What if it could be beautiful?

Despite North American culture’s “throw-away” reputation, if you are of Dutch background you may be familiar with the concept of making do when something breaks. At my house, we regularly use bent forks, holey oven mitts and a repaired teapot. The idea of using something broken-but-functional is not new to me. A recent event made me wonder, however: “What if the broken could be made beautiful?”

In early May, I participated in a kintsugi workshop through Academy Kintsugi, held at Redeemer University during the 2023 Kuyper Conference (“Kuyper and Kintsugi: Public Theology for Repair, Reconciliation and Restoration”). Academy Kintsugi was founded by Makoto Fujimura, a well-known contemporary artist and author, and his wife Haejin Shim Fujimura, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Both gave presentations at the 2023 Kuyper Conference. Makoto Fujimura also gave a public evening keynote address, an event at which he was awarded the 2023 Kuyper Prize from Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary.

Time to mend

Kintsugi is the process of using gold (or gold-coloured metal) to mend broken items in a way that enhances the objects’ beauty and does not hide the brokenness. Our Academy Kintsugi workshop was two and a half hours long, allowing us to move at a leisurely pace through the steps involved in this process. Each participant came with a broken item or used a broken item that was provided. (Before the workshop we were specifically requested not to break an item on purpose, since “there are enough broken things in the world already”!)

At the start of the workshop, we each paused to observe the item we were going to work on, taking note of the brokenness but also starting to imagine how we might introduce something new and beautiful to it. Next, we used fast-setting ceramic glue to join broken pieces. When the glue had set, we sanded off any extra bits of glue on the surface. We mixed small amounts of epoxy putty to fill in areas that were chipped; the putty hardened within 20 minutes and was followed by more sanding to smooth the area. The most rewarding part of the process was mixing gold-coloured copper powder with a liquid, plant-based lacquer to make a gold “paint” that we could apply along the cracked and repaired parts of the object. I worked on a teacup; other participants worked on mugs, bowls, a saucer and a ceramic plant pot.

Kintsugi provides a powerful metaphor, of course. In our lives, we all deal with brokenness – in our bodies, relationships, histories and more. Such brokenness is a result of sin; it’s not the way life is supposed to be. We must do what we can to prevent brokenness from happening, and we ought to lament it when it occurs. While we theoretically and theologically acknowledge that God can heal what is broken, most of us try to hide our trauma and brokenness. But since the kintsugi workshop in May, I have been thinking: maybe, if we could admit our brokenness and share it with a trusted community, God could do more than heal it – he could make it beautiful.

Reframing beauty

In his keynote address, Fujimura pointed out that Jesus still had scars after his resurrection. He is perfect, and yet he bears scars. What does that mean for the way we should understand perfection? Most of us tend to think of perfection largely in terms of physical appearance. After all, that is the aspect of people that we notice first. In our culture, an appearance of symmetry, uniformity and a lack of blemishes are widely considered to be beautiful.

Perhaps, after we die, when we are renewed and made whole, our perceptions will change even more than our physical appearance, enabling us to see an entirely different kind of beauty. I think we already catch glimpses here on this side of the grave. For example, many of the most beautiful people I know are not especially attractive in appearance in a conventional sense. Inner characteristics such as love – their love for others or their sense of others’ love for them – make them beautiful. Imagine if we had eyes to see goodness, gentleness and kindness as clearly as we see a person’s physical features. In C.S. Lewis’s essay “The Weight of Glory,” he described what it might be like to someday have such an altered perception – and what that should mean for how we live today:

“It is a serious thing to . . . remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. […] There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

New eyes, new goals

We are prone, Fujimura said, to read “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) and think of perfection in the same way we perceive beauty – a kind of industrial perfection, by which I understand him to mean uniform and unblemished. The Greek word translated as “perfect” in that verse, however, is teleios, which is related to the word telos (“end” or “goal”). Fujimura commented that teleios refers more to the endpoint and divine path. In light of that, maybe the verse means that we are to have proper perceptions and goals, learning to see how God sees and to want what he wants.

God can bring beauty out of brokenness. He can also give us eyes to see beauty in a new way.

Let’s look for evidence of beauty where it is not immediately apparent, and let’s treat each other in a way that brings out our truest, deepest beauty.