Broken, beautiful and beloved

Mary DeTurris Poust (Courtesy photo of CINDY SCHULTZ)

Several years ago, when I was on a retreat in the Green Mountains of Vermont, the leader — after guiding us through a powerful meditation and reflection — asked us to turn to the person next to us, in my case a complete stranger, and share the one message that our interior self desperately needed to hear. I faced this much young­er person I’d only just met, and I said: “You belong.” As it turns out, it was a message he, too, needed to hear and not far off from the one he’d chosen for himself. In fact, that message, “You belong,” is one many of us have forgotten in our quest to reach some impossible standards of financial success, physical perfection and social status.

We humans are so much more alike than we are different, but we forget that too easily, seeing ourselves as if in a fun house mirror with our flaws, both real and imagined, magnified to unrealistic and grotesque proportions. We believe we are alone in our brokenness and so burrow down deep into our inadequacies, marinating in self-loathing and sadness. Meanwhile, we watch the world go by through the window of our smartphones and believe every filtered photo to be the real and perfect life of a family member, friend or acquaintance. It’s a recipe for unhappiness based on a false truth, for a feeling of lack in the midst of abundance, for a sense of isolation despite near-constant connection. This upside-down view of reality has become so pervasive in our culture that we’ve got an entire society of people weighed down by imperfections they believe to be unique to them, and afraid to step into their own lives exactly as they are and be who they were born to be.  

Whenever I talk or write about accepting our brokenness and finding beauty there, the response is overwhelming. On retreats, via email, through social media, I hear from people who tell me they thought they were alone in their thinking, that they’ve lived their whole life as if with some shameful secret. But the real secret is that none of us get out of this earthly existence without making mistakes and living with imperfections. The key is what we do with that reality and knowledge.

Many years ago, when Pinterest was all the rage, I happened upon a beautiful image of a pale gray-blue pottery bowl broken and held together by threads of shimmering gold. I stopped and stared, taken in by an image that spoke to my soul. I “pinned” this image, which displayed a Japanese form of repairing broken pottery known as “kintsugi.” The shards of pottery are put back together using a precious metal — gold or silver — to fill the cracks, thereby making the piece more beautiful and more valuable for being broken.

At the time, this was a new concept, at least to most Americans, but I’ve noticed over the past decade or so that more and more people are talking about kintsugi and posting images and memes of similar pottery pieces, realizing or maybe hoping beyond hope that they, too, can be as beautiful as these ceramic bowls, not hiding their imperfections any longer but magnifying and decorating them to the point where the very things that once caused them to hide become the reason to celebrate.

We are after all as Psalm 139 says, “fearfully and wonderfully made” by a God who loved us into being and never lets up no matter what we do. When we not only accept that we are imperfect but recognize that the things that make us human are the things that bind us to one another, we let go of the need to stay within the confines of our self-created world and discover, as I did at that retreat center years ago, that we already belong. We belong to ourselves, we belong to each other, we belong to God. And nothing we do can break those bonds.

Join me for a weekend retreat on this topic — Broken, Beautiful and Beloved — March 6-8 at Dominican Retreat and Conference Center. Info at notstrictlyspiritual.com/events.