ART AND SOUL

“Do you feel ashamed by your flaws or imperfections?” Japanese pottery and the art of kintsukoroi can teach us about feeling flawed.

Kintsukuroi (“golden mend”) is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery using lacquer resin laced with gold or silver.  Breaks and repairs are treated as part of the object's history. The repairs are visible — yet somehow beautiful.  The mended flaws become part of the object’s design, and some people believe the pottery to be even more beautiful having gone through the process of being broken and repaired.

Through kintsukuroi, the cracks and seams are merely a symbol of an event that happened in the life of the object, rather than the cause of its destruction.

As we live our lives, our souls, our very insides, can get filled with our cumulative “stuff,” and that “stuff” often crowds out the light of understanding and forgiveness.

Spiritual maturity, enlightenment, or recovery can begin there.  For when we start where we are, there the signs of true enlightenment emerge... humility, gratitude and compassion.  We may find that initial healing manifests itself as generosity for the benefit of others. With time, the healing will penetrate your own soul. That’s where the “stuff” hides.

In What Japanese Pottery Can Teach Us About Feeling Flawed, Hannah Braime explains how a treasured art form relates our “stuff,” to brokenness of a pot, awaiting the Potter’s mending touch.

 “Like pots, bowls, cups, and plates, we endure our own bumps and scrapes... rejection, betrayal, abandonment, failure. So we try to avoid experiences that leave us vulnerable to these feelings as much as possible, lest the people around us see the evidence of just how imperfect, flawed, and ‘not good enough’ we really are.  We can choose to reject our bitter experiences and flaws, to wish and will them away, to regret, to pine, and to live in the land of ‘If only...’  Or we can choose to see these experiences for what they are: our golden seams.”

Ring the bells that can still ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That is how the light gets in.

– Leonard Cohen, Anthem

The lesson we can learn from this centuries-old Japanese practice of finding a valuable pot broken, taking the pieces and patching them back together using gold as an adhesive, is this: a visible mend signifies a Higher Power, The Potter, doing the healing. It shows that the break has been more than redeemed by something even more beautiful.

By recognizing our cracks of shame, unforgiveness, and resentment, we can mend.  As we identify that we are the clay (and resist our human temptation to slap on a temporary adhesive), we must turn to The Potter to do the mending with only the finest gold and silver. When we turn our suffering to Him, the end product is a pot with fine gold-filled cracks. Better than before.

Oh, and the other essential element is ours to offer... time.

So if we are willing to share our flaws, trust God as our Potter, and have patience to see our work of art through to completion, we can transform our lives. We can alter our futures.

It’s a lesson worth heeding. And none of us is without cracks. That’s for sure.

http://www.becomingwhoyouare.net/japanese-pottery-can-teach-us-feeling-flawed/