During last Sunday evening’s Taizé service, one of the prayers included the following petition: “O Lord, deepen my wounds into wisdom.”1 That image swept through me as if coming from beyond time and from deep within the present moment. All words from God do that.
The solemn observances of Holy Week and the great
celebrations of the Easter season invite us to acknowledge the wounds we carry
within us, and feel all around us in the creation. Wisdom is the gift of
acknowledging that all wounds are, in truth, symptoms of the one Wound – Humankind’s
long-storied and selfish idolatries.
Whether
a person “believes in God” or not, there are myriad ways of attempting to set
ourselves apart from and above others. And when I allow myself to be convinced
that I am more valuable than others, there may be no length to which I will not
go to ignore or despise them. Because they do not matter, their pain meanings
nothing to me. There is only my pain,
or anger, or grief.
Good
Friday reveals the pain of far more than one person. Remember the stories
surrounding Jesus’ life as an intenerate teacher, his agony in Gethsemane, his
trial before Pilate, his walk to Golgotha, his time on the cross. Where is
there not pain, anger, or grief along
that journey? For him and for everyone who loves him, and everyone who does
not? It is everywhere. The birth, life, death, resurrection, and continual
return of Jesus is all one eternal movement, and it is all about revealing the Kingdom
of God through the experience of the divine/human wound called Life.
To pray for the deepening of wounds for the sake of wisdom
is to ask God to help us to see and to empathize with all suffering. As
Frederick Buechner said: “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for
feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge
that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace
and joy finally for you too.”2 That is the wisdom of true, and
healthy, and faithful humanity.
Good
Friday is God’s way of deepening wounds into wisdom. It is God’s way of saying,
“I feel your pain. Deeply. To the core of my own being.”
Easter
is God’s way of saying, “Wise up. Suffering will not have the last word.”
Peace,
Allen
1Ted Loder, “Gather Me to Be with You,” Guerillas of
Grace: Prayers for the Battle, Augsburg Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN.
1981, pp. 76-77.
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