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to live with our wounds

4 Comments

Our daughters have been dead for longer than they have been alive.

This is a terrible sentence. It is also our new life.

Every day I live in the space in between.

I swing between extremes, a dizzying pendulum from possibility to reality. What I thought my life would look like – and what it is now. What the world expects of me as a normal adult – and what I feel as I try to function. How many children I have carried – and how many I tuck into bed at night.

I look back over the past six months, and I see each shade of grief bleeding into the next. Watercolors from where we were to where we are. Only when I look from the beginning – painful dark, unbearable to behold – all the way to the softer, open present do I see the sea change.

Grief’s hues lighten as time passes, but they also deepen. This permanent stain is now the color of my life.

For months I told friends it felt like my molecules had been rearranged. The metaphor made sense to me even if it made sense to no one else.

I had turned into a different person. When people expected the same me they once knew (maybe sadder, maybe more wistful, certainly they’d grant me that – but still the essential same) I felt like a farce. I could no longer be who I was, no matter what they wanted. I had become something new.

And it was because of my wounds, not in spite of them.

For months I have thought about this Gospel moment: the risen Christ meeting the wondering Thomas, showing his wounds as proof of his love, which is himself.

I never knew the importance of the wounds. Scars were not what he showed. There was still blood. You could see inside.

Do we see this startling truth, what it means? We are our wounds. And we are also our rising from them.

This is not healing or closure – far from it. His wounds were never healed. They remained. Proof of his life and his love. Work of human hands, gift of God’s mercy.

Wounds are not unblemished perfection. They are not miraculous healing. Both of these could have been proof of divine power, but that is not the point. Love is.

And anyone who has ever loved knows the wounds.

Wounds offer the only compassion that is true: I suffer with you. You are never alone. Reach out your hand. I am there.

. . .

If we know life is earthly and we believe life is eternal, then we are caught in between. Both/and. Already/not yet. Holding these two impossible, incompatible truths together – we live and we die; we are here, we go there – opens up a new place of tensions. The charge between changes, the spark between synapses, the silence before speech, the dawn before creation.

Here is what happens when you live in between.

Your view widens. You are here and there, stretching and staying.

You learn to move with greater agility. You bend instead of snap. You flex and hold rather than resist or recoil.

Your love becomes supple, its jagged edges smoothed by the crashing of waves and sand, the shifting place where water meets earth.

Your wounds do not scar. The moment when light and air meet flesh and blood keeps the wounds soft and open. This hurts even as they heal. But it keeps them from becoming hardened and hidden. They remain the proof of what makes you human and how your life has been shaped by who you love.

When people say “it gets better” or “it gets easier,” this is what they mean. But whenever we try to fold death into life or insert eternal into earthly, our language breaks apart. Words are too thin and brittle for the weight of such forces.

But if you can stay softened by sorrow and humbled by hurt, if you let the breath of time keep your wounds open enough to let another see inside, then you can glimpse God at work in ways you did not know before.

Truth is no longer black and white, but beyond binary – breath-taking in the light it shines upon thousands of facets.

And seeing the sides you never knew existed, watching light glide into corners and pulse with presence you never noticed, you start to see what grace and glory look like.

Golden goodness and richest warmth, savory and sweet and constant as nothing on this earth can be – except of course our longing. The yearning that convinces us (after we wrestle again to the hard ground our gnawing fear of nothing, the icy shiver that here and now might be the only ultimate, everything empty when it ends) that no – no, we were made for more. Every glimpse of beauty and taste of goodness and proof of kindness hums with this promise of more, so much more.

Beyond logic is love. Every time someone tries to explain away the death of my daughters – everything happens for a reason, God has a plan, you can try again – I realize how utterly we fail when we fear to live in the in-between.

Because to live in the tension is to live with the wounds. Christ called it the holiest place of all.

. . .

Every day for six months I have remembered this: I am my own worst nightmare. I am my own best hope.

I am a mother who has held two babies as they died in my arms. I am a mother who has carried home three healthy children.

Depending on the day or the hour, my life fills me with hope or despair, drawing deeply from the reservoir of my own story. It is what I have, always an inch below the surface.

Others try to comfort, assure, distract, advise, or encourage. The ones I love the most are the ones unwilling to pronounce any certainty over my uncertainty. The few and faithful friends willing to stay with me in the grey unknown, the liminal half-light between night and dawn.

In the in-between place, I can hold out my hands and show them my wounds. They know they cannot explain, hide or fix them. They surround me in love and it is enough.

I know now that the worst is as real a possibility as the best. I understand that never has a life emerged from earthly existence unscathed.

But I believe this is the fullness of humanity, what Christ took on and took to himself in love, what he showed when he stretched out wounded hands. Everything was there; he held it all; he never gave it up, let it scar or disappear; he offered it again, still today he offers it in love, he holds out hands that are wounds wanting us with him, all of us with him.

This is what wounds do: break us open. I am never so close to God as when I embrace this whole.

how to live with our wounds

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Comments

  1. jenni ho-huan says

    29 August 2016 at 9:01 pm

    this in-between space is so hard some days. yet it does seem to shimmer too with a sublimity. O how inadequate the words- and for us who find comfort and sense in words..perhaps we are chased into the Silence and there our hearts hush for a while and we hear that we are still alive and well. HUGS my dear all the way from Singapore.

    Reply
  2. Abbey says

    5 October 2016 at 5:24 pm

    This is excellent. I am almost three years into my wound of the loss of my son. You articulated what I cannot.

    Reply
  3. Tracey Kelly says

    18 October 2016 at 5:17 am

    Your “molecules Have Been rearranged” …and you are no longer who you were.. nor who you will be.today or tomorrow. And each new wound and each new joy embraced and share with Our Lord and Our Lady transforms us into what we will ultimately be…with Him.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. it is (not) finished - Mothering Spirit says:
    13 July 2018 at 6:04 am

    […] But now I see how stretching out his fingers might be the holiest moment of faith. To enter fully into love’s woundedness and find it transformed. […]

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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