Healing and Hope Session: Part 2

Session 2; Talk 2:
Wounds as Openings of Resilience and Grace
Paul Ruff, MA, Licensed Psychologist

Talk Outline

In Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem, he sings: Ring the bell that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, (your own perfection), everything has cracks in it/ that’s how the Light gets in.

This calls to mind how God’s grace enters that first wound, the one which affects us all, the fault-line of original sin in our humanity, “O happy fault that merited such and so great a Savior” from the Exultet each Easter Vigil, the vigil of the resurrection, the transformation from the suffering of the passion.

My comments that follow are put in terms of my faith. However, I could restate them all in terms of the findings of secular psychology. Our “natural process” of healing, I believe, contains this same fingerprints of the hand of the Creator.

In exploring wounds as occasions of grace, I do not mean in any way to gloss over them. In fact just the opposite. I want us to reflect on how to bravely, deeply enter them and to allow them to be places of deep encounter with the one who heals, and with those he providentially puts in our path. “Getting over it” is not the goal. Neither is getting back to baseline function. Being transformed in the process of healing is the deeper invitation. To do this we need to let the light shine into and through those cracks in our humanity. Investigations in the field of positive psychology—the psychology that studies health and resilience rather than pathology—have revealed to us that post-traumatic growth is even more common than is post-traumatic stress disorder.

In my over thirty-five years as a psychologist, I have witnessed the effects of the whole multitude of human wounds and certainly had to deal with my own. However, more compelling to me is the miracle of healing. Healing always wants to happen. Grace always wants to find its way in, even though in our injury and understandable fear from being hurt, it can be difficult to let it in.  The seeds of our desire for healing and wholeness, our resilience, corresponds to the action of grace in our healing.

The process deserves to be slow and prudent.  We need to respect our cautiousness in even risking hope.  And we need to trust in a process that is not on a timetable.  A colleague once told me that her response, when asked how long the process of healing would take, was, “Longer than you wish it would, but not as long as you are afraid it’s going to be.”  That answer seems to me to be almost always true and acceptable.  It allows for both our caution and patience but keeps the door open to our hope.

When someone comes in for their first appointment and is relating to me about their concerns and brokenness, I have learned to inquire: “I want to know all about that.  But, could you please also tell me about the part of you that set up this appointment, that got you here today—the part that bravely desires to hope and to heal?” That part is quite worthy of our attention as well—it contains the seeds, the desire of wholeness.

So, to you attending this retreat, I ask, “Tell me about that part of you that hopes for and desires healing.  That is quite a brave part of you.  It contains your resilience and your desire.”  It deserves your respect and your attention.

Wounds can dominate our attention and even try to claim our identity.  They take on undue proportion when we believe the lies that they are:

A) Permanent – “this can never heal; it will always be thus”; It is true that what happened to me will never “not have happened.” However it is false that its effects will always be unhealed. The mark of the wound may be visible—like scar tissue or the increased calcification around a broken bone—but these are actually marks of healing and resilience.

B) Pervasive – “this affects every aspect of my life; nothing can be good again”; It is true that unhealed wounds tend to color and distort our vision in life. Wounds tend to lead us to shrink our vision and constrict our hearts to protect them. However, we can learn to open our hearts again to see even more deeply, with added dimension, the beauty and possibility around us. The larger part of who you are is not your wound. Most of what the world is, is not what wounded you.

C) Personal – “this wound defines me; it becomes my identity; I have lost my possibility”; It is never true that your wound defines you. Frequently it is true that your wound was “not about you.” It was about someone else’s brokenness. Or about your own confusion at a certain point in life. However, they do not define you—they are a comma, not the period at the end of the sentence. The story of you continues to unfold.

We need to move from this to seeing wounds with the vision of:

A) Perspective – “this is difficult and painful, but will eventually be healed. I have healed in the past, as have others. Like a healed broken bone, my healing from these wounds can lead me to be eventually stronger in places now broken. Even in my wounded state, grace is active in me and my corresponding hope and resilience can be made visible.”

B) Providence – “God never wishes for me to be wounded, but it is inevitable since I am a beautifully vulnerable creature in a broken world and with human freedom. However, God will take all of our wounds up into his providence. His grace cannot resist entering our wounds when we are ready to permit this. He can draw unexpected good through these dark and painful experiences. God’s grace and provision can include all that has happened to me.”

C) Purpose – “God’s plan for me is not ended or even really interrupted, by my wound. If I allow Him, He does not even have to wait for me to heal. Even in my wounded state––and at times especially in my wounded state––He can bring grace and draw good through me for myself and others. In fact in staying awake to a sense of purpose, I am better aligned to allow my own healing as He wills it.”

Christ was resurrected with his wounds still visible. This is important, because God could certainly have perfectly closed and healed them. However, rather than healing, He chose to transform them. These wounds had now become places of power and grace rather than weakness and pain. The light of his grace pours out of them. They offer us shelter and protection. In his healed wounds, wounds He had allowed Himself to suffer for us, He brings us grace and the hope of new possibilities. He shows us that the wound is never the last word. I would like to offer a prayer in closing:

Dear Lord, even in your resurrected state you carried in your body the wounds of human vulnerability. Yet in you those wounds were transformed as potent places of grace and power. Hide me in your wounds as I heal. Help me to allow you to enter my wounds, wounds you did not desire, wounds that sadden your Sacred Heart. Help me to allow them to be transformed into places of your healing power. Even in the midst of my suffering, help me to trust that at every moment you are seeking me, that you are loving me, and that, if I allow it, you wish to work good for me and through me. Amen