Healing Old Wounds
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
A few weeks ago, after I’d stumbled and banged my chin on the ground, I was startled to discover that the bruise highlighted a raised white scar on the bottom part of my chin. It’s nothing dramatic, only about a half an inch in length, and clearly the result of a cut of some sort. However, without any reason to contort my face to see it, I would have gone along happily unaware that such a thing existed. Noticing it, however, started me wondering about where it came from, what I had done and when that left this little mark on my chin.
I was reminded that my cousin Sam had a similar sort of scar on his chin, though it was much more noticeable. He got it when very young as he ran along the hall of the house toward the front door, and managed to put his head through the glass panel that was directly next to the doorframe. I have a vague memory of it – one that likely is shaped by the stories told about the incident – there was blood everywhere, and Sam was taken to hospital, a towel held firmly to his chin as he screamed in panic and pain. Until he died, he bore the mark of that day along his chin, a long raised scar, a line of white tracing the edge of his face.
Talking with Claire about scars one morning this week – our morning walks are sometimes a good time to ponder my coming sermon – I suggested that some scars do fade in time. I pointed to a little brown patch next to my thumb that is the remnant of a burn I inflicted upon myself in my teen years when making candy – divinity fudge, to be precise. I had a pan of superheated sugar syrup that I needed to pour into the fluffy beaten egg whites and managed to spill it onto my hand. As is the case with superheated candy syrup, it clung to my skin and gave me a rather severe burn. Now almost 40 years later, I can still see the outlines of it if I look carefully.
And, of course, each time I take off my shoes I see the four inch long scar along the right side of my left foot where the doctors stitched up my foot after repairing the bunion that has made my foot ache for years. Still at this moment angry red, the scar will fade away over time, just as the internal work heals slowly and I am less conscious of the repair, feel less discomfort, and move more freely.
This momentary fascination with scars – and wounds, truth be told – is part of a larger reflection that I’ve engaged since I learned from Lawrence Tuckman that our building bears its own scars. Often when I come in and look around this room – which happens more than you might imagine – I take extra time to look at and bless the coloured panes that appear seemingly randomly around the room. My eye is always drawn to the purple panes, and the patterns they suggest in the windows. These panes are the ones that were put in as replacements after the war. This building suffered little damage from the bombing, but it had its own bit, and these are the most visible scars it bears.
I am reminded about what endures even if it is changed, and what is able to last through the difficult times, through the times of terror and loss.
We all bear scars some visible, some hidden from sight until some new bump or bruise brings them to attention. What we do with them is the question.
In the novel Hunting Unicorns, Maggie is a television journalist who has been given the task of doing a segment for an American investigative show on the decline of the aristocracy in England. To get into the homes and lives of the various aristocrats, she uses an agency run by a fellow called Rory. The story winds and twists as novels do, and Maggie shares her mother’s categories – is it Scotch-tapable? Is there blood? – when she is reflecting upon her relationship. Her partner at that moment assures her that he doesn’t have any internal injuries that will cause him to die or leave her.
In the end, Maggie winds up falling for Rory, who, it turns out is the heir apparent for his family’s estate, his parents are crazy loveable alcoholics who live in a manor house that is falling down around their ears. His older brother died some years before after riding away from Rory’s on a bike while he was drunk. A run in with a car ended his life, and Rory is dragging around grief and anger that is still not wholly healed. As this their love story unfolds, Maggie keeps wondering if Rory is tapable or at minimum if those internal injuries are fatal or not. A happy ending does ensue, but not without the recognition that life sometimes leaves us battered around the edges. And sometimes there are those injuries that are deep and never quite heal all the way.
There’s something about those categories that I find entirely compelling: can you tape it up with sticky tape? If not, will a second layer help? Sometimes we do have to let go of the things that are broken beyond repair, release them from our grasp, though I’m likely to give superglue a go, maybe even some duct tape, the magic fix it up substance of our age.
As a mother, I also like that second category: is there blood? If there isn’t blood, it may all be all right. It’s a good initial rule of thumb at least.
I think especially, though, I resonate with Maggie’s profound terror at discovering that the dog that was hit in the street could die without showing a bit of blood. That there are sometimes internal injuries that are so severe that we cannot recover from them, injuries that are unseen, unnoticeable that are borne within.
Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet leads us there, too. In his dream of wildpeace, he comments:
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Amichai, who died in 2000, speaks to the ongoing struggle between the Palestinians and Israelis, a battle that goes on, and deepens, wounds and scars that cannot seem to be healed.
I must pause and comment here just a little more. Perhaps like you, I’ve watched that conflict with grief in my heart, and have been pleased that it is possible to contribute to humanitarian support of Gaza through the General Assembly website. Indeed, several of our sister congregations have taken special collections to provide some relief to those who are trapped in Gaza without the necessities of life, left without adequate food and water, surely without safety.
A woman I know on Facebook – a social networking website that I frequent – has a little application that pops a message up on her page that tells us each time Hamas sends missiles into Israel, and I cringe, knowing that the response from the Israelis will be forceful, and will probably be more deadly. The words of an Israeli woman who bemoans that she and her children must be ever vigilant, and that they never can truly experience the Sabbath, that their lives are under threat every moment from the bombs lobbed across the border. And the moans of Palestinian parents as they mourn their dead child ring in my ears, too.
‘A rest for the wounds,’ says the poet, and it seems to be the way of the world there, and in so many other places around the world, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka. The wounds of the world which cannot be fixed by tape, no matter how strong, cannot be thrown away, but which seem to endure, the race ever run, the baton handed on and on and on.
Wounds and scars across the face of the earth, and often in our lives as well. The purple glass in this room puts me in mind of them, the scars and wounds that we see, and those that go on hidden.
This is not the only or last word, though. This isn’t all there is, else we might be tempted – even compelled – to step off the cliff into the sea. This isn’t all there is. Mary Oliver is right to ask, ‘if the world was only pain and logic, who would want it?’ The scars and the wounds that we each suffer, that we all suffer, the pain of the world is not the last word. What can be done with it all is the last word.
Those wounds we get change us forever without doubt. The scars are reminders of what has been, of what has happened. But what we can take from those bangs and bruises, those deep cuts, those howls of the orphans no matter where they live, is a deeper dedication to what we know is true: that we are joined one to another by blood and tears. We are one human family, strong and weak, found and lost, mostly broken and sometimes whole. That those scarred places ache when they are bumped, and this can enliven within us compassion, for those who suffer still, for ourselves. Those places where we have been fundamentally changed, where the angry red scar is still raised, can give us the energy to make the needed change, to offer the cooling salve, to seek for the balm that will still the waters.
I come to this room, more often than you might think, and look at these windows, clear and purple and light green. And I bless those panes, each and every one. Those that were strong enough – and lucky enough – to survive the bombing that ripped through lives in this place. I bless the scars, too, for the power they can elicit, for the promise of healing that they suggest, even if we are changed. Those panes do make this room more beautiful, in sun or in shadow. The wounds will ever be there, the scars will ever be there. But they are not the final word.
Like the poet, in the presence of these scars, these truths about how the world is, with him I hold out that possibility for respite, for beauty to emerge, for the longing of our hearts, the longing of the earth to burst forth in bloom. Let it come, says the poet,
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.