If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson 1886
Forgive my indulgence in sharing one of my favourite poems, but the poem acts as a apt epigraph for what I am writing There is a quiet terror in realizing how far the sacred sometimes feels from ordinary life. We build temples and churches—structures meant to summon heaven to earth—yet the ache of existence still greets us in kitchens, hospital rooms, alleyways, and crowded sidewalks. Faith, for many, becomes a pilgrimage always postponed, a distance always just out of reach.
Emily Dickinson does something radical in seven short lines: she collapses that distance. No sanctuary is named. No ritual is required. The measure of a life is reduced to a single trembling question—Did you ease one pain? Did you stop one heart from breaking? Meaning is no longer hidden in grandeur. It is hidden in mercy.
This is not sentimental comfort. It is existential realism. The world does not wait for our theology to mature. Pain arrives before certainty. Hunger speaks louder than doctrine. Loneliness outpaces liturgy. And Dickinson dares to suggest that a life need not solve the mystery of the universe to be meaningful—it need only lessen suffering somewhere along the way.
Christianity, at its most dangerous and beautiful, agrees.
The Book of Acts describes a community that treated property as temporary and people as eternal. Believers sold what they owned and laid the proceeds at the apostles’ feet—not for spectacle, not for piety—but so that “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:35). This is not polite charity. It is economic rebellion driven by love. It is the renunciation of security for the sake of solidarity. It is faith made visible and therefore vulnerable.
This thread runs far deeper into Scripture. In Exodus, God’s voice thunders not on behalf of kings or institutions but for widows and orphans:
“You shall not take advantage of any widow
or fatherless child.
If you take advantage of them at all,
and they cry at all to me…”
These words struck me with a profound poignancy when I left the supermarket tonight and had a few words with a family from Syria, a mother and two children and I wondered about their missing father. God leans forward at the sound of suffering. A God's compassion over broken people.
Philosophically, this confronts us with a frightening truth: meaning is not something we merely believe—it is something we enact. Faith that remains internal is indistinguishable from illusion. The early Christians understood this with terrifying clarity. To follow Christ was not primarily to agree with a creed, but to reorder one’s life around the vulnerable.
Even now, this ancient moral gravity still bends history. We see it in churches that run food banks for those trapped in addiction and poverty. In Christian medical missions that enter forgotten places where profit would never go. In orphanages, shelters, prison ministries, soup kitchens, and in the quiet acts of mercy that never make headlines. These are not accessories to the gospel. They are its spine.
And yet, we must confess the other truth: religion often feels far away. The church too entangled. The institution too slow. The language too abstract. For many, faith has become conceptual while suffering remains brutally concrete. Dogma can feel louder than compassion. Moral certainty can feel colder than love.
This is why Dickinson’s poem still burns. When the sacred feels inaccessible, holiness becomes portable. It must travel light. It must take the form of a cooled pain, a mended heart, a small rescue that no one else applauds. A single life steadied. A single burden lifted. A single trembling soul helped back to its nest.
Jesus himself lived this answer. He did not build institutions; he disrupted them. He healed outside sanctioned spaces. He touched what was declared unclean. The sacred, in his life, was never confined. It spilled into streets, homes, and sickrooms. It moved wherever pain lived.
This gives faith its unbearable weight. If God is found among the broken, then indifference becomes blasphemy. To ignore the suffering neighbour is not merely a social failure—it is a theological one. As Christ himself said, what we do to “the least of these,” we do to him.
This is why the Epistle of James sounds almost violent in its honesty:
If a brother or sister lacks food and clothing,
and we offer only words without action,
what kind of faith is that?
The answer is uncomfortably clear. It is dead.
So, we should be careful when someone claims the name “Christian.” The test is not vocabulary but visibility. Not how loudly faith is confessed, but how tangibly it is lived. Not what we believe about God, but what our neighbour experiences because of us.
In the end, the most authentic act of worship available to us is not performed in rows of pews or beneath vaulted ceilings. Maybe it is performed on sidewalks, in shelters, in hospital wards, in kitchens where the last loaf of bread is broken in half.