Have you ever seen an archaeologist uncovering an artifact or a set of bones? It’s a painstaking business. They can’t just dig right in or they could risk harming the remains in the process. Instead, the archaeologist uses light, gentle brushes, blowing off the excess dust, sweeping away debris, until the artifact reveals itself. Then they celebrate the find!
Although classified in universities as a science, archaeology, like most restorative processes, many would say, is also an art. Likewise, the study of the history of art is considered by most a kind of archaeology. While archaeology delves into the human past seeking to understand behavior, history, culture, and social structures, art seeks to reveal the style, form, image, meaning, and beauty revealed in human expression of the innermost mind and psyche.
Psychoanalyst and interdisciplinary practitioner Carl Jung had a high appreciation for both. He saw the artist as the “collective man or human,” one who shapes and reveals the unconscious psyche of humankind, who reveals dreams, creativity, and offers healing through the power of metaphor. His initial dream to become an archaeologist, Jung became instead a psychologist who examined the human mind often using archaeological process and terms. Just as archaeologists uncover important artifacts that help them learn about humankind’s history and culture, Jungian psychologists delve deeply into the unconscious mind to uncover symbolic artifacts that provide insights into a person’s identity and development. Like the archaeologist, this is not done with bulldozer but with a careful hand and gentle process.
Psychoanalysis, like archaeology, undertakes a process of “revealing,” of “uncovering” something authentic that has been hidden under years of debris. While the goals of many of these kinds of restoration processes may vary, the process requires a careful, “artistic” approach. Likewise, the beauty of finding and “freeing” an authentic artifact, be it a fossil or a human being encased within years of defenses and pain, is a noble endeavor.
A similar process happens in the restoration of actual works of art! Art restoration is an art in itself. It too requires a painstaking approach. Using brushes, soft cotton, wind, and gentle cloths, years of grime, dust, debris, smoke, and other contaminants must be carefully and slowly removed, so as not to damage the original artwork but to reveal it in all of its beauty and authenticity. As original colors emerge it can be a surprising and beautiful, almost spiritual experience! Restoration is a beautiful art.
In 1947 Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock to do a large mural like painting for her home. After years of unprotected build up from parties and events with smoke-filled rooms and the usual years long accumulation of dust, the painting had dulled. Conservator Luciano Pensabene set about the task of restoring the mural. Called “Alchemy,” the restoration of its stunning colors and textures also revealed secrets about the artists “drip process” and his fractal-like technique. In Pollock’s painting, rationality and intuition blended together in an explosion of color. Ironically, the painting (and our knowledge of the artist) underwent an “alchemy” of its own as its restoration revealed so much more than we could have imagined about the original.
But art is not confined to paint and pencil. We not only breathe new life into already beautiful things. But we can also create and recreate new beauty from things that have entirely lost their form and in our eyes, their value. Using bits of trash, some artists have taken what we have considered to be “worthless garbage” and have created from it beautiful works of art! In fact, our entire process of recycling follows along with the theory that nothing is worthless. And everything can be recycled, reformed, revealed, refurbished, revised, restored!
One of the most astonishing witnesses to this theory is the art of “kintsugi.” Practiced primarily in Japan, artists take broken pottery and china and create beautiful works of art from them by sealing them together with molten gold or platinum. These often discarded and deemed “worthless” pieces are revisioned and reworked to become some of the most cherished and astounding (and expensive!) pieces of art in the world today.
Why are we talking so much about the art of restoration? Because this is the way that God sees us! Yes, we can become broken. Yes, we can become dulled by years of emotional debris and pain. Yes, we can cover over our authentic selves and our innocence with defenses and difficulties. Yes, we can feel often that we are worthless due to our mistakes and failures. But God never sees us that way.
God sees in us only our potential. That’s why we name God our divine “potter,” our heavenly creator and artist! God has the power in the Holy Spirit to send his wind upon us and whisk away years of dust and debris from our lives, the sins that have weighed us down and caused us to doubt our authenticity. God has the power to break us down and remold us back into our original image of beauty with all of the freshness and potential gifted to us at the moment of our birth. God has the power to reveal the best of us and rework the parts that need restoring. God has the power to uncover and recover the “us” we thought we had destroyed!
God is the great Restorer!
In fact, this is what it means, as we look to our scripture for today, to be “reborn” in the Spirit of God: “gennethe anothen”! It means to be saved, healed, rescued, restored by the power of the Spirit, the pneumatos, to a new place. “Anothen” not only means from a higher place or from above but also means from the first beginning, to a new place. How beautiful is that! And that is what God does for us. God restores us to our original beauty. God carefully and gently brushes away, whisks away with the breath of the Holy Spirit all of the sins that have accumulated upon and within us and reveals and remolds us into a new place. He makes us gleam as we did from our first beginning. We are “reborn!”
We are all God’s artwork! Each one of us is a unique and beautiful piece of art made and signed by God’s own hand! Each of us is different, and each of us has been in some way throughout our lives been chipped or broken or weighed down or scarred by sin or hurt, pain or difficulty. And yet, in the power of the Holy Spirit, God picks us up, dusts us off, and restores us in living color to our authentic, beautiful humanness.
Human beings are God’s most astounding creation. All we need to do is look around to witness the rest of the amazing creation that God has brought forth! How can we not recognize that we are the product of the most amazing artist who ever lived!
Be proud of who you are. Do not fall into a muddle over your past, your mistakes, or what you see as your flaws or difficulties. For God does not see that in you! God sees in you the beauty that God created. And God has the power to restore you, beautify you, re-create you into the exquisite piece of art he intended you to be –inside and out.
Each of you is a kind of “kintsugi.” Each different, as our life experiences are different. But each of us a unique and valuable (in fact priceless) work of art from God’s divine art studio.
Nothing in this world created by God is ever worthless. Nothing in this world created by God is ever unredeemable. Nothing in this world created by God is hopeless. Nothing in this world created by God cannot be “restored” and “reborn.”
This is the message of Jesus. In this season of Pentecost, I invite you to take a closer look at your life. And invite God to hold you in his palms, to mold you, remake you, reveal you, and restore you to all that you can be. Your life is meant to be a shining example of God’s creative beauty. When you shine, you reflect the glory of God!
Shine, people of God! Shine on!