Finding Hope in the New Year

This is an excellent article from Community Arts Tokyo

Please support their upcoming International Arts Festival 2019.6.15

All Things New

Finding Hope in the New Year: The Language of Brokenness

Every December, the head Buddhist priest of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto draws the Japanese kanji character that best illustrates the sentiments of the past year. This year it was 災 (sai), a character that reflects both natural and man-made disasters. The year 2018 was a year of disaster and brokenness.

In high school, my Latin teacher taught the following illustration about language, which I have never forgotten. "Eskimos have many words for words for snow: one for light snow, one for wet snow, one for powdered snow, and so on. In English, we only have the word 'snow.'" We attach importance to things and their differences by giving them words.

Many point to the difficulty of understanding the gospel in Japanese to an absence of words to describe it. There is no word for one God, a creator of everything. There is no word for sin. There is no word for forgiveness, and so on. Interestingly, there are MANY words for brokenness. I am currently reading a book on kintsugi, the Japanese art of pottery repair, which lists ten types of brokenness that can be found in a bowl. The best English word to translate each case is, simply, "broken." The kintsugi artisan trains the eye to not just distinguish between various kinds of brokenness but also how to bring beauty out of them.

In a sermon message this month in Tokyo, nihonga artist Makoto Fujimura spoke about God, the master 'kintsugi' artist, searching with a trained eye for the brokenness in our lives and considering how beauty can be brought out of it. What is the gospel in the language of brokenness? There are many more than ten kinds of brokenness in our lives and many more ways that beauty can be brought out of it. God came to earth as a little baby in search of broken people. The Lord God calls, "Where are you?" (Genesis 3:9), to people who try to hide brokenness and shame. God goes directly to brokenness and begins his work there. God crafts our stories in such a way that we will be more beautiful because of our broken pieces.

Do you see the hope this gives in the new year? God brings "newness" to our new year not through forgetting but through transforming the old year into something new and beautiful. The new year will build upon the good and the 災 (sai) of all that has come before. We have hope because God will continue "making all things new" in 2019.

"Behold, I am doing a new thing;

Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"

(Isaiah 43:9)