麻豆社

My mother-in-law, an Israeli ceramicist, has made me the gift of a beautiful chalice and patten. The chalice is a cup for consecrated wine and the patten a plate for consecrated bread. In church, they are vessels for the body and blood of Jesus to be distributed to the congregation. As a priest, the chalice and patten are the tools of my trade.

The other week, this patten was knocked off our piano in a cleaning accident and smashed on the floor. I gathered up the fragments, placed them carefully into the cup, and left them on the side table. There they stayed, steadily gathering symbolic significance, as I watched the news of thousands of houses reduced to rubble in Turkey and Syria, with so many dead, so many homeless in sub-zero temperatures. 鈥淲e have this treasure in clay jars鈥� wrote St Paul, referencing the essential fragility of human life. He grew up not so far from this recent earthquake鈥檚 epicentre.

So where is God in all this destruction? demands the voice in my head - a question commonly associated with the Lisbon earthquake of 1555 after which people like Voltaire began relentlessly to satirise the excuses that religious people were making for God. And Voltaire was right to do so. But my understanding of God has always been more about the wound than the sticking plaster, He hovers heavier in the question than in ready-made answers to the unanswerable.

And where answers are absent, symbolic actions help focus my swirling thoughts. A member of my congregation told me about kintsugi, the Japanese art of pottery repair. Here broken ceramics are joined together using a lacquer mixed with powdered gold. Cracks are not hidden but accentuated. Perhaps this is how I should get my patten repaired, highlighting both the hope of restoration but also of the persistence of pain and brokenness. I am reminded that even after the resurrection, the body of Christ still bears the marks of his horrendous death.

This eucharist, a miracle of bread and wine, is not so much an intellectual answer to pain and suffering but something many of us feel compelled to participate in as a response to it. Of course, it will be engineers and doctors, governments and aid agencies that are tasked with the physical act of reconstruction. My contribution as a priest works on different level: I seek to focus the longing of my congregation for restoration, to hold up the pain that they and others experience before God鈥檚 promise that love will triumph over death and destruction. A broken patten, lovingly brought together with veins of gold, may be a modest act of defiance against all this darkness. But it speaks of something deeper in human experience: that despite the reality of shattered lives, hope itself will never, can never, must never be extinguished.

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