Our scars can be beautiful

LAST Sunday, in our local church, a different morning service was used — from the Iona community in Scotland. Charming in its simplicity, it used one phrase that caught my imagination.

Instead of ‘our sins’, it said ‘our brokenness’. I liked that. For while the ‘devices and desires’ of some hearts are indeed evil, most of us are l ow- l evel s i nners, defined more by our lacks and l ongings than any innate nastiness.

T his t hought is al s o prompted by an article I was reading about a Japanese way of mending pottery (yes, this column is nothing i f not eclectic!) called ‘Kintsukuroi’ or ‘Kintsugi’. It means ‘golden repair’.

If a treasured piece of ceramic ware gets broken they have a very special way of fixing it. They mix the glue with powdered gold (or sometimes silver) and that way the cracks become a feature of the mended bowl or pot, making a glinting spider pattern on the surface (pictured).

The idea is that the broken thing has a second life, even more beautiful than the first. Philosophically, it makes breakage and repair precious, rather than something to disguise. The ‘scars’ on the surface of the pottery tell of something important that happened in its history, adding value.

You can see why this uplifting idea is so relevant to this column. It offers consolation, telling us that during our long journey of life we all develop cracks and scars — yet they need not be ugly.

They can actually make us more beautiful: like shattered pots, we can become remade. It reminds me of the wonderful quotation from Leonard Cohen: ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything. /That’s how the light gets in.’ And some equally beautiful lines from the late Fran Landesman: ‘Don’t be ashamed / everybody’s got scars / from our various wars / on the way to the stars.’

All losses will mark us for ever, but the marks of brokenness can be joined in a quietly beautiful new pattern.