Column: Spirituality, What’s Woven with Scars

It’s the year’s turn and time for my annual exercise in casting a look back before I peer up the path. “There are scars you didn’t have the last time we did this,” my mirror says. “Remarkably few, given the opportunity,” I observe. Glasses cover the lumps by one eye. Pretty good for a 30-stitch misadventure the ER doc called “making hamburger of your face.”

These new scars join others, a record of accidents written on my skin. Some have faded to just memories. Here, from when the March wind caught the storm door and turned it into a sharp-edged sail. Here, where an abrasive wheel sanded the tip of a finger off. (Eventually it grew back.) Time hasn’t finished obscuring the scar I’m most self-conscious about, a white line that runs parallel to the veins of one wrist. It earned my doctor’s quirked eyebrow when he saw the gash. I was marking the butt for a hinge on a jamb when the blade slipped. But I had to tell the story for him to know what it meant.

What stories do your scars tell? Which were acquired by accident? Which by consequence of choice?

I lived for a while near a university school of music and learned to spot violinists at a glance. Those committed enough to practice for hours every day develop a sore on their necks where they clasp their instrument between shoulder and chin. The lucky ones scar. The unlucky wear a wound that constantly weeps.

How were you hurt? That place, and that one? (And that scar that’s more than skin-deep?)

Our scars tell our stories of getting cut, torn and abraded; of fiery pain and dull aches; of breakage and loss. And, as with any story, of motive and agency: Did they happen by chance? Or did we choose those effects when we chose their cause?

But that’s not all scars tell. Our scars also tell how we healed.

I want to treat this tenderly. Your scars should not be discounted by me nor anyone else. Healing isn’t always easy, nor certain. When Saint Julian said in her “Showings,” “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and every kind of thing shall be well,” she was affirming faith, not stating a law of physics.

Still, we heal. We’re made with capacities to heal. We can exercise practices that promote it.

I’m back on my bicycles (with a dope new helmet, too). My wrist that broke can support a cast iron skillet again. And daily, I’m learning to lean a little more toward meeting things that make me twitch with kindness, curiosity and clarity.

Someday, somehow, I trust, though we wear a webwork of lines like lace, we all shall be well.

The Reverend Doug Job does interim ministry for congregations in transition and keeps good memories and friends made while serving a church in Cape. He's currently serving in hilly Hannibal, Mo., where he feathers his brakes on descents more than he did last June. You may share your scar stories with him at revdarkwater@gmail.com.