Wounded and Resurrected
My new logo has the original bee I drew four years ago when I first changed my pen name to B. C. Clare, but now with a broken wing. This bee represents female leadership, my ADHD nature (ever working and moving), community, mundane miracles, and my affinity for smelling flowers. The broken wing adds the additional meaning of sacred woundedness—this is what I’d like to expound upon this Easter Sunday.
I thought of how the broken wing may come across to some, as if I’m playing the victim. How in a society of winners and losers, this symbolism looks weak and self-pitying. This is why I must write this piece, for my own processing of what this means (which, to be honest, is why I write anything), and for the permission this might give to others in embracing their sacred woundedness.
I first saw myself as broken when my parent’s divorced and became the child of a broken home. Then when I was physically and sexually abused, then when I was bullied, then when I was severely depressed with undiagnosed ADHD and Bipolar disorder. I got cracks tattooed on my back to symbolize cracked clay when I was 18. It spoke to how, according to Scripture, I am a jar of clay that holds the divine, but I am a cracked jar of clay. My spirit and body were broken. Yet I was still here and I stilled housed the divine in my body (2 Cor. 4:7-10).
I used to be the unassigned spokesperson for the Christian teaching that we are all unclean, wretched, and undone. As I say this, I empathize with all those who have been harmed by this teaching. It is in itself a very harmful teaching. The reason I would argue it is so effective is because it is the best kind of lie. The best lies are simply twisted truths.
The prophet Isaiah writes:
“We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind,
take us away.”
Isaiah is speaking of leprosy when he says “like one who is unclean,” and again when he refers to their “polluted garments”. Lepers were banished and cast out from their communities. At this time the Israelites were living in exile so Isaiah was making the apt comparison. Scarcely any one thing in all the levitical law takes up so much room as the observations around leprosy and the consequences of touching one who has it. Leprosy was both seen as a natural disease and sometimes a punishment of God1. There is even a story where lepers saved a city (2 Kings 7). Either way, leprosy ultimately represented that which people did not wish to see: pain and suffering, the most contagious affliction of all. 2
All have been touched by pain and suffering and death. We all are like lepers, “the unclean”, the scarred, and if you’re like me, you tend to banish the leper within you, out of sight to suffer alone. Perhaps you also have been banished by your tribe.
Today on Easter Sunday I’d like to reflect on the paradox of being both wounded and healed, clean and unclean, broken and whole. John 20 tells the story of Mary discovering Jesus’ empty tomb and how Jesus appears to her, and then later to his disciples. Twice it mentions his physical wounds, in his hands and in his side. The second time is when Jesus is proving to Thomas that he is real:
“Reach here thy finger and behold my hand, thrust it into my side.”
Richard Rohr remarks in The Universal Christ that this is a moment where Jesus holds the paradox of healing and woundedness, there in his resurrected, scarred body. I think that suffering, with all it’s pain, connects us; to each other, to our ancestors, to the Christ, to the Madonna, to our own souls. Jesus demonstrated in the biblical story, when he touched lepers and had his own wounds felt, that scars are to be touched. The pain of others is not to be turned away from.
Jesus cleans the leper, Mosaic detail, 12thC, © Cathedral of the Assumption, Monreale, Sicily
This essay is not to give a reason for suffering, or bypass the trauma and terror of great suffering, but reflect on it and how it has transformed me and many others before me. Much like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene, I did not want any of it, no matter what “good” may come of it. I was sick of asking for fish and being given scorpions. But, like Yeshua of Nazareth, it seemed I had no choice in the matter. I felt forsaken. No one chooses suffering, its something that happens to us, with or without our consent.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, wrote a story in his memoir Night that first opened my eyes to the transformative truth of suffering. He named this memory “God on the Gallows” where he recalls a young boy dying slowly:
““Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. ..
For more than half an hour [the child in the noose] stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“Where is God now?”
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .””
After years of wrestling with the question, “Why does God allow suffering?” I still have no answer. I don’t think there is an answer that could ever suffice. What I do know, from the God on the gallows and the wounded and resurrected Christ, is that suffering is written into the DNA of the divine, just as much as resurrection, springtime, healing, and light.
The broken wing is my spiritual limp, like Israel’s limp after wrestling with God; fighting for an answer, for a sufficient reason as to why I have suffered, why so many have suffered. We, as humanity, have never been so in touch with the suffering of others in this world through media and news and the internet, yet never so out of touch. When I was depressed, I felt I was Nero in The Matrix. I felt I could see what others shut their eyes to; I could hear the cries others shut their ears to. It overwhelmed me because I had no one to share my grief with. We prefer to banish the thoughts, change the channel, or rationalize them with free will and fallen world arguments (and I’ve done all of these things), but Jesus instead asked us to remember and embody the death and suffering of Christ—who is every human—every time we break bread or sip wine.
I am broken and wounded and I carry the deaths of many souls, and yet I am whole and healed and I testify to the life of many souls. I have mourned the loss of many Bryanna’s, and I have also basked in the glow of many Bry’s. My hope for my writing is that B. C. Clare holds enough space for both truths, without one diminishing the other.
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. ”
“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
Sometimes, like the tyrants who were “punished” with leprosy, our suffering can be a direct consequence of the abuses we’ve committed and the harm we’ve caused others. Accountability and the consequences of violence are painful.
It is a common misconception that lepers cannot feel anything, but, although they suffer nerve damage, they also suffer immense, chronic pain.