Shattered: Picking Up the Pieces of My Father’s Rage

Nya, nya. You missed her!

Three-year-old Arthur Boers taunts his father after watching a geranium plant hurtle past his mother and shatter the apartment window. His parents retell this story for years, always laughing. Arthur doesn’t laugh now.

In this luminous meditation on inheritance and memory, Boers excavates what it means to be the son of Dutch Calvinist immigrants who carried more than belongings across the Atlantic. His father survived Nazi occupation and brutal combat in Indonesia, then built a thriving business building greenhouses in Ontario―but never escaped the rage passed down from his own father. Glass became the family trade and its central metaphor: fragile, transparent, dangerous, a substance that refracts light and cuts deep.

With a poet’s precision and a theologian’s discernment, Boers weaves together family photographs, cultural history, and the doctrines of covenant and predestination that shaped his world. He traces how trauma replicates itself across generations, how children can become unwitting rescuers, and how the Calvinist emphasis on discipline and silence around feelings created a pressure bound to explode somewhere. 

From the Glazen Stad (Glass City) of the Netherlands to a hard-won sanctuary beside Ontario’s Muskoka River, Shattered asks whether we can break cycles we never chose to enter―and what it costs to finally see our parents clearly.

Arthur Boers is an Anglican priest and author of several award-winning books, including The Way Is Made by Walking, Servants and Fools, Living into Focus, Shattered, and The Merciful Samaritan. He holds an MFA from Seattle Pacific University.