You are beautiful…’imperfectly-perfect’. Not perfect in the polished, airbrushed, nip and tuck, hide the grays, replace the lost hair way our culture likes to present as ‘perfection’. Not flawless in the sense that nothing in your life has ever cracked or broken. But beautiful in a deeper way. You are beautiful because the very imperfections we carry are part of the story of our lives. Just take a moment to think about life’s imperfections, the moments we have named as “flaws” and hold onto them into our mind’s eye. What are you thinking about? If we were to introduce ourselves in absolute honesty, it might sound like this. “Hi, I’m Scott… I’m imperfect…I’m a sinner.” The same kind of honesty our many 12 step groups in recovery do. Now that would be a different kind of introduction at coffee hour, wouldn’t it? But in a curious way, it would also be profoundly honest. Because the Christian faith holds a recognition that none of us is flawless. None of us has life figured out. Each of us carries places of struggle, weakness, uncertainty, and (yes, even) brokenness. And yet those are precisely the places where God’s grace begins its work.
Throughout this Lenten series we have been exploring themes around legacy, life’s journey, and the question of how we find peace and integration as we move through the seasons of our lives. Often, when we talk about legacy or life integration, we imagine that this is something reserved for the saints among us: the perfect; those who seem to have lived exemplary lives. But the raw and honest truth is something very different. Every single one of us is navigating the ups and downs of life. Every single one of us is asking questions about meaning, purpose, faith, hope, and yes…even doubt. And the question that sits at the heart of all of this is: How do we find peace and wholeness amidst a perfectly-imperfect life? How do we move toward life’s integration rather than being lost in despair?
One of the most fascinating insights about living with life’s uncertainty, that I came across in the Death Doula course, came not from an esteemed theologian, but from a poet. John Keats, the English Romantic poet coined a phrase that has intrigued philosophers and theologians for 200 years. He called it “negative capability.” Keats described it this way: when a person is capable of living in the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without needing to reach after fact and reason. Your negative capability is that capacity to remain present with ambiguity; to resist the urge to force clarity, control, or quick answers when life is unresolved. In other words, it is the ability to live faithfully even when we do not have everything figured out. Negative capability is a gift for all of us imperfectly-perfect beings who search for God’s grace. This, of course, is not easy. Most of us want clear-cut answers. We want clarity. We want life to resolve and make sense. But faith, as we are aware, often asks us to journey in the space between certainty and mystery. The Christian journey is not always about having the answers. Sometimes it is about trusting God in the middle of the questions.
And that is precisely the landscape described in Psalm 23. Reading from Psalm 23 is one of the most beloved passages in all of scripture, and perhaps you found yourself reciting the Psalm along with Pat as she read it to us. It begins with beautiful images of peace and comfort. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.” But the psalm does not remain only in those peaceful places. And aren’t we glad for that! It is very real. Soon the tone shifts. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Notice something important here. The psalm does not say that the faithful person never enters dark valleys. It says we walk through them. The life of faith does not eliminate darkness. It gives us the courage to move through it. And sometimes, it is precisely in those dark valleys that the most profound discoveries about life and faith emerge.
The civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically said, “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.” That simple sentence carries a deep truth. There are certain kinds of beauty that can only be seen in darkness. And we can only begin to imagine the darkness of racial discrimination being navigated at the time those words were uttered! Yet in that darkness, they somehow could see light. Do you recall, when the Aurora Borealis made a few appearances of late. When it did, we travelled to places of darkness. Places in order to behold her beauty. I went to Pitt Lake (along with seemingly thousands of others) Certain forms of wisdom emerge through struggle. Certain depths of compassion grow only after we ourselves have experienced pain. And in that darkness…in that pain, God’s light emerges! And perhaps that is why another great spiritual leader, Desmond Tutu, once said, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” It is important, I think, to stop and pause here and realize what the text IS saying and what it is NOT. It is not saying that God is causing the darkness, the suffering, the pain. It IS saying that in those places, we are not alone and God’s light will shine.
Centuries earlier, the Spanish mystic John of the Cross described something similar when he wrote about what he called the “dark night of the soul.” He wrote, “In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.” For him, spiritual darkness was not a place of abandonment. It was a place of transformation. It was the place where the soul deepens and grows.
If you are in a place of darkness; a time of brokenness. If you feel cracks in your life, this is precisely the time that God’s light is getting ready to shine. But it requires faith! Oh does it ever require faith! It requires trust in God’s arrival; it requires embracing this point in the struggle. And, it can be a time of faith of waiting for the light to arrive.
I think that a key facet of hope in this is that it does not deny darkness. Hope recognizes that light is always present. And this brings us to this morning’s second scripture reading. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, we hear these words: “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.” We notice the language. It does not say that we once lived in darkness. It says we were darkness. And now, in Christ, we are light! The transformation described here is not superficial. It is deep. It is about becoming something new. Something new in Christ. It becomes all the MORE powerful when we recall the context. Paul wrote this from a Roman prison! Imagine…Writing from a dark prison cell, Paul offered the hope of light shining, even there!
The early Christian community understood that faith was NOT about pretending life was perfect. It was about allowing the light of Christ to shine through our imperfect lives. Which brings me to a beautiful image that captures this idea. In Japan there is an ancient art form called kintsugi. Kintsugi is the practice of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold. So, instead of hiding the cracks in a piece of pottery, the cracks are highlighted with gold. The broken places become the most beautiful part of the piece. The cracks tell the story of its history. They become part of its beauty. What a powerful image for our spiritual lives. If truth be told, most of us spend a great deal of time trying to hide our cracks. We hide our struggles. We hide our failures. We hide the parts of our lives that feel broken. But the gospel tells a different story. These are the places where God’s light is preparing to shine!
The gospel teaches that God does not discard broken things. In fact, God takes great care in restoring them! God gathers the fragments. God joins them together with grace stronger than gold. And through those very cracks, light begins to shine. Jesus himself embodied this truth. Think about the invitation he offers in the Gospel: “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Notice what he does not say. He does NOT say, “Come to me when you have everything together; come to me once you have fixed your flaws; come to me when you have been beatified as a saint.” He says, come when you are weary…when you are burdened…when you feel like the weight of this complicated world is beating you down. Come exactly as you are…perfectly-imperfect. Lay your burdens down beside the still waters of my grace. Because that is where the restoration begins.
There is so much brokenness in this tangled world. And if we are honest, there is brokenness in each one of us. Sometimes life knocks the pottery of our lives over, and our lives shatter! And when it shatters, all we can see are fragments scattered across the floor. But faith invites us to see something more. Faith invites us to trust that something beautiful may still emerge from those fragments. That grace can bind together what once seemed beyond repair. That light can shine through the cracks. And this is where the journey from despair to life’s integration of your perfectly-imperfect life begins. Integration, in its deepest sense, never meant perfection. The word actually comes from the latin root ‘integritas’ which means wholeness, completeness, undivided. The closest we have in the Bible would be a word you all know: ‘Shalom’ ~ God’s peace, wholeness in our lives, community and world. The way life is made whole when the pieces come together; when the broken parts are acknowledged and held within grace; when we stop pretending to be flawless and begin allowing God to shape the beautiful through our imperfections.
So hear this truth again today. You are beautiful… perfectly-imperfect; a child of God. Your cracks do not disqualify you from grace. They may be the very places where God’s grace shines brightest. Because sometimes it is only in the darkness that the stars are seen; where the light enters; where the broken pieces align into something new and beautiful. Amen.
