The wound that will never heal

Wounded. premasagar/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0

"Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. [...] The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love."

From "The Five Stages of Grief," developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler

With each unbelievable, dystopian turn of the world, I realize anew that I am grieving the country and the fellow citizens I once thought I knew. And as with all grief, my feelings are rarely linear or tidy or expected. The pain surfaces from something as brief as a click-bait headline or as in-depth as a book about systemic racism. Sometimes I want to throw a brick through a window; other times I want to curl up and weep; other times I want to vomit. But always, no matter my desired outlet, I return to the horrible conclusion that in the face of so much injustice, I am impotent.

I have been here before. In fact, I am here often. What makes it worse now is that since 2016 I have been awakening -- not just intellectually, but spiritually -- to the suffering, injustice, and casual cruelty baked into the very fabric of our government, our society, and our humanity. I will grieve more deeply for the rest of my life because my new tears carry acid. They flood the floor where I stand, burn away the boards, and drop me into a liminal space that reveals to me my previous ignorance, understandable but no less acceptable for being accidental or unrecognized.

I know now that I have marching orders. But are my steps too small, I wonder? Do I let apathy roadblock me more than I should? Just because we as a nation are well beyond the reach of "civility" (cue bricks/weeping/vomit), just because our collective sin is deep and wide and egregious, does not allow me to stay and flail in a morass of angry, despairing tar.

So what do I do instead? A year ago, Nature Boy and I went to see Anne Lamott speak about her book Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Given that the book appeared in the wake of the presidential election, much of the audience Q&A centered on the theme, "Good God, what now?" But I distinctly remember one woman around my age, visibly pregnant, coming to the microphone and asking, "I'm about to bring a child into this world. And now I'm wondering if that was the right thing to do."

I don't remember Lamott's exact response (sorry St. Anne), but as I sit here visibly pregnant myself, pondering the same guilt-ridden question, the answer I want to hear goes something like this:

The world has always been terrible.

The world has always been wonderful.

Still, babies come.

Because life brings with it hope. It gives us all a second chance -- and maybe a second or third or eighteenth -- to do better by the whole human race, to admit we aren't feeling brave but move forward anyway, to believe and trust that love really does win. That love must win.

As Rep. John Lewis reminded me today:

Time to get into good trouble -- the kind that heals our wounds from the inside out.


Prayer #320: To Live as an Open Wound*

To live the Gospel is to live as an open wound -- raw, gushing, muscle torn and bone exposed. No tourniquet can staunch it. No bandage can bind it. For faith is weapon and treatment both, a battle cry and lullaby, a charge and a destiny. The wound is Love; its cure, the same.

Amen.


* Yes, I'm repeating a prayer I wrote earlier this year. I just can't seem to shake the idea of "wound as metaphor."