On Regrets, Repairs, and Restoration

The Beauty of Damage

“If a man has a garment that is torn, he does not throw it away, but patches it and wears it again. So it is with a man in the soul. If he falls, he must patch himself up and go on again.” Abba Poemen, Desert Father

July is a tough month of commemorations. My ex-wife died nine years ago. Even after 31 years divorced, and the years since her death, it is still complicated. I've never been able to not wonder what might have been for myself, my children and the children of my second marriage had I been a stronger person and stayed with her. Of course I know there is no answer to that except guilt driven prognostications.

We married because we had a hope that we'd be better together than apart. We shared a lot of common aspirations, and we did some very good things together. But, we were better in some ways together and became worse in other ways. Living with someone is a process of unpacking mutual baggage. But sometimes one or the other won't put the baggage down, and one or the other won't wait for the unpacking, or can't deal with what was unpacked in their presence.

So, yeah, there's still the "what if" ghost floating around even after 32 years. I still don't know how to navigate not regretting my relationship with her even though it was difficult and failed. I don't know how to navigate regretting the hurt I inflicted on so many people because I was weak. I don't know how to navigate loving my present life and the peace I've found being free from all the issues I had with her.

I guess you never really have an "ex", you just have a person who lives in the basement of your soul and keeps you honest about who you are and what you've done and on a good day, might even give you some hope that you are someone different, or even better than the person they once knew and tried to love.

July is also the anniversaries of the death of my parents. My Dad died on July 7, my Mom one year later on July 22. I sat by their bedsides in our home reading the Psalter when they gave up their spirit. Their deaths were the end of a long, difficult seven years but also the beginning of sorting out what those seven years meant in the context of our 65 years. Grieving, relief, exhaustion and elation are tough ingredients to serve up as a main course as food for the soul. The immediate self-congratulations of “no regrets- we manned our post and did the right thing” eventually gives way to remembrances of things that I could have done better, selfish dumb resentments I simmered in, and what-ifs. It seems no matter how well we live we seem to default to “what-if”….

This past fall my forty-plus years of construction caught up with me. A consultation with a hand and shoulder surgeon affirmed that not all injuries and wear and tear of life are existential….

It wasn’t that a five week remodeling project resulted in needing major surgery. It was more like the bill for ibuprofen and bourbon every night on the project was evidence of and having to face the accumulation of my past, the inevitability of needing to be repaired and a “last hurrah!” before I exited the building I had constructed for decades with my hands.

I had a knee replacement twelve years ago that was botched. I considered the consequences of a botched hand surgery, what the loss of my right hand would mean.

This hand learned to print, color inside the lines, bathe a dead man, draw outside the lines, build houses, churches, high-rise offices and coffins, write cursive, wipe a tear, change the diapers of a child and a parent, pour a beer (both into a glass and down the drain), dig a grave, knead a loaf of bread dough, type a Master's thesis, a blog post and a book manuscript, put a Band-aid on a boo-boo, cook for dozens and for one, turn a page, pull a trigger, bait a hook, clean a toilet, pet a mean dog, sew a button, point in the wrong direction, flip off an idiot, shake hands, beat an adversary, dress a bishop, caress a beloved, anoint the dead, wave goodbye, build a bobber motorcycle and twist its throttle, make a bar-chord and play the blues, torque a bolt, snap a picture, cleanse a chalice, handle a snake, slap my forehead, hang on too long and let go too soon....

"Whatsoever thine hand shall find to do, do with all thy might…” Ecclesiastes 9:10, and I have done so.

In spite of my trepidation I went ahead with the surgery. The surgeon broke my arm, took out a piece to shorten the bone and put in a plate and ten screws to patch it back together in order to re-arrange the bones in my wrist so they don’t rub together. He also filed down some bones and cut some nerves to kill the pain around my thumb. “I can’t do anything about the arthritis itself but I can cut the nerves so you don’t feel the pain” he said. “I still have to work and be able to feel my fingers”, I said. He said, “We know which ones to cut”.

While I was healing and ruminating about this possibly being a construction career ending surgery a Facebook friend, Scotty Parks, posted these pictures on his page.

I was instantly hooked. A few hours later I came up for air from Google.

This is Boro. It is the 600 year old Japanese practice and art of patching a garment to extend its life and re-purpose its use. Boro and Kintsugi (the art of repairing ceramics with precious metals) are related to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: rather than discard a broken thing or try to hide the broken places they are embraced as the history of the object and the repairs and patches become part of not just the continued utility of the object, but also enhance the beauty of it.

That evening I bought a sewing machine on Amazon and dove in to beginner sewing videos on YouTube. All my life I’ve been a person who jumps into the ocean off the deck of the Comfy Cruise Ship and thinks “I’ll figure out how to swim when I’m in the sea.” And I figured cloth is much lighter than sheet-rock, plywood and 2x6’s and an indoor-not-116-degree-construction “side hustle” to supplement my meager Social Security check. (…yes, I’ll sew for you if you want what I’m making.)

So, the last few weeks I’ve been healing from my surgery and learning how to sew. I figured a Boro kimono by its structure, nature and ethos will hide a multitude of sins. I went to my favorite thrift store that has a 50% Monday Senior Discount and bought a half-dozen pair of jeans and a bunch of shirts, pillow cases and dresses to cut up. It took about five weeks, a bit of “remodeling” in process, there’s things in the structure that I know now are “not to code”, and I learned a lot by making mistakes that no one will see under the repairs.

But in the end its creator was happy. And in the grand scheme of creation, wear and tear, mistakes, tearing down and re-working, damage and repair that is a good thing.

And I made a hat to match….

It was also fifty years ago this month that I enrolled at Lubbock Christian University to fulfill a “call from God to the ministry”. There, I was taught and loved two metaphors for God’s “hand in my life”.

One was “the Potter and the clay” in which the Potter, after the original vessel was damaged, molded it into a vessel fit for His purpose (from Jeremiah 18 and Romans 9).

The second metaphor was that of a tapestry. As we live our life “all the threads, good and bad, of different types and of all colors, are woven together for good into a beautiful picture or garment by the providential hands of God.” (An interpretation of Romans 8:28)

Jeremiah, St. Paul, Boro and Kintsugi all teach us that our God-created original being is broken, marred, and torn… we live in a fallen world. But the fallen world cannot utterly destroy the original beauty. What makes us more beautiful is the costly, meticulous, loving repair of the broken creation by its Creator.