Master Kintsugi

“Be perfect just like your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Last weekend I participated in a retreat

in which we used the Enneagram to

help illuminate our potential strengths and weaknesses

by studying the different personality types

and how they interact with each other.

It was really fascinating work that

helped us understand ourselves better

and how we interact with others.

Initially it was hard to read your own personality type

and accept the weaknesses about yourself.

For myself, I found this particularly hard

not because they were inaccurate,

but because they are so accurate!

It is hard to accept the negative truth about yourself.

But once one sits with the tool and the reality of the truth

then it becomes liberating on so many levels,

especially the deeper spiritual truths about ourselves

as all being created children of God with different personalities.

In summary if we want to grow as a person

then we need to accept our imperfections.

That all seems to fly in the face of the words from Jesus in today’s Gospel

calling us “to be perfect like your heavenly Father is perfect.”

But like all scripture, there is a context for the gospel today.

Jesus is teaching that the old way of following God

was too legalistic and too narrow.

An eye-for-eye; a tooth-for-a-tooth was retribution and not justice.

It was fair comparative to other systems of that time

that said if you take one of our lives, then we will take 10 of your lives!

But Jesus blows up the boundaries and tells them to perfect.

The word “perfect” here might be better translated as “whole.”

Be whole as your heavenly Father is whole.

It is not perfect as in “without imperfection.”

It is to be whole and be completely integral with who you are;

to be your complete self as the Father is completely himself.

And inside of that is justice.

Inside of that will be fairness,

once we are honest and true to ourselves.

Everyone was created by God

and by coming back to that understanding of who we are

and the wholeness of who we are,

then we will fulfill the commandments.

That sounds like great theology.

What does is actually and concretely mean?

Every one of us has weakness and brokenness

in some way, shape or form.

Some of them are very small and some are very large.

Sometimes we have done these things to ourselves

and sometimes they have been caused by others.

The way we deal with these wounds or imperfections

is often determined by our personality types

and how we interact with each other.

Whether we are young or old, we make mistakes.

We all know that but the older we get,

the more mistakes we make and

the more exposed we are to other people’s mistakes.

And we can become frustrated and maybe more broken.

What are we to do?

How can we perfect as Jesus calls us?

There is a Japanese artwork called “Kintsugi.”

Kintsugi takes simple pottery that is broken

and the broken pieces are put back together

using a golden dust made into lacquer and highlighting the brokenness.

Because no two pottery pieces break up the same way,

each kintsugi-repaired piece is completely unique and beautiful.

There is uniqueness to each pottery

because of the features of the brokenness.

This is closer to what Jesus was trying to get across to us

that we have to find a way to not just heal

but to integrate the woundedness and brokenness

of who we are into our being itself

and that way being perfect as being whole again.

Not to be perfect as without imperfections

but perfect in our wholeness.

When we do not allow ourselves to heal

then the brokenness remains brokenness.

When we do not allow other people’s wounds to heal,

their brokenness remains brokenness

and they are no longer whole.

There is a mutual responsibility to allow the Lord

to do the healing and the integrating as

God is the master Kintsugi artist.

We are not the ones who do the Kintsugi.

That is the Lord’s work.

But if we do not allow him to heal us

then we cannot become whole.

We cannot become fully integrated again.

How do we do that?

The first thing we have to do is

to be honest with ourselves with our own weaknesses;

our own brokenness; our own foibles;

or maybe it is our weirdness or our weakness.

In the language of the Enneagram retreat,

we accept our personality type and subtype

and sit with the tension of the good and not-so-good features.

We all need to simply acknowledge

that there is some brokenness inside myself.

Some of these are huge breaks and they have shattered us.

Some of them are small chips, little things out of our life.

Sometimes they have been caused by us to ourselves.

Sometimes they have been caused by others,

maybe not deliberately but still the same pain.

Sometimes it seems they were caused deliberately

and the pain is extraordinary.

If we could acknowledge that and

then allow the Lord to heal us

and to use this golden lacquer of his mercy and love

so that it will remain with us

but we become beautifully whole once more.

We become perfect because we are whole.

That can only happen if we present ourselves humbly

to the Lord as not perfect human beings,

but as broken people acknowledging our brokenness.

Once we allow that to happen for ourselves

then there is a chance that we will allow

it to happen for somebody else.

Unless we allow that to happen for ourselves,

allow Jesus and God to heal us,

we are not going to allow anyone else to heal

because we are going to operate from our brokenness.

We are going to insist on other people to be broken

just like we are broken.

Today, our work is to first simply acknowledge in humility

our own simple brokenness, small or large

and then to present ourselves to the Lord for healing.

And let him take that brokenness and

put his gold lacquer of love in and to heal us;

to make us beautiful and whole once again

and then we can reach out to allow

that same healing Kintsugi for others.

“Be perfect just like your heavenly Father is perfect.”