A Fractured Wholeness
See from his head, his hands, his feet
Sorrow and love flow mingled down.
To enter fully into the narrative of Holy Week and the Passion of Christ is to risk being swept up and swept under by the pain and brutality of it, along with the wonder. This is a gift: to enter in to Holy Week in a way that costs us something by demanding the full attention of our heart, mind, and spirit. Participating in the drama of Holy Week is, perhaps, one small way we stay awake and watch with Christ in the garden of our souls. We enter into the celebration of Palm Sunday, followed by the beauty of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany, then the deep wound of betrayal on Maundy Thursday, followed by the excruciating reality of being unjustly condemned to die by way of torture on Good Friday. But before the resurrection joy of Easter Sunday, there is Holy Saturday. And it is Holy Saturday where I get stuck, because Holy Saturday rings most true to the oh-so-human experience of in-betweenness—of wondering if God is asleep on the job or if we’ve been left behind. Is He ever coming back? Although I cognitively know that Christ has risen, when Holy Saturday comes I cannot help but feel a bit lost and abandoned, like he’s gone underground for a good while and cannot say when he’ll return. On Holy Saturday, I feel the ache of remembering that Christ has not yet returned in his fullness to make all things new—an ache that is easier to ignore in the hurry and noise of daily life. But Holy Saturday offers the hush of a divine silence that amplifies the noise of our most painful, unresolved questions, asking us to stay near the wound.
On Holy Saturday this year, something happened that got me un-stuck. And it happened between a baby shower and Easter morning. Our church had recently purchased a piece of art to hang in our lobby. This was an important decision, because it will be the first image people see when they walk through our doors. We wanted it to represent the heart of our church, and I love the image we chose by the artist Paige Payne: Jesus is embracing someone, with a single tear running down His face. Jesus and the person he is holding are both painted in the same white robe in a way which makes the lines and any division between the two cease to exist. Their robes are run with fractures and cracks, like a broken piece of pottery—only the cracks are filled with gold. It’s a nod to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi—that is, repairing a broken pottery piece with gold in a way that does not hide the crack but rather makes it shine and increases the piece’s value.
Our new art piece had arrived the week before Easter, and we were eager to debut it on Easter morning. But there was just one problem: the gold which filled the cracks on the large canvas we ordered was lackluster and dull. It was impossible to print gold leaf onto the canvas, and yet the luminous gold filling the broken places paired with the tear of Jesus was what drew us to the piece when we first found it online. But Mary, a church elder and friend, had a plan. “Let’s paint over the cracks with more gold,” she said while handing me a small tub of metallic gold paint. When the hefty, gold-framed painting arrived several weeks before Easter, we had placed it in the small prayer room off the back of our sanctuary to keep it a surprise. But, of course, life happens, and I had waited until the last minute on Holy Saturday to re-visit the painting and layer it with gold paint. The women at my church had been planning a baby shower for a church member that fell on Holy Saturday, and between those plans and prepping for all that Holy Week involves when you’re married to the pastor of a small church, I’d left painting Jesus for last. When the baby shower ended on Saturday afternoon and the last guests left the church, I crept towards the small prayer room, exhausted and unsure whether I could pull off painting each individual crack gold without ruining the entire painting. But when I opened the prayer room door, a sense of calm greeted me as streams of light shone through the 70’s era window panes of rippled yellow glass. My eyes rested on the painting, propped unassumingly against the wall next to a large wooden replica of the Cross and a crown of thorns. I gently slid the painting to floor and knelt before it in a posture of reverence, paintbrush in hand. Gingerly dipping the tip of my brush into the pot of gold, I began to paint the first slow strokes upwards from the hem of Jesus’s robe, near his feet.
A sense of time passing and the rush and worry of the outside world faded as the alchemy of late-afternoon light streaming through rippled glass turned the shadows around me and within me into gold—the kind of gold used to mend broken things, and maybe broken people too. It was just me and Jesus, the cross and the crown, the gold paint and deepening yellow light as the sun began to descend from its zenith in the sky. And through it all, I knelt—bent out of necessity by getting as close to the painting as I could to ensure the precision of my strokes. As my strokes grew longer and more confident I realized the artistic posture I had assumed was also shaping my spiritual posture in ways beyond my comprehension. All I knew was that I was a woman tired and bent, broken, bowed, and kneeling—in desperate need of Jesus’ embrace. I thought of Mary anointing Jesus for burial with costly perfume and began to think of my own act as one of anointing Jesus for resurrection—painting the truth about his brokenness and ours into cracked and shadowy places until they shone like the sun.
And it was on this Holy Saturday that I truly knew and experienced God not as absent, but simply silent with us. And maybe sad, too, pausing to grieve and hold the broken pieces in his hands before re-piecing them with the costly gold of his blood, poured out like paint upon the dark and haunted landscape of our world. Jesus—broken open by darkness only to reveal the piercing light within—offers His broken body as our one true Mending, filling in the cracks and wounds of our fractured selves, binding us with glory-gold mingled with sorrow and blood. The weeping Jesus represented in the kintsugi embrace that now hangs on our church wall is a Jesus willing not only to identify with us in our brokenness, but to be broken for us. By us.
This Holy Saturday, the elements of my heart’s transfiguration were simple: gold paint on canvas, sunlight, and a quiet room. But when the light caught the gold paint? Magic. And so it is, I think, with us. We are a people who have been caught by the Light—a people who cannot but shine with the light of Christ’s glory, safely and irrevocably held in His compassionate embrace. This glory is one that insists on our fractures as the best places to be filled with gold, made brilliant and new—broken yet whole. This is resurrection. And this is our inheritance.
Did e're such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
Going Deeper: Check out this excellent article written by my friend Grace; her words and wisdom are an invitation to live into the Easter story in our daily lives.