Broken: Broken Glass Shines Brighter
In 1966, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned Leonard Bernstein to compose a new musical work to celebrate the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1971. Well-known for the success of “West Side Story” and as a conductor, “MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers” was not well-received. To read through the lyrics 50 years later, however, is fascinating. The piece follows the structure of the Catholic Mass.
In Catholic Mass, or even in Protestant worship services with formal liturgy such as the Episcopal Church where I grew up, the moment when the priest breaks the communion bread is accompanied by music referred to as the Fraction Anthem. The Latin root of the word “fraction” means “to break,” hence we get our math fractions. For the Fraction Anthem in “MASS,” Bernstein wrote a new song appropriately titled, “Things Get Broken.” The musical had just reached its climax in the previous movement, “Angus Dei,” and the subsequent literary “falling action” involves literal falling and breaking, of more than just the communion bread. This is where the line that started this whole rabbit trail is found: “Glass shines brighter when it’s broken.”
It is factually true that broken glass shines brighter. When you have a single pane of glass, light shines through it; at the right angle, the glass may also reflect the light. However, broken glass has many more facets than one pane and so those facets reflect off each other as well as the original light source because they both reflect and refract the light, changing the direction of the light from one direction into multiple. It’s similar to light reflecting off of a polished gemstone or through a prism, except less symmetrical.
The priest who utters, “Glass shines brighter when it’s broken,” in the play is sharing an observation that surprised him; he says it’s odd and he never noticed before “how easily things get broken.” Many things are much more fragile or precarious than we would like to admit.
Last week I talked about treating your places of breakage with utmost care, not ignoring or patching up to look as if it was never there. This week let’s take not hiding your brokenness one step farther and I invite you to let the light shine through, around, and change direction in your brokenness. The light has more surfaces to shine on and may reveal something you didn’t know. It may illuminate a new road to follow. As light is reflected and refracted in broken glass in new directions, resulting in a brighter light, may a brighter light shine on you and illuminate your path.