It was developed in Japan in the fourteenth Century. It is called kintsugi. “Kintsugi takes broken pieces of pottery and rejoins them using a lacquer with a beautiful gold powder. The word ‘kintsugi’ literally means ‘to join with gold.’”
Peter Scazzero in his book, Emotional Healthy Discipleship, makes this observation. “What makes kintsugi art so unique is that it actually emphasizes the broken pieces rather than trying to hide or disguise them, or discarding the object all together.”
This is so counterintuitive to many, if not most, of us. We spend a great deal of time hiding our broken pieces. Instead of using them to create a useful mosaic, we take our broken shards and sweep them into the dustpan of regret. We neglect to realize, or understand, it is our very brokenness that has helped define us. We are better for our broken pieces. Dumping them into the waste can of embarrassment does nothing to change that.
We find it difficult to sit in the deafening silence of brokenness. It is so hard to simply sit when it feels like our clay jar lays in shards at our feet. Someone has to clean that up. We stigmatize brokenness. It is a something to be ignored.
We cannot seem to bring ourselves to allow our broken pieces to be used to make us whole again. If we leave our brokenness out of our story we have significant holes in our lives. We are not genuinely ourselves. We are fabricated selves. A bit more acceptable, maybe, but not really who we are.
In all of this brokenness there is, ultimately, victory in Jesus. But there is still an internal battle to be won. We attempt to advert the battle that will result in our wholeness. We battle with fear. We battle with our sense of self-esteem. We battle our loneliness. We fight our fight alone. Because to verbalize our fight may put us in the crosshairs of being misunderstood. It may be an admission we don’t have it all together. Which we don’t, but who wants to live there?
Scazzero goes on to explain the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. This philosophy “calls for seeing beauty in the flawed, the damaged, the imperfect.”
We are all broken people. We walk with limps. Instead of living in our brokenness, we attempt to escape it, or completely eradicate it. We resist allowing our future to be ingrained with our history. Our broken past makes us stronger for a beckoning future.