Fraught with Fissures, Laden with Glory
It begins in Montana with my grandmother, as so many of my dearest and best stories do. Drew and I visited her several weeks ago, and each time we see her I come home exhausted—not because of who she is, but because of the energy and focus it takes to live in constant paradox when beholding her, holding her. At any given moment, I feel as though I could break down weeping with the anticipated grief of losing her or burst out laughing with the sheer joy of being in her presence. I love her; she is 90; any goodbye could be my last. This time, on the last morning we were with her, my grandmother’s eyes took on a mischievous glint as she pulled out a neon-colored machine from behind her couch. She positioned the machine just-so, and flipped a lever. As Drew and I watched, nothing happened. I began to feel a bit embarrassed for her. Then, a wheel started to spin and before long, bubbles began streaming forth as my grandmother laughed with glee at the look of awe on our faces, reaching up a shaking, arthritic finger to pop them one by one. Something on her face tells me that as she nears death, she is re-entering childhood—she is learning what it means to be born again, and my soul settles a bit. Popping bubbles one by one is her way of telling me “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” each word a bubble that changes form as it floats through the air yet holds true. The bubbles stop. I mop up the sheen of soap on the floor so she doesn’t slip and fall. I mop up the remains of bubbles as if cleaning the floor fast enough will buy me more time with the grandmother who has helped love me into being.
Just one day after we said goodbye to my grandmother, my Uncle texted me a quote by Henri Nouwen from his book Out of Solitude, with the heading “Every bit of life is touched by a bit of death.” Here is some of it:
“Joy and Sadness are as close to each other as the splendid colored leaves of a New England fall to the soberness of barren trees. When you touch the hand of a returning friend, you already know that he will have to leave again . . . Joy and sadness are born at the same time, both arising from such deep places in your heart that you can’t find the words to capture your complex emotions. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”
It begins—we begin—with joy. There is no guarantee of how many years we have before the sheer joy of being is shattered and we find our sense of shalom fraught with ever-fracturing fissures. The point is, it begins with joy—we begin in awe, eyes caught by the iridescent sheen of cascading bubbles—and then the bubbles pop. We get broken. Someone or something has taken our joy away from us. We are at a loss as to how to gather up our own pieces, so we lie very still. And it is in this space that many of us live out our days: the place in between brokenness and repair. If we are honest, we exert a great deal of effort in ignoring or patching over the irreparably shattered parts of us. Sometimes it hurts too much to behold what we have become, and so we bear a great sadness. But there comes a time when we cannot afford to look away. And so we wait, broken open, aching for the hand of a healer—a Potter who can envision the new creation we are to become long before we are able to imagine what we will be.
The question becomes: How do we bear the ache of it in the meantime? How do we hold both the exquisite joy and the breathtaking sorrow we know in this life? Are we willing to admit that there are times we simply do not know how to be well with a world that is fraught with fissures? I think of a man kneeling in a garden at midnight, hours before death, asking his friends to stay awake and keep watch with him. The Man in the garden is my only answer to “How, then?” when faced with the pain of a sister whose body cannot heal itself, with the knowledge that the time to say goodbye to someone I love most in this world is drawing near, with the unbearable weight of not knowing what the future holds or if what I want most will be given to me, with bearing the grief of multiple friends of mine who have lost children this year alone, with all that I cannot foresee and cannot control. I cannot hold it. You hold it, God. Take it. This has been my prayer. It comforts me that God knows what it feels like to pray alone in the dark, desperate for anything other than what he was facing.
Here is the most honest prayer I have prayed this year, maybe in my life:
How could we ever forgive You for all we have lost yet You have not restored?
How could we ever thank You enough for all You have given we have not deserved?
I recently taught a workshop titled Kintsugi Kingdom, in which we explore the correlation between forgiveness as a mending practice for our broken places and the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The master Kintsugi artist will often let lie the broken pieces of the vessel he will one day restore with a mixture of glue and gold. The Kintsugi artist does this to contemplate the most beautiful and compelling way to mend what has been broken. Once repaired, the gold-illuminated fissures become part of the vessel’s glory—telling a new story that is inclusive of, but not limited to, its once broken state.
As broken vessels, we are invited to trust that our Creator is dreaming a new dream of us too, even as we lie empty, barren, shattered on the ground. The resurrected Christ who bore the scars on his hands and in his side tells me that we might dare to hope that one day we, too—though fraught with fissures—will be illuminated from the inside out, heavy-laden with glory. Our ending and beginning, Joy.