He could have been anyone, I thought: a
businessman, a salesman, a computer whiz for hire. Any one of the young
professionals you might encounter in the course of a day.
The conference keynote speaker wore a dark
suit; a white shirt; a neat, subdued tie. His thick brown hair parted cleanly
away from a handsome, all-American face. He towered above the podium, and as he
began to speak -- calmly, confidently – a few slides of a boy of five or six appeared
on the wide screen behind him.
The subject was child abuse, or more
precisely, the healing journey after.
With hard-won equanimity, the young man on the stage recounted his
victimization at the hands of a next-door neighbor and charted the efforts of
the organization he directs to help other survivors.
In truth, it wasn’t a speech I’d looked
forward to hearing. In prior years, I had participated in this annual
conference on violence, and after sharing my own past in breakout sessions,
found it tough to take in any more pain. But I was intrigued with this speaker, with
the friendly though focused manner about him, his ability to both surprise and
connect with the audience of some five hundred crime victims, advocates, and
social workers.
From him, I learned not only a few
startling facts (one out of five boys suffers abuse; most sexual assaults in
the military are committed upon males), but also a new word: kintsukuroi, a Japanese
term that means to repair something with a gold or silver lacquer, and in doing
so, to understand that the piece is more beautiful because it has been broken.
Of course, the speaker wasn’t discussing porcelain repair, but the mending of the spirit, of the soul. It was a concept that resonated with me; it underscored a segment in my own talk about embracing the totality of one’s life, even those tragic “broken” pieces, accepting each part of yourself and your past as a gift, something of a miracle.
Of course, the speaker wasn’t discussing porcelain repair, but the mending of the spirit, of the soul. It was a concept that resonated with me; it underscored a segment in my own talk about embracing the totality of one’s life, even those tragic “broken” pieces, accepting each part of yourself and your past as a gift, something of a miracle.
I jotted down the word and definition, as
did the friend who sat to my left, and when I returned from the conference, I
asked Don Bredes, novelist and, most recently, author of the
Hector Bellevance suspense series, if
he knew of an English equivalent. He did
not. “What's more,” he added, “I doubt there's even an equivalent
concept in Western culture. Westerners understand how age and wear may impart a
measure of beauty to all kinds of things, but my sense is that here, generally
speaking, broken is broken, and broken is flawed; therefore, any evidence of a
repair is best hidden or disguised.”
Broken is broken.
We hold this true of things, and even more so
of ourselves, going to extremes to mask what’s broken inside and to fix what’s
irregular on the outside, perhaps in part because of our culture. But also
something more innate is at work: a symmetry of facial features and the body
proportions that signal fertility register as profoundly beautiful to us deep
in our psyches. As Denis Dutton, philosopher and author of “The Art Instinct,”
suggested, we are “hardwired” to seek out beauty of all sorts.
The
French might applaud the odd and interesting qualities of the “jolie laide” -- as
one critic put it, “the aesthetic pleasures of the visually off kilter” -- but
it’s youth and perfection that win the highest acclaim everywhere. A stroll
along the cosmetic corridor of any corner drugstore confirms this. And how many of us who grew up with “character
building” crooked teeth here in the land of plenty would allow our children to
suffer the same fate?
Then
there are gashes and gaps within. While we might say, “That which doesn’t kill
us makes us stronger,” we don’t rush to equate inner strength with beauty. We
acknowledge it in the extraordinary few, in others such as Nelson Mandela or Aung
San Suu Kyi, though their appearance would win praise regardless. When confronted with troubles beyond the
expected, with emotional wounds that reach far below the surface, our first
instinct might not be to strengthen and heal, but to adeptly conceal. We
mistakenly assume a stoic façade is the equal of a more demanding amalgamation.
Healing is hard work. It takes time and conscious effort. Quicker and
easier to camouflage or to patch, as I have done in the past, with bitterness
and a dose of nerve. To heal, to achieve something more lasting, more resilient
and precious, takes, as “Wayward Monk”
Shozan Jack Haubner puts it, the desire to “turn suffering into love.”
“We’re worth more broken,” a character asserts in Stephanie Kallos’s
bestseller, “Broken for You,” a novel that explores how a shattered heart can heal,
and at a pivotal point, describes the destruction of a great deal of costly
porcelain. As a collector who takes delight in setting the holiday table with
Rose Medallion China or hand-painted Bavarian pieces, I nearly shouted, “Oh, c’mon!
Nobody would do that!” But I’m reminded
here of an aunt and uncle who, during arguments early in their 50-year
marriage, seemed to toss a quite a bit of their wedding china at one another.
Luckily, they were both bad shots.
Kallos’s heroine turns the shards into glorious mosaics. My relatives
probably just swept up the pieces and tossed them. But they fashioned a long
and genuinely happy life together.
The
young man standing tall at the podium, who held out his hand to the image of
the vulnerable boy with his back against the broad trunk of a tree, displayed
another slide: one with his wife, the couple smiling broadly, dressed for a
mountain hike under a bright sun. He showed
those of us at the conference that even the most grievous fissures can be
joined with the precious metals of love and compassion, show not only to others,
but to ourselves as well.
This "Big Crazy Life" column appeared in the July 2013 issue of The North Star Monthly. Visit the website:
