for one’s own pleasure and power?
The experience of separation is so painful,
Looking back on the ecstacy of love
as nothing but a dream or an illusion.