Day 7 - What do we do with our scars?

I wonder what scars you have and what stories they tell? I have a scar on my palm from childhood where I fell over some rocks in the garden. I also have a large red scar above my heart from where I had a pacemaker fitted in October last year after a diagnosis of heart failure. Our wounds are intimate things. We tend to conceal them with clothing or cosmetics. We want to look like life hasn’t knocked us in anyway. Then of course there are the invisible scars we bear from past hurts. We try not to draw attention to those.

John Hoyland in his later years had heart surgery and the wriggly line of his scar turns up in many of his paintings. Here it is in bold red. Hoyland paints on a huge scale. The painting mentioned here stretches from the gallery floor to the ceiling, but the line of the scar is only part of the composition and not the whole. If you didn’t know about the artist’s background and I asked you what the colours and the shapes remind you of you might reply ‘fireworks’ or ‘a photograph taken by a deep-space probe’. Indeed, Hoyland liked to include suns and celestial bodies in his work. He places his scar, a sign of his mortality in the context of something far, far bigger and life giving. This is how he survives and lives. The painting isn’t gloomy but bursts with energy and brightness.

Jesus doesn’t hide his wounds. They are visible upon the cross and he rises with them. He invites his disciples to see his wounded hands and Thomas to touch his wounded side. The concealment and pretense that we are ‘whole’ is part of the problem.

Isaiah has the extraordinary line that ‘by his wounds we are healed’ (Isaiah 53: 5). Perhaps by seeing the incarnate God wounded and sharing in our suffering we don’t have to hide anymore. Maybe over time our scars might even become the place of newness and hope for ourselves and others.

I’m reminded of Richard Rohr’s question about what we do with pain. Do we transmit or transform it? We’d like our wounds to heal in an instant, wouldn’t we? To be able to rewind the clock but it doesn’t work that way. I’m glad that Jesus’ wounds didn’t disappear at the resurrection. He carried with him what he had been through as do we.

Despite appearances, Hoyland’s works were not thrown upon the canvas in minutes, they were a struggle for him. He couldn’t understand why people would paint to relax. Hoyland felt he was collaborating with chaos - struggling to find some kind of form. Our collaborating with Christ, to see our wounds in His and His wounds in ours, may also be a struggle but I hope that it’s one that ultimately leads us to something bigger and life-giving - the God, whom Job discovered, measured out the earth’s foundation and knows where light resides.

Suzanne Nockels