We have to be realistic about ourselves, too. We will never arrive at the end of our journey and enter the Presence of God without being emotionally, physically, and spiritually wounded and broken along the way. But - our merciful God heals us in an unexpected way: our wounds glow with His grace!
Kintsugi is a Japanese art, born of the belief that broken objects should not only be mended, but are more beautiful when repaired. Stefano Carnazzi, writing for LIFEGATE, calls it "the art of precious scars." He explains,
"When a bowl, teapot or precious vase falls and breaks into a thousand pieces, we throw them away angrily and regretfully. Yet there is an alternative, a Japanese practice that highlights and enhances the breaks thus adding value to the broken object. It’s called kintsugi (金継ぎ), or kintsukuroi (金繕い), literally golden (“kin”) and repair (“tsugi”)
"This traditional Japanese art uses a precious metal – liquid gold, liquid silver or lacquer dusted with powdered gold – to bring together the pieces of a broken pottery item and at the same time enhance the breaks. The technique consists in joining fragments and giving them a new, more refined aspect. Every repaired piece is unique, because of the randomness with which ceramics shatters and the irregular patterns formed that are enhanced with the use of metals.....
"The kintsugi technique suggests many things. We shouldn’t throw away broken objects. When an object breaks, it doesn’t mean that it is no more useful. Its breakages can become valuable. We should try to repair things because sometimes in doing so we obtain more valuable objects. This is the essence of resilience. Each of us should look for a way to cope with traumatic events in a positive way, learn from negative experiences, take the best from them and convince ourselves that exactly these experiences make each person unique, precious."
When we are in pain and reach out to God, God is waiting for us to bind up all our wounds. When the places where we're broken are suffused with the precious, liquid gold of God's love, we grow stronger, more compassionate, more resilient. God's Holy Spirit of wisdom tells us that the very experiences which wounded us - even our sins! - can teach us, make us wise. Once we are recovered enough, God prepares us to take God's gift of merciful compassion and pour it over another hurting soul. Then we are radiant with God's own mercy and compassion and those repaired wounds glow like the sun!
"Mercy" and "Compassion" are often used interchangeably in the Bible to describe God's loving actions toward us. But many spiritual writers use the word "mercy" to specifically describe how our God-Who-Is-Love is always turning to search out sinners, always waiting for them to return to Him so He can embrace them.
If we wonder, does sin REALLY break us, wound us? Pope Francis reminds us that, when caught in the destructive grip of sin, a sinner can be "acutely conscious that one is wounded so severely that one requires, not minor treatment, but the emergency and radical attention provided in a hospital on the edge of a battlefield." The Church, which is us, ministering in Jesus' Name, is supposed to be that merciful field hospital.
When we talk about sin, however, it's good to clear up some misunderstandings about morality. Moral rules aren't arbitrary rules, imposed from outside us by God the Lawgiver just to keep us from having fun or doing what would make us happy. The question is - what does make us happy? The ultimate human motivation for every one of our actions is to make us happy. But, sometimes what we think will make us happy does not, in the end, make us happy at all. Joe Heschmeyer comments,
"Look within yourself: if you ate everything you had the impulse to eat, would you truly be happy? If you slept with everyone you had the impulse to sleep with, would that make you happy? Or would you not instead be lonely and gluttonous and broken? If you can't figure that out from looking within, try looking around you. So some of our desires should be listened to, and help to make us happy. Others of our desires are dangerous, and need to be moderated or entirely ignored. If only there were some way to know which was which; if only someone could show us how to 'be human' better....
"Of course, this is exactly why we have to consider God's role in morality. Before you start to think of God as Divine Lawgiver, remember that He is Creator....He created you: He knows you infinitely better than you know yourself. He understands how you tick, because He's the reason that you tick. And He knows exactly what will make you happy...and which things won't....
"Moral laws aren't arbitrary. They're rooted in our human nature. Pornography, murder, gluttony, greed, and the rest are forbidden for the same reason as putting a fork in the electrical socket. Those kinds of behaviors hurt other people, but they also hurt you, the moral actor, as a human person....
"... Moral laws are primarily internal. God doesn't stand outside of Creation like a referee; He's the ground of all being. The primary role of God's law-giving isn't imposing some new obligation on us, but revealing us to ourselves....The Author of the Universe is showing you a road-map to happiness and Heaven, and a map of your own soul.
"Finally, following the moral law is key to happiness. I don't mean here that happy people never sin or that sinners are never happy. But I do mean that the Saint is a great deal happier and more joyful, a great deal more fulfilled as a human being....It's not just that the afterlife is better for the Saint; it is frequently the case that this life is better for the Saint as well." (from "Getting Morality Wrong," Word on Fire, Sept. 8, 2016.)
In other words, what God tells us is immoral happens to be immoral because it hurts us! Sin wounds us, breaks us, so that we have absolute need for a merciful God Who forgives us, heals us, fills us with strength and wisdom, and literally puts us back together again.
But what causes those wounded places to shine once they're filled with God's liquid gold and silver of mercy? We will shine if we can give the gift of mercy we have received as a gift to others. Bishop Robert Barron talks about Jesus' gift of divine, merciful forgiveness to the Samaritan woman at the well. Once she has been filled with the living water of forgiveness, she rushes off to spread the news that the Messiah has truly come!
"How wonderful," Bishop Barron says, "that, having met the source of living water, she is able to set aside her addictions and to become, herself, a vehicle of healing for others. The very best definition of evangelization that I’ve heard is this: one starving person telling another starving person where to find bread. We will be ineffective in our evangelizing work if we simply talk, however correctly, about Jesus in the abstract. Our words of proclamation will catch fire precisely in the measure that we have been liberated and transformed by Christ."
The more we realize that we have sinned and will always sin, the more we are grateful to God for His mercy, the more we will evangelize by extending God's mercy to others, especially by witnessing to how God has healed and transformed us. After all, Jesus tells us, "Be merciful just as your Father is merciful."
Conversion and repentance don't always happen in our souls at once. Jesus himself pointed out that the sun rises on both sinners and saints, and God's rain falls equally on the righteous and the wicked, because God is patient; God recognizes that, like the Prodigal Son, we often need time to realize what a mess we've gotten ourselves into before we decide to come home to Him.
People who are unrepentant sinners often wind up in prison. How mercifully society treats them when they are released can make all the difference to their ability to be broken-but-repaired-pottery, their wounds mended and a-glow, able to lead productive lives again. In last Fall's mid-term elections, the state of Florida extended forgiveness and healing to ex-prisoners, often the ultimate outsiders, some of the "little ones" whom Jesus was so concerned about.
"Florida voters passed Amendment 4, a change to the Florida Constitution that automatically restores voting rights to 1.4 million Americans who have been living and working in our communities but politically disenfranchised because of criminal convictions in their past.
"Before this amendment, Florida's policy was extra-strict - one of permanent disenfranchisement for all felonies, meaning it did not matter what you did, how long ago it was, or how old you were when you did it. If you had a felony conviction, you could not get your right to vote back unless the government decided to specifically grant you clemency." (Myrna Perez, "An Act of Forgiveness and Healing," "Sojourners" magazine, Feb. 2019)
This new amendment will have far-reaching effects: it permits more people to participate in the electoral process; it ends blatant Jim Crow policy; it promotes full citizenship and reintegration into the community. "Especially, Perez notes, "it also brings core Christian teachings into the public square - and it is important that we discuss these teachings because there is still work to be done." For states' disenfranchisement of those convicted of felonies is still widespread.
And disenfranchisement has a great toll on both communities and families.
"At its most obvious, communities with high rates of disenfranchised persons have fewer votes to cast, and less political influence....At the family level, disenfranchisement takes a great toll because a parent's political participation can influence a child's decision to vote."
Former inmates are faced with almost insurmountable difficulties. For a long period of time they have been forced by the state to live away from their homes and loved ones. When they return, they feel disconnected. They're frequently told that there are certain places they cannot live and certain jobs they cannot have. Finding any job is difficult because very many employers won't hire them. They still often are battling addictions and need to be part of AA or NA programs. Some of them find being "outside" so challenging and unwelcoming that they deliberately commit another crime so they'll go back "inside" where life is ordered and they feel "safe."
Ex-prisoners are often the ultimate outsiders. But, doesn't God, in Scripture, always ask us to care for outsiders, to extend them mercy? The Samaritan woman was an "outsider" to Jews, but Jesus spoke with her, ministered to her. God obviously considers it society's moral obligation to welcome back ex-prisoners and give them the basics to start over. Giving them back their voting rights honors their right to participate in the civic process and reconnects them to the human family that they have been separated from for so long.
Perez states emphatically, "Laws disenfranchising community members for past crimes treat people as second - class citizens, but there are no second-class citizens in God's Kingdom....While human nature may make it difficult to avoid judging persons who have criminal convictions in their past, we do well to remember that God gave his only son to the whole world, and he died for the sins of the whole world, not just those who were never imprisoned for their sins....Separating community members into classes of citizens who can vote and classes who cannot fails to recognize the equal worth of all persons before God....
"Bearing grudges outside the prison walls, against our very neighbors, doesn't just damage our democracy. It also tarnishes the joy we are supposed to feel when one of us starts their new life outside of prison."
Perez forcibly reminds us that our call to be merciful is because God is first merciful to us: "God loves us even though at times we are enemies to God and at times enemies to others. It is precisely because God loves our enemies that we must love our enemies."
Part of our spiritual journey is constantly checking our attitudes to see if we are understanding and loving our brothers and sisters with the merciful mind and heart of Christ. God, the Master Kintsugi artist, would never throw anyone away who is broken, not even an ex-prisoner! God desires to mend every outsider's wounds with the silver and gold of compassion and mercy - and God asks us to help Him, as individuals and as a democratic society.
To refuse to be concerned about the fate of society's outsiders, to consider them throw-aways, even to deny them the assistance they need to reintegrate into society, is to have a sinfully hardened heart, a heart which is on the way to dying a spiritual death. God asks us to be merciful to others as God is merciful to us, to give to others the tremendous gift of merciful forgiveness that has been freely given to us. Then, as we have helped with the mending of others' souls, our own wounds mended by God in His art of spiritual kintsugi will surely shine with silver and gold light!
"And forgive us our trespasses AS we have forgiven those who trespass against us...."