The Enduring Testimony of Woundedness

“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

— ROSE KENNEDY (1890–1995)

There is the sanctity in the experience of pain and that truth bears itself enduringly through the passage of our lives. If we would be capable of love – and, when we are the best of ourselves, we are capable of little else – we would also be capable of much grief when love goes wrong. To love is to risk, simply because to love is to lose.

We become wounded when the entities we love get damaged.

When the people we love, and the things we love, and we ourselves, get damaged, or don’t realise their expected potential, we are aggrieved. And once we are aggrieved and the memory is recorded in our minds how are we to see things differently other than to accept them – that, they did once occur?

There is a rightness about the fact that we cannot completely remove the mark of loss. We somehow know that time seems to help with our adjustment, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that with time we give our minds sufficient opportunity to accept what happened and our new reality, and to cover the pain so it’s bearable.

If we were to take a fresh excavation into the pain we might find that the pain we experience has been transformed into something of a memorial – kind of a reflective fondness exists in that pain. We somehow miss that part of ourselves that is perhaps gone. We therefore cannot help but reminisce, and such things evoke the spirit of wonder. But let us not fool ourselves. There is pain there, alright.

Such a journey into the losses of the past, and the experience of a safe grief, give us confidence that God is intrinsically part of the healing process.

We have been made better for our experiences of pain. We endured the pain the best we could and God made for us a sweet legacy that we could not have imagined earlier.

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Loss has a precious sanctity about it that decrees we loved what we lost and it can never, ever be made unimportant. The keenest of wounds are the treasures of reminiscence – they can never be erased.

Wounds have about them the media of grief, and through grief we grow, and through growth we mature. We become better people for the losses we grieve in authenticity.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.