Glory of the Wounds
by Daniel O’Leary

(A priest of the Leeds diocese at Our Lady of Graces presbytery, Tonbridge Crescent, Kinsley, Pontefract, West
Yorkshire WF95HA)

I received Selena into the Church 12 years ago. When Selena was a small girl she loved to wear her grandmother's shoes. One day she fell and cut her leg above the knee. The wound needed some stitches. It healed in its own time. Selena is now 23. We met again recently. We talked about that moment in her young life. She said she still had the scar. Instead of disappearing, it grew as she grew, becoming more special as she herself became more special. She showed it to me, with some pride. It was now a valued part of her. It seemed to define who she was - the symbol of her uniqueness. It was, indeed, aperfect scar.

There has always been ambiguity and mystery around the wound, the flaw, the weakness. Thomas Aquinas describes our darkest areas as necessary for the full appreciation of God's light. We live in this paradox of dark and light, of fragment and wholeness, and no one can be sure of the outcome. "Life breaks all of us," wrote Hemingway, "but some people grow at the broken places."

We speak about the flaw in the oyster as the birthplace of the pearl; about the wound in the soul where the flawed genius or the wounded healer is born; about the ubiquitous shadow wherein evil lurks or where an astonishing transcendence takes place. The battle of opposites may be waged in public or in the secret recesses of each human heart. The greater the gift, the greater the flaw and, therefore, the greater the intensity of the deadly duel. We can trace the pathos of this strange encounter in the victories and tragedies of those we knew - in the final grit and faith of a John Paul II, or in the fatal self destruction of geniuses such as George Best or Elvis Presley.

There is something about the phenomenon of weakness and shadow that is' almost sacred. The primitive people had the highest reverence for the mystery of the wound, of the missing piece. Can God be God, they asked, where everything is finished, complete, and perfect? Hence the tradition of the inserting, of the etching, painting or stitching in, of a deliberate, disfiguring flaw, in early Amerindian, Celtic and Japanese art.

In Grace and Necessity, Archbishop Rowan Williams writes: "Jacques Maritain speaks of finite beauty, or finishedness in the work, being always incomplete at some level, 'limping', like Jacob, with the encounter with what cannot be named; achieved art always has that kind of imperfection through which infinity wounds the finite."

When it comes to our own raw need for help during our moments of quiet desperation, we do not always turn to the local paragon of virtue. We seek someone who has been lost too, but not completely; someone acquainted with failure, but who keeps trying. We ask for someone who has fallen often, but who refuses to stay down. Is it not true, more often than not, that we trust people more for their vulnerability than for their virtue? Are some people too strong for us, too perfect, to understand us? We never feel judged by those who have befriended their own darkness. Is it not said that sinners are drawn more by the brokenness of the recovering alcoholic priest than by the squeaky cleanliness of a professional cleric?

In his very first homily Benedict XVI said: The Pope must be conscious of being a frail and weak man, since his strength is frail and weak, constantly needing purification and conversion.” He was well aware that it was his powerlessness that was his strength; without his awareness of that essential flaw, his reign would be of little value. He would be too strong for the rest of us. He would have nothing in common with those he served. He could never pray with St Pau l- he with his thorn of the flesh - "when I'm weak then I'm strong". It is his flawed nature that empowers him through grace. "He is breaking me down into his own oblivion," wrote D.H. Lawrence, "to send me forth on a new morning, a new man."

How important it is for us, then, to be faithful to the via negativa; to remain silent and humble before the mystery of God. And how dangerous it is to be too arrogantly certain about "God's will", as though we knew the Creator's mind. There is a deceiving darkness that will for ever confound and confuse us. God's ways are most certainly not ours. Divine light, when incarnated, so often emerges as darkness; and God's perfection, when enfleshed, is found only in fragility! Even in heaven that same frail human body of Christ still shines with raw wounds. The flaw too is glorified.

Nowhere is the central place of a flawed moment celebrated more than during the rituals of the Easter Triduum. Immediately after mourning the awful death of Jesus on the Good Friday hill, we praise the very reason for this destruction of innocence. Within hours we are exulting in an Exultet that proclaims the divine necessity of humanity's first flaw - 0 fe/a culpa; 0 necessarium Adae peccatum. Our peak liturgical moment sings of a sin. St Thomas Aquinas believed that "if all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the. universe".

On Holy Saturday, when this crucified Jesus descended into Hell, he consecrated the roots of our flaws from the inside, making them, forever, the possible sources of his newly risen life. Is not that why St Paul assures us that even our worst sins can paradoxically reveal a graced awakening? How often we misread those epiphanies of opportunity, those near occasions of grace!

]A few years ago I slipped into Trinity College, Dublin, to watch a rare performance of J.M. Synge's first and briefest play When the Moon Sets. A young nun, allowed home for a funeral, falls in love with her distant cousin. She spends days and nights in desperate prayer for guidance. "May God forgive me," she finally whispers to the young man, "I will stay with you." He replies: "Why do people ask for God's forgiveness for the most divine things they ever do?"

There was a Russian Orthodox parishioner who, every chance she got, would bend Metropolitan Anthony's ear about her progress in sanctity, her accumulation of virtues and her eradication of vices. On his annual Easter visit, she collared him again. "I have all the virtues now, Bishop," she triumphantly blurted out, "and only one vice left." Metropolitan Anthony paused for a moment. He looked at her carefully. "For God's sake, woman," he earnestly whispered, "hang on to that vice."

@The Tablet (February 18, 2006) http://www.thetablet.co.uk
Reprinted with permission.