There is No Going Back (Part 3): The Five Wounds
Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
– John 20: 24-29
The five wounds of Christ are as follows: a hole in each hand and a hole in each foot from where the nails held him suspended to the cross and the hole in his side from where a Roman soldier pierced him with a spear to make sure that he was dead and out flowed blood and water.
When the Resurrected Christ reveals himself to the apostles, he is radiant with light, glory, and untold beauty. He has literally unmade death with his death, has transformed death into an act of salvation, of eternal life, promise, and hope. The doctrine of the Resurrection is the cornerstone of all Christian faith; through his suffering and death, Christ has saved the world, has conquered death, and has transformed death into eternal life.
But the resurrected Christ is also the crucified Christ. The Christ that appears to the apostles and to Thomas carries the five wounds. The Resurrection does not erase what the Crucifixion did to him. And the eternal, resurrected, glorified flesh of the Savior is forever marked by the five wounds.
The idea behind this theology gives particular gravity to the acts of mortal flesh: what we do here on earth echoes in eternity–truly, actually, and physically. The resurrected and ascended flesh of Christ that dwells in Heaven is not the infant Christ in Our Lady’s arms, nor the child Christ that lectured the Pharisees in the temple, nor even the Christ that stood forth in radiant glory during the Transfiguration. No, our faith tells us that the Christ who lives eternally in Heaven in perfect unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit is the crucified and resurrected Christ: the Christ that bears the physical witness of an unimaginable death on his sacred flesh.
The world was forever changed by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. So too, was Christ himself forever changed. He was willing to assume everything that it meant to be human, up to and including a horrifically painful human death. But the reality of that death is retained even in the God-flesh that returns from the dead. The Body of Christ is resurrected–yes–complete with the physical proof that he suffered and died.
The implications of this teaching are innumerable and certainly beyond my scope to explore. What I want to highlight here is that the Resurrection does not bring Christ back to the carpenter and teacher that he was before the crucifixion. All of him–mind, body, and soul–have been permanently altered by what was done to him and what he did in response. And what this means is that even for a man who was also God–there is no going back.
Of course, for God, all things are possible, and Jesus could have chosen to manifest after his death with whole and undamaged flesh, just as he could have chosen to come to this world in any form, but chose the total vulnerability of a newborn. To understand this, we postulate that in all ways and at all times, God respects our free will, our ability to choose and to determine our course, and he does not violate his own rules. What happened to Christ happened and nothing can change that. What Christ did after it happened also cannot be changed. These things exist simultaneously in time and in eternity. And Thomas needed to put his hand into Christ’s side in order to prove it to himself.
When someone tells me that one day, my mind and soul will heal from the ravages of Lizzy’s death, I think of the five wounds of Christ. If the reality of suffering and death is marked permanently on the incarnate flesh of our Savior, how can my own mind, body, and soul not forever reflect the damage done by the death of Lizzy?
I do not think this is hyperbole, nor do I think it unrealistic to consider the real-life implications of this tenet of theology. It is not only what we choose but also what happens to us that changes us, in some cases to the point where we can no longer be unchanged. And it is here, at the quiet and resonant bottom of this thought, that I begin to grieve for the person that I was–for the innocent and ignorant girl-mother who thought her firstborn daughter would bury her.
I no longer recognize the person that I was (arguably a child in her obnoxiously sanguine perspective on the world), nor do I fully know how to dwell in a flesh and a mind that seems now so foreign to me. There is a loss of innocence that has occurred here, and it is no insignificant loss given that I was able to retain that innocence throughout my broken marriage, my divorce, and the birth of my child.
On one of the nights that Lizzy was still on life support in the hospital, I laid in the hotel bed with my little sister and confided to her that I felt like my skin had been flayed from me and what was left was this hunted, pathetic creature that kept running this way and that, looking for relief, looking for safety, only to encounter a new nightmare everywhere she turned. In the dark, in the quiet, tears running down her face, my little sister could only respond, “I know.”
Sometimes, I fear that I am still that bleeding, hunted creature, who, deprived of her innocence, is destined to scamper from shadow to shadow, never finding the solace she seeks. But it is also in this fear that I think of Christ’s five wounds, and in this thinking, remember that suffering and death is indelibly present even in the perfect flesh of God.
In these last dragging and heavy months, I have learned that Lizzy’s death has shaped me as profoundly as did her birth. I am not who I was, nor do I have a chance of returning to what I once believed or thought to be true or took for granted. I carry with me the reality of the death of my daughter and the reality of the pain that has carved me mercilessly into a new version of myself. And although that version currently eludes description, it is someone that I will spend the coming years learning to know and someone to whom I must now trust the life of that which is most precious to me: Cecilia.
Tonight, I lay in bed, in the dark, in the quiet, with my living daughter sleeping peacefully beside me. And I pray for clarity, a clarity that I have prayed for ceaselessly in each dark day since Lizzy’s death. But I fear that clarity is an evanescent promise, for the more I seek it, the more elusive it becomes. More and more, I realize that what is being asked of me is a surrender I am unwilling to give: a surrender to the many unknowns surrounding Lizzy’s death and my consequent purpose or lack thereof here on earth, and a surrender to the basic mysteries of human life and death, of pain and healing, of suffering and resurrection.
So just as I turn to Our Lady’s face in the Pieta to seek someone who understands my pain, I begin to turn to the image of Our Lord, resurrected and radiant, the light penetrating the five holes in his sacred Body, to seek an answer for what I am being called to. For my vocation can no longer be just motherhood. It has become a suffering motherhood. And the child-self within me has been killed just as surely as has Lizzy.
Her death now walks beside me and within me, but so does her life. And I think this is the mystery to which I am now being called: to learn to allow the light of Lizzy’s life to pour forth from the wounds of her death; to walk forward carrying both her life and her death within me… and to be more faithful to her than I have ever been before.
Amen.