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By Rev. Heather Janules
July 24, 2011
It is an exciting time in the life of any congregation:
the completion of a new sanctuary.
A couple years ago, a local Unitarian Universalist community created
a unique worship space by building a round, wooden structure. This
structure, called a yurt, has a skylight in the center of the roof
and windows all around, making the wood and white interior glow with
natural light. After months of permit applications, lots of
volunteer hard work and waiting, the beautiful new sanctuary was
finally complete.
One Saturday, our Board of Trustees of my congregation had the
distinction of being the first group to use the new worship space
for a meeting, a retreat to plan our work for the next church year.
We arrived at the church in enough time for Mary, a member of the
congregation, to give us a tour. Mary beamed with pride as we walked
through her spiritual home.
The inauguration of the sanctuary as a meeting space, this retreat
with our Board, we thought, warranted a group photograph.
The most attractive part of the sanctuary is the front of the
worship space, the chancel. Against the stark, white wall is a shoji
screen with black-framed panels. In front of the screen is a low
wooden table, holding the items used in worship – the minister’s
hymnal, the chalice and a glass bowl for the community to name their
joys and sorrows.
A minister who once served the congregation told me about this bowl,
a clear vessel held in a wrought-iron stand, cradling a number of
multi-colored stones. Each Sunday morning, the members removed the
stones and filled the bowl with water. At a special time in their
service, those with a joy or sorrow they wished to share with the
community –the birth of a new child, a death in the family – would
speak aloud what they carried in their hearts and place a stone in
the water.
The Cedar Lane trustees decided to have our group photograph in this
beautiful spot. Mary was kind enough to take a number of photos with
different cameras. Then, with the last click of the shutter, it was
time to come to the table and begin our work together.
As I moved towards the work table, with one swift, careless motion
of my arm, I knocked the bowl of multicolored stones to the floor
and watched in horror as it smashed to pieces.
Quickly, our church leaders jumped into action, looking for a broom,
picking up tiny pieces of glass with their fingers. Feeling
terrible, I pulled Mary aside. I asked her where the congregation
found the original bowl and what time their service began the next
morning. I knew I couldn’t put the pieces of their sacred bowl back
together but I was going to do everything in my power to ensure that
they would have a bowl exactly like their now broken one for worship
the next day.
Mary took everything in stride. “These things happen,” she said. “It
was an accident. We have another bowl we can use tomorrow.”
I knew the only way I could sleep that night would be if I did
something to mend what I rendered. Sensing that it would be best for
the congregation to choose their bowl, I sent a donation to the
church to offset the cost of the new vessel. [pause]
In time, this awful experience of breaking a community’s sacred
vessel and the graciousness with which Mary received its destruction
became symbolic of something bigger than this one incident. It has
served as a reminder to me of how easy it is to do harm and, in
equal measure, how easy it is to become broken ourselves, to fall
apart. Sometimes this brokenness is literal – a smashed glass bowl,
a house annihilated by a tornado, a wounded body. Sometimes it is
poetic– a broken heart, a shattered spirit. And I have been reminded
that there are many ways to respond to brokenness – with distress,
with anger or, as Mary demonstrated, with a clear understanding that
brokenness is part of life. These things do happen.
While I have enough life experience to know that brokenness does
happen, I have not made peace with this reality. I have not learned
to fully accept the experiences that have wounded me or my own
shortcomings that have caused harm in others. So it should not
surprise anyone when I also affirm that I have yet to find beauty in
brokenness. Knowing that not everyone comes back from the brink of
despair or physical annihilation inspires me to see any recovery,
any return to “normal,” as the miracle, as more than what any of us
can expect. The pain of becoming broken stands in the way of my
seeing anything miraculous in the experiences that insult the body
or the spirit.
The idea that brokenness can be not only acceptable but beautiful
came to me through a serious of journal entries by a writer who goes
by one name, Sparrow. Published in The Sun magazine, his piece
titled “Spring Comes to New Jersey” includes this entry on April
5th. He writes:
This afternoon I visited the International Center of Photography to
see an exhibit by photographer and artist Barbara Bloom. She admires
the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken ceramics are repaired
using gold-laced lacquer. The idea is that an imperfect vessel is
more satisfying than a spanking-new one. In the exhibit was a teapot
Bloom had broken and repaired with gold lacquer. The line of the
break, dictated by pure chance, is now a subtle decoration. The
teapot displays a sacred humility.
In the world so many of us live in, a world of want for material
gain and the newest model of gadget, the notion that “an imperfect
vessel is more satisfying than a spanking-new one” is a radical
inversion of what is desirable. In this short introduction to the
art of kintsugi, my notion of beauty turned upside down.
Having discovered the possibility of finding beauty in the
unplanned, uncontrollable fractures of a broken teapot, I remembered
another story I first heard from my minister, a story that reminds
me that I am not alone in struggling to see beauty in the broken
places and that finding this beauty, what Sparrow calls “sacred
humility,” is possible.
The story is from the book “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel Naomi
Remen, the co-founder and medical director of the Commonweal Cancer
Help Program. In a chapter titled “The Container,” Dr. Remen shares
the experience of a young man whose body is saved but whose life is
destroyed by surgery. Diagnosed with a cancer in his right leg, this
young, strong and popular athlete required an amputation. With the
loss of his limb, he also lost the lifestyle, attention and status
and he so enjoyed. He lost his identity.
What filled the void was a deep, searing anger, an anger he treated
with alcohol and other self-destructive behaviors. After two car
crashes, a mentor encouraged him to meet with Dr. Remen to begin to
process this profound change in his life.
Dr. Remen recalls one of their early conversations: “Filled with a
sense of injustice and self-pity, he hated all the well
people…Hoping to encourage him to show his feelings about himself, I
gave him a drawing pad and asked him to draw a picture of his body.
He drew a crude sketch of a vase…Running through the center of it he
drew a deep crack. He went over and over the crack with a black
crayon, gritting his teeth and ripping the paper. The drawing was a
powerful statement of his pain and the finality of his loss. It was
clear that this broken vase could never hold water, could never
function as a vase again.”
Throughout their subsequent meetings, this patient would bring in
articles about other people who suffered traumatic physical losses –
a man who lost a leg in an accident, a girl who suffered burns in a
house fire, a boy wounded by a chemical explosion. When he shared
these stories, he railed against the doctors who tried to heal these
people, saying they just couldn’t understand what such a loss was
like.
One day, Dr. Remen asked him if he wanted to do something about this
gulf between these patients and their doctors. He eventually
acknowledged that he would like to meet patients like himself. After
a few phone calls, Dr. Remen was able to connect him with young
people who had suffered injuries like his. He quickly formed a deep
bond with these patients and, in time, became an effective
ambassador, helping family, friends and medical care providers
understand what it feels like to live through an experience of
profound physical brokenness.
One patient that became especially important to him was a woman who
underwent a double mastectomy to save herself from the cancer that
claimed so many of the lives of women in her family. While this
radical surgery perhaps prevented great suffering and an early death
from cancer, the loss of both breasts at age twenty-one plunged her
into deep depression.
During his first visit, this woman was so shut down that she did not
respond to anything he said. He spoke openly about what it feels
like to lose such an intimate part of one’s self. He got angry and
yelled. Nothing. Finally, in a gesture of pure desperation, he
unhooked the harness that connected his prosthetic leg to his body,
causing it to crash to the floor. Her eyes opened in surprise. Then,
he began hopping on one leg, snapping his fingers to music playing
on her radio and laughing. Before she knew it, she was laughing too.
“Fella,” she said, “if you can dance, maybe I can sing.” In that
moment, a great friendship began.
Soon thereafter, she joined him in his visits to others who were
struggling as they had struggled. Eventually these two friends,
their relationship born of shared loss, became husband and wife. In
the past, so many of this young man’s romances were based on how his
girl looked on his arm. This bond, however, was born of something
deeper and perhaps even more attractive.
In Dr. Remen’s last session with this man, she brought out the
drawing he had made of the broken vase and asked him if he
remembered it. She recalls that, “he took it in his hands and looked
at it for some time. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s not really
finished’…Taking a yellow crayon, he began to draw lines radiating
from the crack in the vase to the very edges of the paper. Thick
yellow lines…He put his finger on the crack, looked at me and said,
softly, ‘This is where the light comes through.’” [pause]
As I reflect on these stories of beauty in brokenness - these
stories of sacred humility, of finding light in the crack - a common
thread emerges. Whether it is an artist’s eye and touch or
conversations with a medical healer or between two devastated
patients or - in the story of the broken Buddha - a gathering of
curious and bewildered monks, what turns a collection of broken
pieces into something beautiful is the presence of human attention
and compassion.
As Rev. Georgia observed in her telling of the story of the broken
Buddha, the parable about the monks is not only meaningful in the
way that it reminds us that the Buddha had to be cracked open in
order to reveal the gold inside but that the gold would have
remained hidden had the monks not worked together to chip away the
alabaster. In her words, “human transformation is a team effort.”
While I have not fully learned to accept the reality of brokenness
in human life, I do know that people around me can see beyond my
narrow perspective. Another set of eyes can see resilience where I
may see hopelessness, beauty where I just see a wound. It is through
receiving the gift of human tenderness that what was unbearable is
rendered manageable.
Sy Safransky, in the same edition of his “Notebook” when he recalls
his daughter’s accident and healing, makes this observation:
Every experience can be a teaching if I’m willing to see it that
way; that suffering, too, can be a teaching. In fact, suffering
usually gets the teacher-of-the-year award because I always sit up
and pay attention when I’m in physical pain or when my heart has
been broken or when I witness the anguish of someone I love. To
honor the teaching doesn’t mean welcoming suffering with open arms,
or looking for the silver lining of a tragedy with a kind of
relentless optimism that denies painful feelings. I remind myself
that blessings in disguise remain disguised until they’re good and
ready to reveal themselves – and even then, the blessing might
simply be that a particular setback has taught me to live more fully
in the present, or deepened my compassion for others going through a
similar difficulty or underscored the paradox that we’re ultimately
alone and inextricably bound to one another. [pause]
In a beautiful place of worship, through my moment of carelessness
and the shattering of a sacred vessel, I received a profound
reminder about the fragility of this world. Now that time has passed
and I have been invited to reflect on different ways of experiencing
both beauty and brokenness, I now understand my experience with the
broken bowl as another parable of sorts.
Like the bowl in the chancel, we human beings are vessels; our
bodies are mostly made of water. Like this bowl, sometimes we carry
joy, sometimes we carry sorrow. Sometimes, we break apart. These
things do happen. In these moments, it is often the people closest
to us, the people of our faith community and beyond, who help us
pick up the pieces. And, in this drawing together of shards and
colored stones, sometimes there is beauty. Sometimes there is a
“sacred humility.”
I do not want to suggest that Mary, our host, saw her community’s
fragmented sacred bowl and regarded the sharp and colorful remains
as beautiful. Yet her calm and gracious response seemed to come from
a deeper place than the obligations of hospitality. I had a sense
that Mary was intimately familiar with the fragile, transient nature
of this world and at greater peace with this reality. Perhaps Mary’s
immediate acceptance of the damage I caused and the destruction of
the chancel bowl was the simplest and most important lesson of all
that day.
In this thing called life, we carry our joy and our pain together
and, when one of us falls apart, let us be prepared to join them in
picking up the pieces. We can, like the monks with the broken
Buddha, break through the surface and find the gold inside. We can,
like in the art of kintsugi, piece together the fractured elements
and create something whole, something that displays sacred humility.
We can, like the man in Dr. Remen’s story, turn brokenness to
wholeness by joining with others with fractured lives. We can, like
Sy Safransky, both feel the pain of suffering while also being open
to the gifts that suffering can sometimes bring, including the gift
of compassion and connection. We may not be able to fully mend what
is rendered but, with patience and love, together we can welcome
healing into the empty space. May it begin with us.
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