Kintsugi of the Spirit

My wife permits me to use her great-grandmother’s china tea set at my workplace. It is a precious allowance. And it terrifies me every single time that I utilize them.

The fragility of the implements heightens my appreciation of the tea. By necessity, I am more attentive to the experience. If I become flippant or careless in the least, then I would be disgracing generations’ worth of inheritance and finding myself in a heap of self-loathing all of a sudden. One day, however, it occurred to me that were an accident to happen, we’d have the cool opportunity to attempt the Japanese craftsmanship of kintsugi. Rather than attempt to hide the damage, the fragments are patched together with ostentatious accentuation.

Kintsugi has fascinated me for several years. Of course, the metaphor of people appeals to me greatly. That our injuries could be beautified beyond our previously unmarred state is a hopeful story to inhabit and practice. Well, I’ve only thought so on an ambiguous metaphysical level until recently.

A few weeks ago, the notion hit me to consider this idea right in the context of my marriage. Some of those wounds run deep. I have spent years resenting many of them. At times I have been so dismal as to resign myself into a futility of a self-inflicted forever-story.

This dynamic turns on its head instantly if I am willing to try at a redemption within our very narrative. The scars become beauty marks. The havoc becomes music. That which has been corrosive becomes gilded.

All of this was little more than a pleasant thought experiment. Perhaps I had begun some dress rehearsals within myself. Yesterday, it became a real emergency.

Our oldest son broke his leg — something awful — bombing a hill on his skateboard. As I write this, it has been a long 30 hours since the injury… ordeal at the ER, consultation at the orthopedists office, while we presently await his early morning call for surgery tomorrow. Our priority right now is to simultaneously abate the inflammation and give him as much comfort as feasible. The next three to four months portend all manner of rescheduling and probable inconveniences. The size of life.

Nevertheless, I was delighted to find some glimmers of excitement during this crisis. Of course, I do not enjoy the scenario, none whatsoever. Yet I cannot help but appreciate the opportunities this affords. He’ll be home more (we’ve been ferrying him to his first “real” job a few times a week); he’ll have more pronounced need of us during his fleeting teenage years; we get to solve problems together. For all the hurts and cracks that have developed, we are privileged to insert tenderness and beauty into every one of those cavities.

I believe this is somewhere along the wavelength of Henry Nouwen’s “Wounded Healer” archetype. We are incapable of passing through life without injury or injuring others. At least for a time, we are clumsy. Most of us never grow into the fullness of kindness that we were meant to imbue the world. What I intend is to be indomitable in that pursuit. This means much more suffering along the way, to be sure. Yet I want to be the kind of man that gilds the wounds as a habit of reflex.

Would that we become purveyors and perfecters of beauty in every hurt we might encounter.