Brutiful.

I had never heard that term before. Then, on Sunday, I heard it twice in one day. Let me give you the context.

Last week Thursday, I went to my church in the evening to attend a prayer service for a young couple who are dealing with the ravaging effects of brain cancer. Doug and I have only been members of this church for a little over a year, but from the beginning of our visits there, this young man and his wife were regularly lifted up in prayer in the Sunday service.
About 3 months ago, Doug and I went to a luncheon for people in our parish to get to know each other. We sat down and started conversations with the people near us. Across from us was this young woman we had been praying for, and I soon realized she was my daughter’s age. In fact, she had lived on the same floor of her dorm one year. That day, I learned a little part of her story, including her answer when I asked her how she and her husband met. They met in college at a cancer support group.
That one sentence spoke a thousand words, and they took my breath away.
Fast forward to two Sundays ago. The person giving the prayers of the people had announced that the tumor in her husband’s brain had grown rapidly since Christmas. This came a few weeks after the news that there was now no treatment that he could have. There would be a prayer service on Thursday to surround them with love, care, and prayer.
I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I put it on my calendar. I am on the prayernurturing committee at church, and one of our pastors emailed us inviting us to come a little early to help set up chairs and help show people where to go if needed. “I think I’ll go to that,” I thought to myself. Thursday came around. I arrived a little early to lend a hand where needed. Already, my pastor and 2 others who organized this night were ready. They had placed some chairs in a half-circle up front, printed out about 2 dozen pages with a song on the front and the back, and set out about 30 candles for people to light and bring up as they came in. They imagined maybe 20-30 people coming, they told me.
Instead, almost 200 showed up.
Two hundred people who knew this couple from a variety of places–family, friends, cancer groups, work, etc–arrived to pray. They came in quietly, solemnly, with pain and love in their eyes. They surrounded the young woman (her husband was now too sick to come; he had begun hospice that morning). The people gathered together with love in common for this couple began to offer up prayer, encouragement, God’s word, and memories in support. One childhood friend cried out so powerfully, his prayer pierced my heart. Somehow, his words and tone captured love, trust, pleading, and pain all in one prayer in a way I had never heard before. I wept. Others wept. This lasted for an hour and a half. “This,” I breathed to myself, “is love embodied, the body of Christ in tangible form.”
A few days later, Sunday morning arrived. Doug and I went to church. When it was time to greet each other, a friend of mine sitting in the row ahead of me gave me a hug and whispered, “Thank you for reading that poem on Thursday night. That whole service was…(she paused, looking for the right word)…have you heard the term brutiful?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
“It’s a combination of two words–brutal and beautiful–meaning both words are true,” she explained. “That’s what Thursday was.”
I stopped, struck by the word. “Yes, it was,” I agreed.

Later that same Sunday night, eight women varying in ages from mid-20s to mid-50s gathered in my living room. We began as a “pop-up” small group at my church. One lovely woman had offered it as an opportunity for women to grow deeper together, and an eclectic bunch of us responded. A year and a half later, we are still meeting. We connected over laughter, life, and stories. Then, the woman who initiated this group led us in a process to write our stories. This night, our first person shared their story. Our friend and leader of sorts set it up with such care. She explained she would first pray for us, then we would all listen while one person read their story. Afterwards, we would hold them and their story in silence. When we were ready, we would each take a rock, write down something about the person and their story we heard and wanted them to know. We would go around the room and share what was on our hearts and then give them our rock. We would close the night in praying together. Each of us would do this over the next months, and each of us would walk away with words to reread on stones that held us and our stories like anchors.
I read my story. It was a sacred night. It felt holy and good. It was, again, church–God’s body in tangible form.
When one young woman in our group shared with me what she wrote on her stone, she used that word, “brutiful.” Again, I was struck by the truth and power of this word I had never heard before that day: that some things simultaneously hold both the brutality of this broken world and the beauty of God. It reminds me of a mug I bought from Orange Pebble Studio. Hand-etched in clay is this phrase, “Beauty and Brokenness.” When I hold it full of warm coffee or tea, the message of these words reminds me of hope in the midst of tears. In this already-and-not-yet world, this dichotomy can be true. When we hold each other’s stories gently with deliberate love and care, I believe we bring a sense of the sacred to the ordinary.
Let’s keep walking together, acknowledging the brutal while shining light on the beautiful–it is a sacred act of love.