The show opened with John picking up the old lighter and turning it over in his hand. There was a quiver in his lip. It was glinting as it caught the light, and the freshly burnished brass case was smooth and soothing to the touch. He paused a moment, then flipped it open in one easy move. It had been a long time since it could do that. Dragging on the flint a spark leapt onto the wick and from a little flame flickered a warm orange glow. To those looking on, the tear rolling down his cheek told them that there was more going on here than just a little trinket getting a new lease on life after being worked on by a restoration specialist. This little treasure, lost for so long and weathered by the hand of time, was all that he had left to remember his grandfather by – this memento that had travelled as his grandfather’s pocket companion. He remembered sitting at his feet listening to old stories, watching as he rolled it over and flipped the lid back and forth. And here it was – made new by the hand of a skilled craftsman – restored to what it once was, working as it should. And the world just felt right again for that little moment.
There is something about the idea and process of restoration that intrigues us and draws us in. From stories of car restorations – remember the show Wheeler Dealers? – and house renovations and rebuilds, to something as simple as the satisfaction of sharpening a knife so that it slices with ease – we love to see things restored to the way they should be. Maybe as you read that you can recall episodes from shows like Fixer Upper, Homes Under the Hammer, and a firm favourite: The Repair Shop.
There’s nothing like a good old fixer-upper.
Have you ever wondered why we’re so drawn to seeing things restored, and why we get such satisfaction out of it? Like the little story above, it’s often not just the act of something being restored that moves us, but what that restoration means; the bigger story that it connects to.
A few years ago, I bought an old dual sport motorbike as a restoration project – something to keep me busy through Covid lockdown. The engine had some broken cogs, the clutch was slipping, and all round it just looked very tired with all its dents, rips and scratches. With the help of a few YouTube videos, some knowledgeable friends, and a reupholstery professional, over a few months it was restored to its’ former glory… well just about. It’s hard to articulate the joy and satisfaction that I felt at the end when we wheeled it out and compared what it was before – a rusty old wreck – to what now stood before us, something quite pleasant. But more than just looking good, it was restored to proper function. It could do what it was made to do – it carried me over many mountains with friends as we set off adventuring.
We are wired to want to see things in their right state, carrying out their proper function, and when something isn’t in that state it’s jarring. It just doesn’t sit well with us. Think of the simple example of the blunt knife. The function, or the ‘end goal’ of a knife is to be able to efficiently cut something. And when it can’t do that – when that end goal is frustrated – because of the knife being blunt, well, then it seems that the proper order of things is out of balance. And there are few things more frustrating than fishing a knife out of the drawer only to find that it can barely handle a tussle with a tomato.
This is something that the great philosophers of old spent quite a bit of time thinking about. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD), for example, building off the thought of the ancient philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), explained how everything has a telos –a natural end or purpose. Things have an ultimate goal, function, or end toward which they should move. So, the telos of the knife, its purpose, is to be able to cut things. And when it can’t do this properly, we know that something has gone wrong – it’s not able to live out its function in the proper sense – and something needs to happen to bring it back into alignment with its purpose to be a ‘good’ knife again. And, in the case of the knife, this means having someone with some skill sharpen it. Or think of an apple tree. Its telos – natural end or goal by virtue of what it is – is to grow, produce fruit, provide shade and shelter for birds. This is a good apple tree functioning as it should. But when the tree is sick and loses its leaves, is stunted, and bears no fruit – we know that something is wrong! We don’t just shrug and say “oh, that’s just a different type of apple tree doing something different. Each to his own”. Our inclination is to remedy what has gone wrong and to restore the tree to health – to its proper function and purpose. According to Aristotle and Aquinas, everything has an ultimate purpose based on what it is by its nature – the type of thing that it is – whether it is a lighter, a knife, a tree, or a human being.
Have you ever wondered what your telos is? Ever wondered what the ultimate goal or purpose of humankind is? On the one hand, if all we are is the product of blind, physical processes and nothing more, evolving by chance in response to the external environmental pressures we face, then there is no ultimate telos other than passing on our genetic material – and there’s no ultimate purpose or goal toward which we should strive – everything just is. But, if that really is the case, then we lose any grounding for thinking there’s a way humans should be – especially in terms of human actions in the world. We lose any justification for looking around and being appalled when we seeing someone doing something they shouldn’t. We lose any real objective reference point for looking at those in poverty and thinking that this isn’t the way things should be. The cost of that ideology – atheistic materialism – is just too high, and is frankly unliveable. Those very intuitions, I think, are a pointer to the fact that there is indeed more to us than meets the eye – we’re more than just the physical stuff we’re made of, because we are designed to be a certain way. But as that intuition creeps even closer – we know something is wrong with us, and we long to be restored ourselves.
However, just like the sick apple tree, we look at humanity and know that something has gone wrong. A simple glance at the world around us, and an honest wrestling with our own lives, reveals that the grand vision of what we think we should be as humanity seems out of reach. But what can we do? Can we dig ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in? Some have said we can, but, if we’re honest, how’s that going? Years of technological development, scientific advance, better policies and new laws… yet things are still such a mess. It appears that we are compromised and broken at the core, and we need something outside of us to fix us – to restore us to the way that we’re supposed to be to achieve the better end we feel we should attain.
So why are we so drawn to restoration? Interestingly, this is a theme that is at the core of the Christian faith, and runs right through the Bible from beginning to end. The last book of the Bible, Revelation, may just as well have been called ‘Restoration’ as it describes a time when God will come to make all things new. Christianity speaks to our innate yearning for restoration on two fronts: the first is that God is all about restoration. The opening chapters of the Bible give us a grand story of God’s creative action, making a world that is good and functioning as it should, but then, just a few chapters on, that good creation gets broken – and the remainder of the Bible is the great story of God’s plan to restore it all. The second is that we are made in God’s image – that is, we reflect something of what God is like – and thus we resonate with having a disposition toward seeing restoration brought to what is broken, if not seeking to be the agents of that restoration ourselves. On these two fronts we find ourselves swept up in a story much bigger than ourselves, a story that gives us a better map of meaning as we try to navigate our way through this world and find our place in it. But there is another aspect that the Christian faith speaks to, perhaps more tangible to us than the former two even. That is the fact that we are broken, and in desperate need of being restored to the way we should be – to being brought back in line with our telos, our right way of existing.
But what is that end? What is our ultimate purpose? And how do we get there? In short, and following Aquinas again, the end goal of humankind is to live in union with its creator. That is our ultimate end and the only way to true fulfilment and satisfaction. The reason we resonate with restoration in all its different forms is because our maker and designer is a God of restoration, who stepped into the mess of our lives and find us. And as we reach out to God, we find ourselves in the hands of the Divine Craftsman who is able to restore us beyond anything we could ever hope or imagine, and that restoration connects us to a much bigger story. We may look at ourselves and not see much – but God sees past the rust and cracks, the guilt, shame, and hopeless wondering, and invites us to come and be made new.
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