Kintsugi & Advent
(12/11/22)
O Lover,
Within forty-eight hours last week I had my first and second encounters with the Japanese art of kintsugi: the repair of damaged pottery via the application of gold lacquer to the very seams of fracture. A larger metaphorical meaning of the term involves any restoration which incorporates evidence of damage and repair rather than seeking to reverse and/or disguise it. Kintsugi transforms into another dimension of beauty rather than obfuscates the evidence of damage. My first encounter involved the reference to kintsugi in a sermon my son preached in his Mennonite congregation; the second a recent Pope Francis audience with several kintsugi artists. These two experiences almost immediately nudged me into awareness of a profound dimension of Your relationship with . . . everything!
Not surprisingly, these two encounters almost immediately had me pondering Your Christ. His restorátio —-we use the word “Resurrection”—incorporates, rather than removes, his marks of torture and slaughter into the Risen One who has conquered death. In the process he both discloses and embodies Your eternal M.O. of discarding nothing of the history of Your finites, whether triumphs or disasters. With You, finally, nothing is lost. To edit Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: the cracks are “how the light gets [out].” This is indescribably more than the mere reversion to a former state of pristinity and unchallenged innocence. Indeed, restorátio is far too weak a word for the glorification of Jesus of Nazareth into the Cosmic Christ as witnessed to by the Apostles. And not unlike the kintsugi bowl, the Risen One paradoxically was, and yet was not, who they had known before the shattering catastrophe on Dark Friday. It is thus not accidental that the Fourth Gospel (20:19-29) twice has the Risen Christ passing through barred doors and inviting his disciples to explore his (lacquered) wounds, his recent history, with their eyes, hands and hearts.
One of my names for You, O One Beyond All Names, is Alchemist, The One who, beyond repairing, restoring, and fixing, transforms infinitely beyond what once was. The jagged lines of our shatterings become the inklings of beauty which are nothing less than the precursors of the new heaven and new earth (Apoc 21:1), the exquisite beauty of which cannot be compared with what once was. Although in the writings of some Christian mystics, particularly those indebted to the Neo-Platonic cycle of being, there may not always be adequate emphasis on the scale of the enhancement unfolding between the cosmos’s origins out of You and its ultimate homecoming to You, it is precisely in that present pause that Your heílsgeschichte is operative. The interval of that enhancement, one of transformation transcending restoration, is Your artist’s studio, Your playground, where You are “making all things [pánta] new” (Apoc 21:5), golden lacquer new.
Given the scale of the implications of the Risen Christ, I view the thrust of the kintsugi image as being a central part of the hope needed to live in this world, a multifaceted bucket of shattered shards, as it presently is. In the edited words of the Holy Father in his audience: “where [brokenness] increased, Your [golden lacquered] grace abounded all the more” (Rom 5:20, EA). This day, O Lover, I tighten my grip on Your “all the more” as Reality, both now and for the duration. Kintsugi seems to be one of the clues on the road to the new heaven and new earth.
