“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi
In a culture obsessed with flawlessness, we forget: It’s the cracks that let the light in.
We hide our wounds, polish our personas and pursue perfection as if wholeness were a destination. But what if the divine isn’t found in what’s seamless, but in what’s splintered? What if God isn’t an architect of immaculate blueprints, but a companion in the glorious, gritty work of becoming?
That might sound like heresy. After all, if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, shouldn’t the world reflect a perfect plan? But I’ve come to believe that divine omniscience doesn’t mean divine micromanagement. It means deep, compassionate understanding. God knows the detours and the delays, the joy and the grief. God knows that transformation is slow, and that sometimes, breaking is part of becoming.
I’ve lived this truth. I’ve clawed my way through addiction and emerged raw, scarred and radically changed. For years, I despised my own cracks — the regrets, the shame, the story I didn’t want to tell. But over time, I realized those fractures were letting something in: humility, empathy, grace. Recovering didn’t erase the damage. It revealed a different kind of beauty — one rooted not in looking “all better,” but in being honest, human and open.
Cracks: Not hidden but honoured
There’s a word in Japanese culture for this: kintsugi — the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The cracks aren’t hidden; they’re honoured. The object becomes more valuable, not less. Alongside kintsugi is wabi-sabi, the appreciation of imperfection, and kaizen, the philosophy of continuous, incremental growth. Together, they whisper a radical truth: Perfection isn’t a final product. It’s a faithful process.
Even evolution, life’s most sacred unfolding, is born of brokenness. At its core, evolution isn’t a march towards flawlessness but a dance shaped by trial and error, mutation and adaptation, extinction and emergence. Nothing was born fully formed. Not the eye. Not the brain. Not us. Every living thing carries a legacy of imperfect steps that made survival possible.
And crucially, evolution doesn’t progress despite brokenness, but because of it. The so-called “errors” in DNA replication are what allow life to innovate. Without cracks in the code, there would be no creativity in the cosmos. Life is, by design, unfinished. It’s an experiment in sacred becoming.
This pattern pulses through spiritual history, too. Consider Handsome Lake, the 18th-century Seneca prophet. After years of addiction and despair, he awoke from illness into a vision that reshaped not only his life but the spiritual fabric of his people. His teachings — a blend of Haudenosaunee tradition and renewed moral insight — birthed the Code of Handsome Lake, a movement of sobriety, community and renewal.
Was he perfect? No. But that’s the point. His transformation carried power not because he walked a flawless path, but because he fell and still found his way. His brokenness became a doorway. The light came through the cracks.
Possibility over perfection
To see God in this is to shift from worshiping perfection to reverencing possibility. A cracked seed births a forest. A wounded creature adapts. A species stumbles into consciousness. Perhaps God isn’t editing out our flaws, but composing with them. The dissonance is part of the song.
Imagine God not as a cosmic engineer, but as a patient gardener. Not a blueprint-drafter, but a choreographer, responsive, alive. In that divine dance, imperfection isn’t failure. It’s movement. It’s momentum. It’s growth in motion.
Kaizen reminds us that transformation happens step by step. Spiritually, this means God doesn’t demand instant purity, but invites us into a slow, sacred evolution, shaped by compassion, practice and time. Not perfection, but progress. Not flawlessness, but faithfulness.
Still, I get it.
There’s a real fear in letting go of the old architecture, the idea that if we’re not striving for some ideal of flawlessness, we’ll fall into complacency. That without the threat of divine disappointment, we might stop growing.
Some might say: If you honour your imperfection, aren’t you dishonouring God’s will?
Doesn’t grace without judgment lead to apathy, even chaos?
That fear is valid. It’s been shaped by centuries of theology that tied holiness to performance and redemption to purity. But here’s the paradox: shame often paralyzes us, not grace. It’s perfectionism—not humility—that keeps us from risking, creating, evolving.
True transformation doesn’t arise from hating our imperfection. It arises from trusting that we are already loved, and therefore free to change.
Grace doesn’t let us off the hook. It lets us get back up.
It says: You aren’t disqualified by your brokenness. You’re initiated through it.
Not because brokenness is the goal, but because truth is. And once we stop pretending, healing becomes possible.
Our wounds don’t threaten God’s will. God’s will works through them.
Charles Hartshorne’s process philosophy
But perhaps there’s something even deeper at stake here, something existentially and theologically provocative. I’ve long been drawn to the work of Process philosophers and theologians, particularly Charles Hartshorne, a thinker who was also, incidentally, a passionate ornithologist. Hartshorne envisioned God not as a static, all-controlling being, but as a dynamic presence, in authentic relationship with a changing world.
In his theology, the pursuit of perfection is often a veiled desire to become God, to escape our creaturely limitations and ascend into control. But this, he warns, is a subtle perversion of faith. A form of idolatry. It’s to seek flawlessness not as a devotional act, but as a way of bypassing the need for trust, relationship and humility.
Hartshorne preserved God’s sovereignty and benevolence, but he was willing to relinquish classical attributes like omnipotence and omniscience. Not as a diminishment of the divine, but as an affirmation of relational power, a God who changes with us, grows with us, weeps and celebrates with us.
God’s perfection isn’t domination. It’s responsiveness. Not unchangeable power, but unceasing love.
In this light, the desire to be flawless isn’t a sign of spiritual maturity, but a kind of resistance to the very relationship God invites us into. It’s a refusal to let God be God, and to accept our sacred place within the dance of co-creation.
To seek growth through grace isn’t to lower the bar. It’s to finally get out of God’s way.
It’s everyone’s first time being alive
This message may be more urgent than ever. Because the truth is: It’s everyone’s first time being alive. Even the wise have never been this age before. We’re all improvising. The journey is hard enough without the added burden of pretending to have it all together.
We need grace, for ourselves and for one another.
In this light, pain isn’t proof of divine absence. It may be the very place where the sacred is most near. Like a seed cracking open in the dark, transformation often begins in the places we’d rather hide.
So here is a different kind of faith: not belief in a flawless world, but trust in a holy one. Not a life without scars, but a life in which scars shimmer with gold. In this theology of transformation, every detour, every collapse, every misstep becomes part of the sacred architecture of becoming.
We aren’t static creatures chasing an ideal. We’re living testaments to divine process—ever-growing, ever-unfolding. Maybe God’s greatest act isn’t creating a perfect world, but co-creating a beautiful one, with us and through us.
A world that breathes, bends, breaks and still heals.
In the cracks, we find connection. In the wounds, we encounter the sacred. And in this ever-becoming miracle of life, we aren’t simply drawing nearer to God. We’re moving with God.
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image 1: George Payne; image 2: Jesse Cornplanter
