Brokenness: facing our fear
The art of kintsugi has more to teach us.
As I wrote last month, a kintsugi workshop helped me realise that God can bring beauty out of brokenness (“What If It Could Be Beautiful?” Aug. 7). All brokenness – whether physical, emotional, relational or situational – results from sin, but not all is a direct result of our own sin.
Some forms of brokenness seem to be without cause and are a sad part of living in a fallen world, as with the diagnosis of a debilitating disease. Others are inflicted upon us by specific sinful actions of others. Some result from our own specific sins; in these cases, even when the essential steps of repentance and confession remove our guilt, consequences often remain. Each type of brokenness is challenging in its own way. In the face of pain and suffering, what is an appropriate response? Lately, I’ve been reflecting on this: if God can heal our wounds and even make them beautiful, perhaps we don’t need to fear brokenness as much as we do.
Even to type that line seems counterintuitive, and something inside me resists the idea. But fear of our own brokenness can keep us from confronting reality. That, in turn, can amplify suffering. When we fail to acknowledge difficult and broken areas in our lives, pretending instead that all is well, we push down discomfort. And unresolved pain takes its toll on us and the people around us, sometimes in surprising ways. For example, it might mean we start to live from a place of shame – defined by Brené Brown as feeling like we are not good enough to experience love and belonging – which impacts our interactions with others. It might result in physical ailments, as described by Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Or maybe the hurt we have experienced gets carried into future relationships, keeping us from taking risks and living a full, rich life.
As I think of reasons to fear brokenness less, I remember how God sometimes seems nearest when we admit that we are weak, poor and broken. Difficult circumstances can make us realise in a new way our dependence on him. I have definitely experienced this, for example when, years ago, one of my children was hospitalized with scary results on a brain MRI and later diagnosed with a rare disease that required lengthy treatment.
Maybe this circumstantial awareness of God’s nearness helps explain some of Paul’s words in the New Testament: “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness” (2 Cor. 11:30). Later, he expands: “But [God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10). I find these verses difficult to understand and even more difficult to affirm. When I consider God’s nearness, however, I get a glimpse of what Paul might mean.
God is near us in our deepest need; more than that, when we suffer, he suffers alongside us in our brokenness. Jesus wept when he saw the tomb where his friend Lazarus’s body lay. Though Jesus is no longer physically with us, he is with believers through his Spirit, and the Spirit “intercedes for us with wordless groans” (Rom. 8:26).
Wounds and blessing
How can it be that our weaknesses and hardships – our suffering – can be a source of blessing?
This paradox is addressed by John Ames, minister of a small-town church in Iowa and narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. In a letter, Ames wrote, “I know it would be presumptuous to speak as if the suffering that people feel as they pass through the world were not grave enough to make [the question of why things happen the way they do] much more powerful than any answer I could offer. My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do everything we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.” Ames added, “I have struggled with this my whole life.”
I imagine that most of us have struggled in a similar way. In my own wrestling with this topic, a friend helped me see that how we respond to suffering is more of a witness for God than how we respond to blessing.
How, then, is a follower of Christ to respond to brokenness and suffering? I would say: Acknowledge it. Grieve. Lament. But do not imagine that you are alone in the depths of your struggle. The God of the universe, who himself stepped into our suffering world, stoops toward you. He has promised never to leave you, never to forsake you.
In the art of kintsugi, a broken item ends up beautiful because the cracks are lined with gold. When we turn to God in our brokenness, his presence holds us together and shines in the darkness. In the midst of our pain and difficulty, he whispers, “Do not fear. I am here.”
