When Hearts Break Open: A Reflection on Letting Go

by Lori Wilson

"When you see my husband on the corner, or my brother or my son, please treat them with respect."

Sometimes God speaks to us through the voices of those we least expect to be our teachers. Sometimes the Divine allows our hearts to be broken not to destroy us, but to expand our capacity to love like God loves.

The Sacred Art of Letting Go

Life presents us with countless opportunities for letting go - our children leaving home, our identities shifting, our perspectives being challenged, our comfortable assumptions being shattered. In Ignatian spirituality, we refer to these moments of grace as consolation and desolation - times when God seems present in the breaking open, and times when we feel the absence that makes space for something new.

Each letting go is an invitation to discover who we are beyond our roles, beyond our plans, beyond our carefully constructed sense of how life should unfold. In the Hebrew Scriptures, we see this pattern repeated again and again: Abraham leaving his homeland, Moses letting go of his life as a prince, and the Israelites releasing their bondage to Egypt. Always, the letting go precedes the becoming.

When we allow our hearts to be broken open—by our children's independence, by encounters with perspectives vastly different from our own, or by the natural losses that come with loving deeply—we discover that God is present not despite the breaking, but within it.

Finding God in the Breaking

The mystics have long known that the spiritual life includes suffering not as a punishment, but as a pathway to union with the Divine. When we resist the breaking, we miss the invitation. When we allow ourselves to be broken open, we discover that our hearts have more room than we imagined.

Consider the woman in a small Mexican town, where the population is predominantly women and children, whose husbands and sons have left to find work in the United States. When asked what she wanted visitors to remember, she stood and said, "When you see my husband on the corner, or my brother or my son, please treat them with respect." In that moment, hearts broke open to see beyond familiar perspectives, to recognize the dignity in those that society often overlooks. Consider the parent dropping a child off at college, feeling the fierce love that must release in order to truly love. Consider any moment when life has asked you to let go of who you thought you were, to become who God dreams you to be.

This is the spiritual journey - not a straight path toward perfection, but a spiral dance of holding and releasing, of being formed and reformed by Love itself.

Prayer for the Breaking Open

God of all comfort and all challenge, You know the places in our hearts that resist the breaking open. You know how we cling to what is familiar, how we fear the letting go.

Help us to trust that when You allow our hearts to break open, it is not to leave us empty-handed but to make space for something more beautiful than we could imagine.

In the spaces where our hearts break open, plant seeds of compassion. In the moments when we must let go, remind us that Love never truly leaves us.

Make us brave enough to love like You love - with hearts wide enough to be broken and strong enough to heal and generous enough to break open again.

Amen.

Reflection Questions

For Personal Prayer:

• Where in your life is God inviting you to let go? What makes this difficult?

• Recall a time when your heart was broken open. Looking back, how do you see God's presence in that experience?

• What identity or role are you holding onto that might be limiting your spiritual growth?

• How has allowing your heart to be broken open in the past expanded your capacity to love?

• What does it mean to you that God might allow our hearts to be broken, not to destroy us but to make us more capable of love?

• Where do you see God in moments of letting go versus moments of holding on?

• How do you discern between God's invitation to let go and mere worldly pressure to release what matters?

• What spiritual practices help you trust in the breaking open rather than resist it?

For Group Reflection:

• Share about a time when encountering someone else's perspective broke your heart open. What did you learn?

• How has letting go been part of your spiritual journey? What has surprised you about this process?

• Where do you see God in the stories of others who have had to let go of dreams, roles, or expectations?

• How can we support one another in trusting God's invitations to let go?