Kintsugi is a Japanese approach to pottery repair in which cracks are filled with golden lacquer, highlighting the shapes of the cracks with the valuable material. The flowing shape of the flaws adds to the beauty of the piece.
The technique was developed accidentally when 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl. He sent it to China to be repaired and was disappointed that it came back stapled together.
“Local craftsmen came up with a solution—they filled the cracks with a golden lacquer, making the bowl more unique and valuable. The repair elevated the fallen bowl back to its place as shogun’s favorite and prompted a whole new art form. … This method transforms the artifact into something new, making it more rare, beautiful, and storied than the original.” (Andrea Montovani, Kintsugi and the Art of Repair)
More storied than the original.
All of us make mistakes and things can fall apart for any of us. This is true in our personal lives and also in the larger world. I pointed to reparations as an approach to heal the harms of racism in my sermon last Sunday.
It is how we use those experiences and repair them that determines their impact and their ultimate value.
Repair never returns us, or our world, to some pre-harm, pristine condition. The repair becomes part of who we are.
Do we view these repairs as scars, imperfections? Perhaps we try to cover them, make them invisible. Do we display our repairs as signs of worthiness? Do we subscribe to the belief that we are stronger in the broken places?
Or can we come to see beauty in those repairs. Can we come to understand the process of repair as living art? Such art does not restore innocence or purity. Such art creates a new wholeness.
As Alicia Garza writes in her book, The Purpose of Power
“My work is to transform grief and despair and rage into the love that we need to push us forward. I am not, and we are not, defined by what we lack—we are defined by how we come together when we fall apart.”
Blessings,
Bill