Now that you're here,
Take a moment.
Settle in.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
I recently went back to my hometown to preach,
And one of the passages I preached on was from Ezekiel.
In it,
God takes Ezekiel to a valley of bones and asks if God can make these bones live.
I talked about how easy it is to feel like those bones.
Fragmented.
Dried up.
Broken.
Inhale.
Exhale.
In the book Art and Faith,
Artist Makoto Fujimura talks about the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi.
This art form repairs broken teaware,
And kintsugi masters mend the broken pottery,
First with Japanese lacquer,
And then they cover that with gold.
Inhale.
Exhale.
What I love about this is it's a new way of seeing.
I adore pottery.
I have all kinds of it scattered around my entire house.
If I were to drop a piece of my pottery on the floor,
I would probably cry a little or a lot,
Depending on which piece it was,
And then I would grab a broom and a dustpan.
I would sweep up the mess and not think twice about throwing it away.
Inhale.
Exhale.
But this tradition of kintsugi sees the beauty in the brokenness.
For instance,
These masters believe that broken pieces of pottery resemble landscapes,
So a master will actually accentuate the brokenness.
More brokenness is one of the things that makes us who we are.
Inhale.
Exhale.
But the idea is not to stay broken.
With kintsugi,
There is a gentle,
A masterful repairing of the damage.
When you are broken,
What are the gentle and quiet ways you can heal?
Walk in the woods,
Garden,
Call someone who knows how to listen with the ear of their heart,
As Saint Benedict says.
Watch the grass blowing in the wind.
Buy a beautiful journal and spill all your secrets with an expensive pen.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Something else that I love about kintsugi is it doesn't stop with the repair,
The gluing back together.
It takes those scars and accentuates those scars by coating them in gold.
When we are hurt,
When we are broken and fragmented,
We should not only knit ourselves back together,
We should then take what is precious and somehow apply that to honor the work that we have done.
We should celebrate and highlight,
Look,
This was broken.
Now it is mended and it is precious to me.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Getting hurt and feeling broken,
That sucks.
When you get hurt,
When you feel broken,
Cry.
Cry a little or a lot,
It's okay.
Weep,
Rail,
But rather than staying broken,
What can you do to put yourself back together so that you are stronger,
Fiercer,
And a hell of a lot more interesting than you were before?
Do that,
Try that,
And if it doesn't work,
Try something else.
Keep gathering up the pieces of yourself,
Mending them and offering them to the world.
This is me.
This is the real me,
The broken me,
The beautiful me.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Live light and live fierce.
