8/4/2022 Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
I was very sad when I heard the news. It was another couple calling it quits and breaking up. Their relationship was beyond all repair. Instead of love and acceptance of faults no matter what happened to them; it was promises broken again and again and their mutual trust completely shattered. Instead of having each other’s back and sharing life’s burdens, everything had become about protecting themselves from each other. The cracks from this broken relationship will not only leave permanent scars on their own lives, but also on the hearts of their two young children. It is they who will bear the biggest heartache as their parents determine that they are better off apart rather than being together. –Like a ceramic bowl that is dropped and broken, for this family, things will never be the same again.
In Japan, there is a long tradition of making beautiful pottery, a tradition that goes back thousands of years. And it is in Japan that the art of Kintsugi was created and still is practiced. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a lacquer resin mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. — Instead of throwing away a piece of pottery that has gotten broken, all of the parts are saved and it is carefully repaired with the expensive lacquer. The cracks, instead of being viewed as permanent ugly flaws, are highlighted and the cracks themselves become beautiful patterns, flaring uniquely across the surface of the piece.
The philosophy behind Kintsugi is that the breakage and the repair become part of the history of the object, something to highlight in memory and beauty rather than to disguise. When it first became popular in the 15th century, collectors became so enthralled by this new technique that they were accused of deliberately breaking valuable ceramic pieces, just so that they could be made even more valuable by adding seams of gold to them.
In our own lives, we could learn something from Kintsugi. All people are broken in big and little ways and with the broken shards of their lives they often cut and hurt other people. But with God’s gentle loving help; all of our broken lives can be carefully put back together again. Even when we are completely broken into pieces by life, when we can do nothing but lie shattered on the floor, we can know that we are still loved and valued by God. As we go through God’s process of repair, a new and awesome creation will be the result. The scars on our hearts become seams of gold where the history of our hurts are documented, but there is beauty in the surviving. May the love of God repair all of us as we gather our broken pieces and hand them over to our Maker for repair over and over again. Amen.
