By Rev. Heather Blackstone
A cut, intentional or not, healing or hurting, is how it begins.
Blood rushes to the site to begin cleaning, to start the clotting process. Within a few minutes, cells arrive. The wound heats up, pain increases, the skin turns red — you wouldn’t know it, but repair has begun. A few days later tissue begins closing the wound. Deeper structures begin to form, the skin gets stronger. If the cut is deep or severe, a scar is left behind.
I love asking people to tell me their favorite scar story, as it usually leads to memories of learning to ride a bike, standing up to a bully, something that had to be removed, an answer to prayer, the birth of a child. Sometimes these stories are painful, but more often they serve as points of pride, a proclamation of one’s own strength, “I am strong” written in nature’s jagged cursive.
When they tell the story, they can sound tough even though most of us in the moment were anything but. The breaking of skin is wrong; it isn’t supposed to happen but sometimes it does, sometimes it has to. The blood proves this disruption and we become fearful, we may become woozy, combative even. Because bleeding needs to be stopped, we forget that it is also the beginning of healing.
I think we as a country are bleeding right now. Illness that isolates, systemic racism, an environment struggling to stay alive, politics that divide, religion that abuses and a million other issues where the desire to have compassion has been replaced with the need to be right.
Every time an issue pokes through, we bleed a bit more. It’s getting dangerous. We either play tough and pretend it doesn’t bother us, or we panic because we know these responses, these things we are dealing with, are signs that everything is wrong, our body has been badly broken. We are bleeding because of things that needed to be removed and things that were ripped from us.
A lot has happened that shouldn’t have, this year has been filled with things that should never have happened. We have a choice: We can let ourselves keep bleeding, but we know how that will end. Or we can see these things as the beginning. If we are careful with ourselves and our community, recognizing and respecting that we have all been hurt, these wounds will heal, binding us, connecting us. These wounds could be our scar, something we point to as part of a story that we tell about healing, a story that tells the world we were tough, we were brave.
Blackstone is director of youth ministries St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church.
