We Only Have to Love  by Pam Rumancik

In Japan they collect ancient bowls and pottery in which their cracks have been filled with gold. When a tea pot or bowl has broken they patch it with resin and then coat the resin with gold powder. Not only are the cracks visible – they highlight the durability of the piece and give the pottery enhanced beauty and resilience.

There's a Japanese story of a man who had bought a beautiful new vase, immaculate, created by a master. He wanted to show this piece to his friend after their tea ceremony. But since the vase was so new, he was ashamed of presenting it to his friend. So he took a brush and dipped it into gold varnish which is used to cover the glue in cracks and fissures in ceramics. He drew a line that looked like a crack in the new vase. Now it looked old and mended, not perfect any more.

This is how he presented the vase to his friend, who immediately understood the matter. He admired this aged vase and regarded his friend with the highest esteem.

In the Japanese culture they understand that new and pristine has not yet stood the test of time. It’s untried – and much less interesting than a cracked and aged pot streaked with gold.

A pot's value does not come from being undamaged…

Which brings us to Mary Oliver’s poem – Wild Geese.

"You do not have to be good…" our cracks may well be our most valuable assets if we just look at life a little differently…

Karen and I began reflecting on our lives for today’s sermon. It’s been a roller coaster ride – chaplain, ordination, coming down to serve a church in the south when the only thing I’d said about where I wanted to go was ‘not below the Mason-Dixon line.’  And that was all about not liking heat.  It just goes to prove – want to make God laugh? Start making plans…

But this is the end of the year – and a time where many people look back over the past 12 months and take stock.  What went well? What tanked?  Where did I live up to my expectations? Where did I miss the mark?

This church has had a pretty wild year as well.

Only last January it was celebrating your 60^th anniversary and looking at a newly invigorated church community with a certain set of expectations about what would happen next.

And now – here you are with an interim minister getting ready to begin the search process for a new settled one.

What happened?  Were mistakes made? Did everyone act from their very best place?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably we will never exactly know but part of the work we are doing during this interim period is figuring out where the cracks are – and how we can fill them in with gold.

Life is complicated. Everyone can be acting from the very best place possible and still things go awry…  how do we respond and continue to get stronger and more resilient in that process?

Karen talked about the impossibility of being perfect – there is no such thing as a perfect human being. No such thing as a perfect life – there’s no such thing as a perfect church. So what do we aim for?

We know we screw up. We fall off diets, we “forget” to exercise, we hurt people’s feelings, we make mistakes.  Each of us messes up from time to time, no matter how hard we try. The story of David shows that even our heroes mess up – and sometimes in a really big way.  And yet, still they are beloved of God.

So it’s not that we mess up so much as how we respond to missing the mark – to being human.  We can bluff our way through and hope that we put it behind us – and that it can be forgotten about – forgive and forget! But that doesn’t help us move forward.  In thinking about the Japanese bowls that would be the equivalent of just buying a new one.

The other response is stopping and really looking at what happened and finding a way to learn, to grow, to become stronger from our missteps.  This would be looking with our heart and responding with love so that we might be stronger and wiser for the next year.

Painting our cracks with gold not only owns our mistakes – but claims the hard won wisdom they represent. Our response to life determines who we become – who we are.

Because in life it is our cracks, our broken places, our places where we have failed and learned and tried again that make us beautiful and filled with life.

Our cracks, our weakness, our woundedness, these are the stuff that makes lives of rich meaning and deep understanding. If I have never broken a promise or missed a deadline, or broken something valuable, I will not be able to have compassion when someone else does one of those things. 

But if I am aware of my own shortfalls, it is much easier to have empathy and compassion for another’s problems.

It is my brokenness which makes me whole, my shortcomings which deepen my ability to love.

As Unitarian Universalists we come with a deep tradition of Universalism – which believes that all are beloved by a God who accepts us exactly as we are – flaws and shortcomings. It is from this place that we are called to love the world.  Not despite our failings, but in the midst of them.

Mary Oliver wrote – "you do not have to be good… you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Can we love as we are called to love? Love without conditions? Love without limitations? Love without earning or denying our humanity? 

How do we love the cracked and flawed humans who share this planet with us?

These are big questions as we close in upon a new year but the answer is the same as every other year. We love from our brokenness and from our pain – we love from the mistakes we make and the triumphs we share. We love imperfectly but still –

We only have to love…