Touching Wounds

Poor Thomas!

For over 2000 years, people like you and I have been hurling stones across the ages at the one often remembered for doubting. After the resurrection, it was Thomas who wanted to touch Jesus’ wounds. Although Thomas, like us all, represents our common struggle to believe and deep longing for certainty, he also illustrates one of the most important aspects of living spiritual lives: reaching out and touching another’s wounds.

Richard Rohr was the first writer to help me look at Thomas in this new light, and ever since I have thought about my life-long struggle to have a relationship with Christ. I mistakenly took the path of self-improvement that suggests a relationship is possible if you pull up your moral bootstraps and “get your act together.” I now know the sad dead-end of such a route and how such a life is just that, an act.

Thomas, and many others since, has shown a more excellent way. Grounded in our humanity, fully aware of all the ways we have messed up, we are invited to reach out and touch Christ’s wounds. Suddenly, or over time, we come to know one of the great mysteries of the life of faith: by his wounds we are healed. No, our past is not erased, but somehow transformed. Touching his wounds, we realize we’re not alone.

But the mystery does not stop there. We are then invited to reach out and touch the wounds of those around us, and let them touch ours. Suddenly our ordinary lives are transformed into sacred journeys. Just ask the woman who received an unexpected phone call after suffering a heartbreaking miscarriage from an acquaintance who had the same experience years ago. Just ask the man who enters an AA meeting for the first time only to hear from others about their first meeting. Just ask the child who is excluded from a sleepover only to go out for ice cream with her mother who shares when the same thing happened to her.

Yes, our wounds are painful, but they also possess the power to transform lives, ours as well as others. All we need is the courage of Thomas to know the power of touching wounds.