Jack Beers:
“Can something that has been broken, be put back together in a way that makes it more beautiful than ever before?’"
Matthew Kelly:
“So this is really the central question of the book. We live in a disposable culture. When something breaks, we throw it away and buy a new one, the dilemma or the predicament that that creates is what do we do with our own broken selves? What do we do with broken relationships? What do we do with broken institutions, broken dreams? You can't throw these things away and buy a new one. And so I think this is one of the central questions of our age and it is something we all struggle with but I think something that we struggle to articulate. The Japanese have an art form called Kintsugi. When we break a vase or a bowl or something, we throw it away, buy a new one. The Japanese artists gather up these ceramic pieces and they put it back together. Only when they put it back together they don't try to hide the cracks, they mix gold dust with the glue. And so when the piece is put back together, it has these lines of gold that show exactly where the cracks are, but they're beautiful. I mean, these ceramics are astoundingly beautiful.
And so the idea is... the question is "Can something that has been devastatingly broken, be put together and become more beautiful than ever before?" And in these ceramics, I believe we discovered that the answer is "Yes." The extension of the question of where the book really goes, is can someone who has been devastatingly broken, be healed and become more beautiful and more lovable than ever before. I believe our default answer to that question is "No." And I believe that that is creating massive sadness, anxiety in us all because it's sort of a hopeless proposition, right? And, it simply is not true and that is the conclusion I come to throughout the book for myself.
And it is the conclusion that I hope the reader will come to is "Yes. You had been broken in your life. Yes. You have made choices, bad choices. Yes. You have been hurt. You've had your heart broken. And as a result of that, you are broken and wounded, but you can be healed and you can become more beautiful and more lovable than ever before," is my dream for the reader, is my hope for the reader, is that they can come to that conclusion because I think it is an astoundingly liberating conclusion and changes the way we look at ourselves forever and changes the way we look at other people in their brokenness, in their woundedness, as they deal with their mess.
Matthew Kelly
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