Wabi-sabi
The Rugged Beauty of Discipleship
O Lord, correct me, but with justice;
Not in Your anger, lest You bring me to nothing.— The prophet Jeremiah, c. 625 BC.
Every Old Testament prophet had a deep, personal relationship with God.
But how often do we fail to call to mind the fact that each one knew God only in part?
Moses struck a rock in his frustration. Jeremiah shied away from God’s anger. Even Elijah was a man like us1. What gives us the idea that we have to be perfect to approach God?
There’s something so human about Jeremiah’s prayer in chapter 10 verse 24. It is the prayer of someone who knows God. Within the knowledge of God, there is layer after layer of mystery.
Who is He really? What is He capable of? How great is His power? These are questions no human will ever be able to answer on this side of eternity. If we ever think we know Him fully, we’ve stumbled into error. I read this prayer as Jeremiah hedging his bets.
God, have your will. But please don’t forget the power differential between us.
Better safe than sorry.
A Holy Lump
Jesus promised we would see more than the prophets and kings of old2, and indeed we have. We have seen the Son, and Him resurrected in glory. The express image of the invisible God has been made manifest to us. And yet, for all our enlightenment, what do we get?
We still do not pray as we should3. Our words fall woefully short of the glory that we are meant to declare (If I had 10,000 tongues…), the wisdom of men will get us nowhere4— and yet in his goodness, God has made provision for our impotence.
Paul wrote, I glory in my weakness5. To us this might sound trite, like false modesty; to Paul and the early Church it was reality, well-lived and hard-won. The weaker they were, the more powerful Christ in them became6.
They marveled at His glory precisely because they could not hold it. Then, when He deemed it right, out of them burst forth undimmable light and unquenchable fire.
We are earthen vessels holding the stuff of heaven7.
Are we allowing Him to exploit our idiosyncracies8 for His Glory, as only He can? We must be transformed in our minds9 if we are to begin to believe in our hearts that our weaknesses are what make us strong.
How will He shine through us if we are always pretending to be perfect?
A long time ago, a friend of the family presented my parents with some odd, lopsided mugs. They said they were inspired by a Japanese art movement, whose name I had long forgotten. But I have a clear recollection of what my mother said next.
The mugs are imperfect, she said, to remind us that only God is perfect.
The tradition that inspired the mugs, I learned, is called wabi-sabi.
It comes from the Japanese words wabi, meaning lonely, simple, or austere, and sabi, meaning imperfect, well-used, or glowing with the patina of time.
Wabi-sabi is the glory of the ordinary. It’s slow. It’s the groove of perpetual dedicated use. It is resistance and breaking in. It is what happens when stuff that was built to last goes through character development. A well-read Bible. The gearbox of an old Toyota. A a tool that just won’t quit.
But what about a heart?
When we follow Christ’s example, we learn how wabi-sabi love can be. The beauty of the worn-out, well-loved life is waiting for you to put it on.
It’s not cheap—the very opposite, it’s costly, not because of bells or whistles, but because it doesn’t cut corners. It faces up to reality and meets it on its own terms. In short, it breathes authenticity: it’s the humble power of knowing what you’re made of.
God gives Jeremiah an example of biblical wabi-sabi:
And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.10
We, the imperfect, are exalted in the perfection of our Master and of His perfect purpose. The Potter molds the clay, throwing it onto the wheel to deform what has been corrupted. It is in the breaking, the remodeling, that the off-beat, holy lump of clay gets a royal refresh.
This is our our destination, if we allow it.
Then we’ll see what remains unto glory.
Fun Money
I’ve always been drawn to things that hold their value, that endure: the eighth-time-riser, the rough and tumble, the tough, rugged, raw. But what happens when that isn’t enough?
There was a season in my life when I had money. I bought things just to say I had them: new ski gear, a pair of Italian hiking boots. New gears for my bicycle and strings for my guitars. Multiple jackets and many pairs of shoes, even an electric razor. I was a walking billboard for the fine taste I had developed.
Over time, desire gave way to the unshakable feeling that something had been taken from me. I was not happy with who I was, so I started selling, giving away, and purging all of my fancy things. When I came to the end of this vicious cycle, I found that even in my foolishness, God had provided all that I needed.
The old hiking boots I had worn to the White Mountains in college were collecting dust in my closet. A friend moved, and his old bike went to me. My first guitar came out of storage, I bought some second-hand ski gear. It was simply and lovingly mine. I was seeing the beauty of the commonplace all around me.
Thinking back on that time, I remember this verse
The LORD preserves the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me.11
The difficulty of this world is that anything nice we have is immediately made to feel out of date when the time comes to update the software. Is there anything human about the levels to which our society consumes?
All this is nothing new to a God who was in all ways tempted like us, yet without sin12. He saw the fads come and go, and respectfully declined in favor of a much more durable destination. Jesus set His face like flint towards Jerusalem: are we equally driven, or have the cares of this clay clouded our earthly vision?
Just follow My instructions, He calmly corrects us. Have I not commanded you to wait upon Me, as the promised hope of My coming hastens toward the appointed Day?13
Vessels of Honor
Having received Christ as a child, Amy Carmichael knew little of the personal faith that strengthens the resolve and fortifies the will to follow Jesus.
Roberts Liardon details an experience that changed everything for her. In God’s Generals Volume V, he tells of a teenage Amy, still mourning the loss of her father, helping an old woman carry a heavy bundle up a hill in the rain.
Instead of encouraging her, the stares of her fellow churchgoers communicated disdain towards the young girl and her brothers.
Embarrassed, she found it within herself to resist the urge to run away from the old woman. Just then, a verse flashed before her eyes:
Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
1 Corinthians 3:12-14 (KJV, emphasis added).
Then she says something marvelous:
I turned to see the voice that spoke with me... The blinding flash had come and gone; the ordinary was all about us. I said nothing to anyone, but I knew something had happened that had changed my life’s values.14
The blinding flash had come and gone. I wonder if that’s what it’s like when our lives flash before our eyes. We look around to find that some form of innocence to which we held so tightly is gone, but that something much more valuable has taken its place.
Whatever survives the fire will shine on into eternity. Amy Carmichael realized that nothing we do matters except what we do for God. But what’s more, it is ordinary.
Perhaps Tolkien was right to say that “all that’s gold does not glitter.”
The blinding flash has come and gone, and we find ourselves transposed into the ordinary rhythms of life. The shock of some revelation flashes across the consciousness, then it’s gone. The great joys of life are all swallowed up in time’s unassailable advance.
What will remain?
The pure gold, tried in fire15. Beautiful? Remarkable? Yes, and valuable. But unexpectedly plain-clothed and beguilingly simple.
Where can we find it? Out of the way, off the beaten path, right over there; in the humdrum of traffic on a Tuesday afternoon, the zigzags of a lawnmower on a summer’s evening, in the words of a story you’ve read a thousand times.
So we begin nthe trek back to the wabi-sabi faith with which we started. We seek the simple, the resilient, the quiet, the proven, the true. The grace of a King who picked us up and dusted us off when we had fallen face-down into the dirt.
Did we have the words to address Him then? No, certainly not.
But we had the tears. And He kept them safe.
Prayer
Father, so often we wish we could stay in the power, the glory, the rapture of the revelation. But Your true majesty, O God, is revealed when you thread together the unremarkable moments of a regular life, doubt and frailty crocheted like a blanket of purpose that stretches the length of our wounds and opens us to healing.
The mundane, the travailing, the daily grind is where so many saints fail, where they see their destinies shattered by the weight of normality — Let us raise a Hallelujah from there!
May we be strong in the wabi-sabi. May our testimonies declare our imperfections, Lord. Remind us of the elegance of our scars, of the purpose behind our pain.
Turn each boast into a boast in our weakness. Let the eternal significance of the every day remain with us, and be to us a constant reminder of Your never-failing love.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
James 5:17. This is often forgotten because of the great works of the prophets. If they were great, (and indeed they were), then by Christ’s standard, they were the least among men.
Luke 10:4.
Romans 8:26.
1 Corinthians 1:25.
2 Corinthians 12:9.
While jailed like common criminals in Philippi, Paul and Silas’ brokenness made room for a miraculous overflow. They were being held in the most miserable of conditions when an earthquake shook them loose of their bonds. The jailer guarding them, despairing for his life, nearly fell on his sword; instead, Paul proclaimed the Gospel to him and his entire household was baptized. We should all be praying for our weakness to be revealed so thoroughly, that God’s power might be shine forth all the more.
2 Corinthians 4:7 is more than a statement on the humility of humanity; in it we find a correlation to 2 Timothy 2:20, in which Paul uses the same Greek word, skeuos, to describe a vessel. The earthen vessel must be purified in fire (a process through which Paul passed between the time of the writing of these two letters) before it can be considered a vessel of honor: the takeaway is not to despise the mundane work of our common discipleship; in time, the Lord’s perfection will show through us more fully than we could have imagined.
A fancy word for flaws.
Romans 12:2.
Jeremiah 18:4 (ESV) is one of the most inspired passages of prophecy in the entire Bible. There is little fat left to trim off his words, and yet their depth and clarity evince magnificent beauty hidden within simplicity as only a master’s brushstrokes can evoke. One can almost feel the weight of revelation in the voice of Jeremiah as he encounters God’s meaning in real time. All this, for the quotidian shaping of a standard clay jar.
Psalm 116:6. I was brought low as many are, by being lifted up. When we’re not paying attention to the one who’s doing the lifting, we can easily be blinded by the splendor of the kingdoms of the world in all their greatness. The Lord later exalted Himself in my lowliness.
Hebrews 4:15.
My favorite example of this concept is found in Habakkuk 2:3, which reads,
For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry (KJV).
God shows us that tarry and tarry have two different meanings, His and ours. While the promise of arrival is guaranteed, it is not contigent on us or anything we can accomplish. The slow drudgery of life is what causes us to feel as though it tarries; God sits above the circle of the Earth and marks the passing of times and seasons as hours on a clock.
Original quote from Gold Cord: The Story of a Fellowship by Amy Carmichael.
Revelation 3:18 is often used as an admonition, and rightly so. The process of getting gold out of a smelting furnace is demanding at best, soul-shattering at worst. And yet the Lord of Heaven and Earth has made a way through the heat of the blaze. The inferno won’t touch you, He promises, if you stay by My side. How can it be, Lord? Seek to know and you’ll misunderstand. The incredible things of life are for those who dare to hope for them.
This is a very good essay. An easy read packed with quiet divine truth. Thank you, my friend, for so beautifully articulating these enduring themes. They sing of God and his undying love for us, the broken and worn and suffering. May we learn to love our imperfections as they radiate our love for God, for our neighbors, and for any we meet along the way that are struggling under the weight of life. Blessings, brother.