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| Kutaniyaki Bowl. Photo by Caitlin Meyer 2017 |
I’ll
bet that title caught your attention. Allow
me to explain. While sipping tea this
morning, I realized that 30 years ago this month, my college roommate and I set
out for intensive language studies in Kanazawa Japan. Kanazawa is a small city of about 450,000
people on Japan’s western coast. Among
other things, Kanazawa is known for Kutaniyaki,
vividly-glazed porcelainware, and Kaga Yūzen, beautifully-painted silk that’s
hand washed in the clear waters of Kanazawa’s Asano River. As part of our study program, we visited local
craftsmen to watch them create these beautiful works of art. That’s where I learned about wabi sabi.
Wabi sabi (侘寂) is a concept in traditional Japanese
aesthetics centered on the wisdom and beauty of imperfection. Artists express wabi sabi through asymmetry, roughness, and simplicity, often intentionally
disfiguring their work before completion to emphasize the beauty of life’s imperfections.
In a world obsessed with perfection, wabi sabi is a refreshing and humbling reminder
that perfection can only be found in God.
God is
infinite perfection and blessed in himself.
To say that God is perfect means that the attributes that God possesses
are held to a degree that’s impossible to exceed. Think about it this way, we understand from our
world that there’s a hierarchy of qualities – objects can have qualities to a
greater or lesser degree. Water can be
hot, hotter or hottest, for example. As
we ascend this hierarchy of qualities, we ultimately must come to something that
is the greatest – “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” to borrow
Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s words. That
“something,” that “that,” is God. So, if
we understand God as the supreme being, the pinnacle of all being, then God
must be perfect. If God were anything less
than perfect, he wouldn’t be God.
Have you ever wondered why human
beings understand and strive for perfection when we’ve never actually seen
it? It’s because the desire for God is written in the
human heart, whether we realize it or not.
God never ceases to call us to himself, so we yearn for the perfection
that is God. Our problem is that we seek
perfection elsewhere. We strive for the
perfect body, the perfect spouse, the perfect vacation, and even the perfect
martini, but we’re always left dissatisfied because perfection can only be
found in God.
In this
misplaced quest for perfection, we designate as flaws those characteristics
that do not fit our distorted concept of perfection. Perhaps it’s the birthmark on our left knee,
a crooked nose, or our spouse’s window-rattling snore; maybe it rained all
vacation, or the kids cried for the entire car ride; or maybe even, heaven
forfend, the martini was stirred, not shaken.
When we strive for perfection outside of God, we disregard the God-given
beauty of all things; we fail to understand that perfection itself created us and
loves us just as we are; we fail to find wabi sabi – the wisdom and beauty of imperfection.
