"Lent and Our Wounded Places" by Heidi Grogan
Lent is the time in the Christian calendar when I feel most authentic and real. I want to enter into the narrative of Jesus’ life and death, and the place I most readily recognize him is in suffering. Oh, I can definitely imagine attending to Julian of Norwich during her visions of Christ’s crucified body. Julian, who prayed for experiences of his passion and understood at a visceral level that “all shall be well.” This confidence, while smells of neighbours’ burning flesh—neighbours lost to the plague—permeated her anchorite’s cell.
But even in 2014, here in suburban Calgary Alberta, I identify with Jesus’ wounded body. I feel Jesus meeting me on the road and hear his invitation to “look” at his hands and feet. I see him pull his shirt up, hear him say “touch me and see.” And then, he checks my scars, reading my story on my body (the protective posture learned in childhood, an unproductive uterus, evidence of mastectomies), touching and transforming me with attentive love. Love coming to be present to me at the site of my wounds.
A counselor’s good advice recently given, suggested that when we have not yet attended to the trauma we’ve experienced, we walk as if there are nails in our soles. We walk on our feet’s edges, avoiding pain, and this eventually cripples our knees, our hips, and impairs our gait. To heal, the nails must come out. It hurts badly. I imagine it as a John Wayne movie scene—a stick between my teeth and a friend pouring whisky down my throat during a primitive surgery. No doubt people decide that walking on edges is preferable. But for those who stay present to the pain of healing, the hope is that one day we will dance lightly. Hike to places we never thought we could go. Meet Jesus on the road and compare scars.
Jesus’ broken body is offered to us for our healing. It is the lens for me to experience resurrection both personally and for people around me today, right now: boys and girls starving under the cruel orders of anorexia; women I love who are damaged from years in the sex trade and who as girls, were badly sexually exploited. Jesus is clear in Matthew 25 that he more than identifies—he says “This is me.” He is hurt and he is hungry. And like Julian of Norwich, I want to draw near to him. I inhale deeply the despair of dark days, embracing bodies broken. When I choose to see the hurting of our world, and my own story too, through the lens of Jesus’ broken body, hope of transformation comes into focus.
--Heidi Grogan works with Servants Anonymous Society, an agency supporting sexually exploited women. She earned her MCS in Spiritual Theology from Regent College and is an adjunct instructor at Ambrose University College, teaching on the spiritual mystics and social justice. She and her family live in Calgary at the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. Her article, "This Is My Body," appears in Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (Feb/Mar/April 2014).
Art credit: Le Breton, Jacques; Gaudin, Jean. "Jesus Carrying the Cross, Speaking to a Woman" from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Original source: Collection of Anne Richardson Womack.
Lent - March 2014
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Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.-—Psalm 51:10-12, NIV
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