Broken Halos

By Bobby Neal Winters

I grew up as a Southern Baptist; I am currently a United Methodist. Once, very, very many years ago. In another decade, in another century, I was having a discussion with a Methodist pastor. I forget the context, I forget the topic being discussed.  That pastor, at that time, made the remark that Southern Baptist theology encouraged co-dependence.

I was a lot younger then.  I passed in on to my Baptist brother who, in turn, passed it on to his pastor.

Among themselves they agreed it was accurate and took it as a complement.

If I were teaching an upper-level class right now, I would assign the students to write an essay, a chapter, or perhaps an encyclopedia on those three paragraphs.  As I am not, let me expand a little.

Lately, I’ve found myself in conversations with people who’d recently made difficult decisions. Even though the decisions were made and were irreversible, they were feeling just a tinge of guilt.

I looked them in the eye and said these words, “You have to take care of yourself first.”

In isolation, without context, that sounds harsh and even Machiavellian. I didn’t mean it that way.  Let me unpack that.

When you are on a commercial jet, and the flight attendants are taking you through their spiel about how to buckle your safety belt and other things that could provide a filter for natural selection, they do say something helpful.

“In the unlikely event the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own first before assisting others.”

It doesn’t take all that long to lose consciousness, but it takes about 3 minutes or so to die. Get your mask on, and then you can help other people.

If you help someone with their mask before you get your own on, even if you are successful, they--a small child for instance--might not be able to help you. You die; they live with the regret of not being able to save that adult who saved them.

Now, there are people to whom the idea to help others first would not have occurred.  There are people who would pull their seatmate’s oxygen mask out of the ceiling and smile at them behind the mask. 

This advice is not for them.

This advice is for the people that Chris Stapelton is singing about in “Broken Halos”:

Seen my share of broken halos //

Folded wings that used to fly //

They've all gone wherever they go //

Broken halos that used to shine.

Stapelton, having seen the world through the dim light of honkey tonks, is aware of a type of person who helps without boundaries, who works without a safety net, who doesn’t necessarily put on their own mask before helping someone else with theirs. 

He imagines them as angels.

And it's beautiful.

One is tempted to imagine the angels as breaking their halos during the course of helping, of folding up their wings out of burnout, and this does happen.

But there is another point of view. 

Another Methodist pastor, on another day in that other decade, that other century, told me about a Roman Catholic Priest by the name of Henri Nouwen.  Nouwen wrote a somewhat famous book with the title “The Wounded Healer.”

If you get on the internet and search for quotes--which I encourage you to do--you may find this one that gels the idea I am trying to get at: “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”

Maybe the angels can help because their halos are broken.  Maybe they’ve ceased their flying because you can’t help from way up there.

Burnout is a problem.  Helping can devolve into codependency. You can get your halo broken.

You can also decide to try to understand.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.