I’ve broken a lot of bowls and plates and glasses and such over the years. I’ll never forget how mad my Mom got when she opened a cupboard and out tumbled a pitcher I’d put away poorly.
The pitcher was pewter, so it just got dented. The other dinnerware, however, got shattered.
A friend tells the story of weeping over a broken china plate that had been a wedding gift. As such, it was more than just a plate, representing her marriage which was fracturing.
In his 1919, post-WWI poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats wrote: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
It’s an evocative line, one which has expressed my life at different times. At other times, it has expressed the chaos in the world around me, even as I myself have been spared the whirlwind of the moment.
In the middle of Psalm 31, David expresses a similar sense of dislocation and disintegration:
I am forgotten as though I were dead;
I have become like broken pottery (Ps. 31:12).
Broken pottery is only good for the waste bin. Once useful and possibly even valuable, it has become useless trash. This is unfortunate when it happens to a dish; it’s grievous when it happens to a person.
As Psalm 31 opens, David is feeling vulnerable. Three times, the word “refuge” appears in the first four verses; “fortress,” twice. What’s he afraid of? Shame.
Let me never be put to shame (Ps. 31:1b).
Shame in the ancient world had to do with a loss of reputation, the devaluing of your name. But that’s not as emotionally distant as it sounds. In small communities where you walk everywhere and in which everyone knows everyone else, to lose your reputation is to lose your place in the community, to lose essential relationships.
Brené Brown refers to shame as the fear of disconnection. It’s a feeling of being unworthy of love and belonging. It kills the soul, because we were made for connection, for relational bonding. Shame is relational death.
And David seems to have feared shame for good reason as the psalm later reveals.
Because of all my enemies,
I am the utter contempt of my neighbors
and an object of dread to my closest friends —
those who see me on the street flee from me (Ps. 31:11).
The slander of David’s tormentors has succeeded. Even his closest friends recoil at him. People run from him instead of embracing him. His neighbors look down their noses at him instead of inviting him over for dinner.
People whisper about him (v. 13). They lie about him (v. 18). And the emotional distress it causes him manifests itself physically in his body.
Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and body with grief.
My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
and my bones grow weak (Ps. 31:9-10).
But as successful as they are in their slandering, they don’t bring down David. He doesn’t succumb to shame. As difficult as we all find this, he embraces his vulnerability.
In a line which Jesus so fittingly echoes from the cross, David prays:
Into your hands I commit my spirit;
deliver me, LORD, my faithful God (Ps. 31:5).
There is need and openness and trust and hope and desperation all wrapped together in those few words.
He doesn’t reject his need. He doesn’t plow ahead on his own, resolving to not be a burden to anyone, but to shoulder it all himself. He doesn’t isolate or insulate himself. He acknowledges need and reaches out.
My typical approach is to take things into my own hands. Or at least to try to. But David sees that his own hands aren’t the answer to his enemies’ hands. He needs to be in God’s hands.
My times are in your hands;
deliver me from the hands of my enemies,
from those who pursue me (Ps. 31:15).
Even though I know different theologically, when things fall apart in my life, it feels like I’ve disappointed God and he’s turned his back on me. I know this isn’t true, but the feeling comes anyway. And I’m in good company, feeling this way.
In my alarm I said,
“I am cut off from your sight!”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help (Ps. 31:22).
David doesn’t allow his feeling of being rejected by God to stop his prayers. He pushes through the feeling and gets to the reality. God hasn’t rejected. In fact, he stands ready to listen. His face is turned toward us. And it’s turned toward us with a smile, not a frown.
Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love (Ps. 31:16).
Knowing that God is with us, that God is for us, turns back shame and establishes confidence and trust, the necessary conditions for rest, for peace.
How abundant are the good things
that you have stored up for those who fear you,
that you bestow in the sight of all,
on those who take refuge in you.
In the shelter of your presence you hide them
from all human intrigues;
you keep them safe in your dwelling
from accusing tongues (Ps. 31:19-20).
Rest doesn’t mean every piece of life is put back together at that moment. Rather, it’s a pause as I stand in the midst of the scattered shards of the broken pottery of my life to sweep them up and offer them to one Artist who excels at making beautiful things from shattered things.
The Hebrew word we translate as “peace” is shalom. It has a sense not just of the end of violence and hostility, but of wholeness, of put-together-ness, of things being as God always intended them to be. In our shatteredness, this is what we pray for, knowing that our mended cracks just might make us more beautiful than we were before we broke.
Kintsugi is Japanese for “golden joinery” and is the practice of taking broken things and mending them with lacquer infused with gold or silver or platinum. Instead of hiding the cracks, these flaws are emphasized and glitteringly so. Instead of becoming less valuable by being broken, kintsugi pieces become that much more unique and precious.
It takes strength of heart to not give up on ourselves, giving in to our shame. It takes hope to offer our pieces to God, letting him join them back together with gold. But he smiles when we do. And the results are loved and lovely.
Be strong and take heart,
all you who hope in the LORD (Ps. 31:24).