The Astonishment of Resurrection

Repair is Not Enough

There’s a billboard on I-75 South at the Howell Mill exit in Atlanta that for several months depicted a woman’s distressed face from the point of view of a cracked phone screen. The caption said, “Broken is Beautiful,” and I never drove by it slowly enough to determine if it were an ad for a local screen-fixing shop or a counseling center. Both exist to fix brokenness — and I can’t discern what’s beautiful about the problem.

If you like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, meaning “golden joinery,” you might appreciate the beautification of brokenness. Kintsugi is the practice of making broken things beautiful by highlighting the cracks with shimmering seams instead of concealing them or throwing the pieces away. This idea of accepting imperfection, transience, and incompleteness is prominent in Buddhist philosophy and is known in Japan as “wabi-sabi.” It’s an interesting and frugal aesthetic choice, but not a good metaphor for human healing.

A broken cup, repaired with Kintsugi [image credit]

It surprised me recently to see some Christian writers and influencers incorporating this concept that “Broken is Beautiful” into their devotional material. Their instinct may arise from a biblical teaching that expresses a similar, though distinct, universal truth. The Apostle Paul wrote in a letter to the Christians who lived in Corinth,

“God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” II Corinthians 12:8-10 (English Standard Version)

According to this verse, our brokenness can beget beauty if it enables us to realize our need for God’s intervention. In other words, when we acknowledge our weakness, we allow God to work in us — and he creates beauty.

But if we remove God from the idea that “Broken is Beautiful” — and toss it around in a post-Christian world — it evolves into something more like this:

“God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” -- II Corinthians 12:8-10

In other words, “I’m beautiful the way I am.”

“Broken is Beautiful” has become the anthem for a world that has lost hope of healing. When we can’t fix it, and it won’t go away — and there’s no hope of it improving — the only way to be comfortable is to accept and celebrate the failure: to free ourselves from the expectations of others; to define for ourselves what is ‘normal;’ to create our own standards. In my life, that looks like this:

• I was short-tempered with my husband this morning because that’s how I was feeling — and that authenticity is beautiful.

• I cross the double white lines of the HOV lane daily because my time is (undeniably) more important than everyone else’s — acknowledging that I matter by putting myself before others is beautiful.

• I recently gave the benefit of my wisdom to an inefficient healthcare employee — and when she reacted poorly, I mentioned that I know the Chief of Staff of the hospital. My self-confidence and self-advocacy were beautiful.

• I same-day-cancelled a physical therapy appointment for the third time in a month because of migraines — and my self-forgiveness at inconveniencing my physical therapist was beautiful.

These flaws are (the least embarrassing) examples of my brokenness. They range from character deficiencies to physical infirmities — and while some may (arguably) be my fault, the last doesn’t seem to be — yet they all constitute brokenness. It’s the fundamental human problem that transcends every nationality, race, and creed — the problem that every religion since the dawn of time has attempted to address: how do we mend the brokenness of existence?

“To be or not to be,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks in Act 3, scene 1 as he considers whether to continue suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or to kill himself and end it. We will not weigh those two options here, though pain in this life can be unbearable. There’s a better solution to “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

What are some possible solutions?

1. Paganism? My children’s book of Greek myths depicts people burning animals to appease the gods and purchase favor — since suffering seemed to originate with the gods’ bad moods and they liked the fragrance of cooked meat.

2. Judaism? The monotheistic God of the Bible instructed the Hebrew people to offer animals as repeated sacrifices, too, to atone for their brokenness — which, according to God, originated from Man’s prideful rebellion against him and infects everything we do and think.

3. Islam? Muslims believe that they need to feel badly for their individual sins, ask Allah for forgiveness, and try to do better — but that there’s no pervasive, ongoing state of sin and brokenness to deal with.

4. Buddhism or Hinduism? They treat brokenness differently. They don’t seek forgiveness from a god they’ve offended but deal with the problem internally through meditation and self-improvement leading to a kind of peace. They attempt to fix themselves, essentially — like Kintsugi — and that has led to our present belief that “broken is beautiful.”

Do I really need any of that? The fact is, I’m not so bad — many people act worse than I do — many others suffer worse than migraines. And yet gilding these cracks and celebrating my brokenness as relatively virtuous (or relatively well) feels incomplete to me. I want to be whole.

In the absence of a solution, many of us have attempted to ameliorate the discomfort. Some of us dull our awareness of our intolerable, jagged edges with prescription and illegal drugs, alcohol, sex, video games, pornography, shopping therapy, or my relationship with processed sugar. Some blame other people for not affirming their brokenness. Or we “change the narrative” and deny there’s a problem at all by gilding the cracks and calling it beautiful.

Why beautiful? As the philosopher David Hume wrote in the 18th century, “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” In our world that believes truth is relative, we have adopted Hume’s perspective and say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The subjectivity of the word “beautiful” insulates us from value judgments: if I say my brokenness is beautiful, who are you to say otherwise?

Treating brokenness with optimism is not new. Judeo-Christian scripture steered us in that direction 2,000 years ago. Though “Not every god has a plan” (as the Marvel tagline said for the last iteration of Thor), there’s a much-quoted verse — that has inspired TV shows and throw pillows — which famously says that the God of the Bible has a plan:

“‘I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.’” Jeremiah 29:11 (New International Version)

Another greatest hit says,

“All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28 (New English Translation)

Perhaps those sound like a Hallmark movie in which everything works out in the end. But there is an important plot line in the story of my own life that illustrates the hard-won significance of these verses. In fact, it’s one story with two endings.

In the Kate Susong biopic, the scene would open on my two-year-old self practicing the violin with my mother instructing me. The next scene shows me performing all over Atlanta in various recitals and competitions. The montage quickly moves (because the childhood scenes in these movies are so boring) to my elementary school talent show in which I play the allegro movement of Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G while my more socially-adjusted friends lip-sync to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” From there, I win many concerto competitions, practice 30 hours a week before and after school throughout junior high, and spend two summers of intense study at Interlochen Arts Camp. The apogee of this childhood spent in unyielding devotion to a single goal occurs when the audition judges for the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra — the state of Georgia’s premier youth orchestral group — name me as the region’s best student violinist in a blind audition. When they discover my age, they feel it is unwise to give a 13-year-old the first seat in the orchestra over her 18-year-old peers and give me the seat of Principal Second — still a huge honor for an 8th grader. I am destined to be a concert violinist — I have the passion, the skill, the supportive parents, and the contacts required to achieve this dream. Nothing can stop me now!

This is where the music becomes foreboding and slow motion would be affecting. Instead of my star continuing to rise, at 14 years of age, I dive from a high dive in P.E. class and forget to tuck my chin as instructed. The whiplash I sustain damages the nerves in my neck and shoulders and sends my muscles into spasms that take years of physical therapy to calm. I can no longer play the violin without debilitating neck pain — that dream is over.

Even when the discomfort subsides enough for me to discontinue the muscle relaxants, pain killers, steroids, and shockwave therapy, my body and mind are permanently altered by the injury. My joy — communicating with an audience — has been stolen. I had cultivated the ability to share something profound with other people — the universal language of music that everyone can speak — and that ability is gone. A reasonable person might ask: What kind of God would give a talent to someone, only to take it away?

A reasonable person might also ask: Do I believe that God is good? Do I believe that God is omnipotent? Do I believe that God knows the plans he has for me — plans to prosper me and not to harm me; plans to give me hope and a future? A reasonable person might say no to any one of those questions — and that leaves them only with Kintsugi. My answer to those questions is yes because I know that I cannot fix myself — and I know that God is heartbroken over our suffering and wants to fix it. After all, “Jesus wept”¹ when his friend Lazarus died — even though Jesus would shortly restore him to life. If the answer to the above questions is yes, then the only reasonable choice in the face of profound loss is to trust that God knows more than I know — to accept that he loves me more than I understand — to believe that he’s not finished yet.

Christians would say that the death of Jesus paid the debt we owe to our Creator for breaking everything with our sinfulness — and that the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead began the miraculous healing of it all. The broken cup isn’t put back together with golden Kintsugi seams — it’s made better than before. The divine entrepreneur isn’t making lemonade out of our lemons. He’s making lemonade trees.

With a fledgling faith in that kind of God, “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine,”² I pivot and pour my energy into theater. Though I am spared the paralysis that many have suffered from diving accidents, the mysterious effects of the neck injury hound me. The neck pain, the increasing back pain, and the headaches that grow in frequency become my constant demons that I fight with all my strength. This montage in my biopic is a world of furious intensity — a life in which boundaries are hurdles to be overcome; time is at my command with every second scheduled; people are supporting characters in my drama; and I can do everything through sheer willpower. While consuming the reserves of my youth, I believe I am doing “all things through Christ who strengthens me.”³ Even Jesus cannot claim the starring role in this epic — I allow him to finance and produce and always intend to give him credit in my Oscar acceptance speech. My young life is a world in which I can be whomever I want — messages I cull from advertising, I think, that encourage my natural optimism: “Be all that you can be,” “Just do it,” “Accept no limits.”

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
— “Invictus,” by W.E. Henley (1920)

I win state and national theater competitions during high school. Senior year, President Clinton gives me a medal as the top actress in the nation among graduating seniors. Subsequently, I go to Princeton for my bachelors, Columbia for graduate school, and Broadway to pursue an acting career. I will force myself to be the best at everything through self-determination and Disney philosophy.

“Anything your heart desires will come to you!”
— Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio (1940)

“When you believe in yourself, anything is possible!”
— Dumbo, Dumbo (1941)

My years in New York are a whirlwind. I work and audition during the day and rehearse and perform at night. My experiences acting in the City are a tale for a different essay — but I will tell one pertinent story here. The first show I audition for in New York is a Broadway revival of one of my favorite musicals, My Fair Lady. It’s based on the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion — which, in turn, is based on a Greek myth that I loved as a child. In the myth, Pygmalion carves a sculpture of a beautiful woman and falls in love with his creation. He despairs that she cannot return his love and prays to the goddess Aphrodite to bring the sculpture to life so that it can love him back. Aphrodite takes pity on him, and the statue becomes human. They marry and have a family — one of few happy endings in Greek mythology. I wasn’t cast in My Fair Lady and have never performed in that musical or Shaw’s play — but that story of transfiguration has whispered something significant to me throughout my life.

Pygmalion and Galatea, my favorite painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, by Jean-Léon Gérôme

New York thrums with promises of eternal life through fame and wealth — and those who believe them will experience the City’s vampirism. After four thrilling years, I age a decade as my life energy is sapped. I would stay, pounding the pavement until I become part of it — but the wonderful man I meet at church convinces me that something better is in store. We fall in love, I come home to Atlanta to marry him and have children — and am hell-bent on being the greatest wife and mother of them all.

Yes is the only word I know in response to requests for volunteers, invitations to lead, opportunities to perform. A good friend once told me that the most obvious symptom of my brokenness is my busyness. I whip myself into a frenzy of activity. The more considerate I am, the more people I help, the more committees I chair, the more meals I cook — the more virtuous I am.

Not that I claim it aloud. I am also the most humble person you've ever met. No, the virtue is publicly enacted and privately cherished. Though I believe that Jesus died to pay for my sins — which, in theory, makes me forgiven and free from virtue-counting — functionally, I think the death and resurrection of God aren’t quite enough. I need to accomplish more just to be safe.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain that God “shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” I am very hard of hearing, apparently, because God has shouted with shattering intensity to get my attention. In 2014, around the time that I become the primary caretaker for my mother-in-law (who had received a terminal diagnosis) and begin homeschooling my son in first grade (because that’s how awesome I am), I start to get migraines. Not just several times a month — but five to six days a week. After two years of homeschooling with daily migraines, I blame my son’s recalcitrance for the pain and send him to school — but the migraines continue. After four more years of caring for my mother-in-law with daily migraines, I blame her negativity — but following her death, the migraines persist. Over the next four years, I seek every therapy, take every medication, change my diet, try homeopathy, exercise, have two major surgeries — and the migraines continue unabated. What remains for me to blame? My husband is kind of high maintenance — could it be his fault?

After ten years, crushed by the migraines but still pushing through and being awesome, I have a revelation. My vision of myself has required me to reject my limitations and create a new self who will be strong and “accept no limits.”⁴ I had spent the first 45 years of my life as a weekly-church-attending believer in the Resurrection of Jesus — while defying my Creator by defining myself. I’d had two major surgeries — one was a hysterectomy in which I’d had organs removed! — in an attempt to fix the migraines and solve my debilitating brokenness. And all at once, at the beginning of 2024, the mortifying realization crashes over me that my own hubris is the cause of my suffering. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” as Proverbs 16:18 says. My prideful rejection of my limitations has stolen a decade of my life, mired in migraines.

As the revelation strikes, I ask myself, What if I am a person who is capable of much less accomplishment and activity than I want? What if God made me to be someone I don’t want to be? Do I think that God is trying to cheat me of something? Do I think God made a mistake when he didn’t stop my diving accident and allowed me to be weaker than I want to be? Or do I trust that God knows the plans he has for me — plans to prosper me and not to harm me — plans to give me hope and a future?

The answers to those questions have changed my life. A little over a year ago, I stopped insisting I was the spectacular person I wanted to be — and accepted the person God made. There was a short period in which I mourned the death of Super-Kate — before my relief lessened my regret.

Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest… For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
The words of Jesus in Matthew 11:28

At this point, my biopic (still in production) diverges — there are two resolutions that happen simultaneously. In the first, there’s a happy ending. My ability to play the violin has not been miraculously restored — but I am delighted to acknowledge publicly that God’s plans are better than mine. My dreams of violin virtuosity did not include a husband or children — I would have been on the road, married to my career — but my family are sweeter to my ear than any music I could have performed. And that sweetness came from some very sour lemons of pain and loss.

The second ending contains an unexpected plot-twist: I am not healed of the migraines. I am limited by them — and that’s not OK. I’ll admit to some chagrin that I’m like a dog living inside an invisible electric fence, sitting in the yard, watching the traffic go by. It’s embarrassing to be such a willful animal that I need this level of discipline — but God is kind to keep me happy in the yard and give me work that suits me. I have become a writer during this year, no longer making music or declaiming drama — but weaving words and engaging with a new audience: You! This new life of writing has been a gift that I would have missed had I continued leaping the boundaries of my limitations. When I sometimes try to be Super-Kate again and say yes to things that Super-Kate would do, a migraine zaps me and reminds me to enjoy the beautiful green pasture that is mine.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Surely, I have a delightful inheritance.
Psalm 16:6 (New International Version)

He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Psalm 23 (English Standard Version)

That “Broken is Beautiful” billboard on I-75 — which I’ve discovered is a Verizon ad — was changed before Christmas to the image of a smashed iPhone with a gift-bow adhered to it. The holiday caption read, “Broken is a Gift. Turn in your old device and get a new one.” I laughed out loud as profundity overtook me on the interstate. Advertisements are thick with theology. The best ones speak to our deepest need for a new life, a new heart, a new device. Verizon got this ad right —broken is not beautiful. Broken is an opportunity to receive a gift.

The Verizon ad is a new-tech solution to an old-tech problem. In Ezekiel 36:26, God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” — the best trade-in offer anywhere. To take advantage of the manufacturer’s warranty, however, you have to trust the manufacturer. It felt pretty risky to turn in my heart of stone even though it was cracked long ago — after my best friend betrayed me in 4th grade; when I could no longer play the violin in 8th grade; when I lied to my parents in college; when I watched the Twin Towers collapse in person on 9/11; when my grandparents died in four separate losses over 25 years; when my dreams have been limited by chronic migraines; when I resented that someone’s comment on Substack got more likes than mine yesterday. My instinct is to keep the broken heart I have — it’s familiar, and I know its quirks.

But then a Verizon ad reminds me of the manufacturer’s warranty and that blessed trade-in. I remember that my brokenness is not beautiful and that I don’t want to celebrate it, or accept it — much less gild it. I remember that God’s promise to me is complete transformation — new life. When all things are made new on the Last Day, my migraines will no longer limit me, and I will be the best version of Super-Kate, after all, because of the ultimate trade-in: Jesus’ life for mine. Lifting theology from advertising again, even Chick-fil-A’s cows know the primal problem when they tell us to “Eat Mor Chikin:” If we are to live, something else has to die. Since it’s the death and resurrection of God himself, the whole world will be transfigured into perfect splendor. We won’t be repaired like a ghoulish Kintsugi sculpture. We’ll be made new like Pygmalion’s statue — trading our hearts of stone for hearts of flesh —

— and that will be beautiful.

We beautify our brokenness — but something better is coming. [Image credit]

“God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’” Revelation to John 21:4-5 (English Standard Version)

1. John 11:35 (King James Version), which is the shortest verse in the Bible, incidentally.

2. Ephesians 3:20 (New International Version)

3. Philippians 4:13 (New King James Version) Beware of wielding Bible verses out of context.

4. It’s startling to note how much Nike advertising has affected my life.