Anne Snyder: From Comment magazine, welcome to The Understory, where the future quietly takes root. I’m Anne Snyder.
Makoto Fujimura: There is a greater story than the one so visibly wounding. This story rises above, redeems, restores, and heals. And it is that voice of the Good Shepherd that brings the ancient broken fissures into a new golden healing.
Anne Snyder: The artist Makoto Fujimura has spent decades exploring what he calls “broken beauty”—the observation that beauty is often born, not despite the fractures each one of us experiences in this life, but through them. On the opening night of the Understory Festival, Mako reflected on what that vision might mean for the Western world at this particular moment. Rather than asking how quickly our deepest cracks can be repaired, he wondered whether we might first learn to behold them differently.
This reflection originally appeared in our opening-night episode, “What Is Struggling to Be Born?” framed by an address from Fr. Tomáš Halík. We’re releasing it here on its own in the hope that it might find fresh ears and perhaps lead you back to the larger conversation from which it came.
Recorded at the National Cathedral on the Understory’s opening night, here is Makoto Fujimura.
Makoto Fujimura: A friend once told me—and this friend is here, I found out—if you want to understand something, you have to be willing to stand under it. We might say here that in order to tell the understory, we also need to stand under the story.
But what is that story? We may think that it is the story of our times, of what is being revealed, the dark and sinister forces in our complicity. We have a culture that does not understand. But we over-stand, standing over with derision and judgment.
Ours is a generational struggle to push back against forces of darkness that lurks under all powers and principalities. We risk welfare by doing so. In a culture of culture wars and breakdown of language, communication, and communities, the rubble of hubris stand over us, haunting us and taunting us. Yes, it has been a humbling experience to be forced to stand under and be crushed and pepper-sprayed by the oppression and violations rendered to us.
There is a greater story than the one so visibly wounding. This story rises above, redeems, restores, and heals. And it is that voice of the Good Shepherd that brings the ancient broken fissures into a new golden healing.
We stand here at the National Cathedral today, not perhaps yet able to understand, but to simply stand together, not as people of false hope concocted by the false prophets of our time. We are people of despair and desperation, singing together our lament, but to sing with the prophet Jeremiah in his lamentation, “Great is thy faithfulness.”
We stand knowing that this bell tolls for us, calling us out, and we have been given in our breath a song yet in our brightest of abyss. The future will tell us if we have indeed been faithful to this album, not to patch up the fraying old wineskin, but to become improbably as a new wineskin—not as how we were, but how we will be.
My art form, that uses Nihonga materials, traditional Japanese painting technique into contemporary expression, is an art of slow layering and pulverization. Minerals are pulverized to become prismatic layers of paint. The surface is often over 100 layers. It is quite literally broken beauty.
We need to recall today and behold a treasured Liberty Bell, a bell that remains silent because it has a crack running through it. That is the reality of our experiment of liberal democracy. We are fragile and we are vulnerable. But rather than rush to fix the crack, now is the time of beholding.
Behold an acorn. Behold wounds. It is in his wounds we are healed. And it is in our weaknesses that God’s strength is made perfect.
So let us make, through our pains, paint together a vista into the new to see beyond the angst and the anxieties of our time. Compose, compose a human song that we may together come to sing. Go out to cultivate a garden of beauty and take good care of our land and our culture, carry the stenches and burdens of the darkest slums of our marginalized existence, of our children’s trafficked bodies, sinews and dry bones. Stand to call the breath of our hopes and have the spirit be poured into the very crevices of darkness so that the devastated wasteland can be transformed, transfigured into an oasis of abundance.
See, in the darkened holes of betrayals and broken promises, see a candlelight of someone’s prayers. Refract the light in the pews and the bus stops and the corridors of underground tubes. Offer your tender light of life so that the future generations can see them so as to see their prismatic dreams in them.
May that be the new beginning of our understory: to cast an impossible rainbow upon stormy seas into this cathedral of hope, a rainbow for the fallen world, a prismatic broken beauty that God chooses to stand under, and a salvific ark gate for our homecoming.
