Wounds, Sacred Place of Mutual Compassion

Spiritual Sunday

Some of the best sermons I have heard have been about “Doubting Thomas,” today’s Gospel reading.  I think it’s because we all recognize ourselves in Thomas, who can’t bring himself to believe without seeing physical evidence. I think of an observation that Anne Lemott makes about doubt:

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

In this poem by Father Chircop, which I encountered on a “Global Christian Worship” website talks about our hunger for tactile certainty. The real gain we get from touching Christ’s wounds, however, is that, in doing so, we touch our own. Wounds become “the sacred place/ of mutual compassion,/ and the springboard to an intimate song/ of communion and possibility,” the poet tells us.

The passage reminds me of a Hemingway passage that I wrote about recently and that Joe Biden cited when remembering the half a million Americans who have died from Covid and honoring those who loved them: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Here’s the poem:

Invitation
By Father Philip Chircop SJ

Stand in our midst
again, today
enter the circle of our fears
penetrate the darkness of our doubts
meet us where we are

May we listen your sung Shalom:
‘Peace be with you … Peace be with you’.
May we see your hands and your side.
May we feel the warmth
of your holy breath
softening the hardened clay
from whence we come.

Invited,
curious like a little child,
we place our trembling hands
not only your wounds
but on ours too,
and on the lovely
brokenness of others

breathing in, forgiveness
breathing out, forgiveness

wounds becoming the sacred place
of mutual compassion,
and the springboard to an intimate song
of communion and possibility
crafted in the heart:
‘our Lord, and our God.’

Previous Doubting Thomas posts
R. S. Thomas: Reach Out Like Thomas in the Darkness
Malcolm Guite: Touching the Wounded God
Denise Levertov: A Vast Unfolding Design Llit by a Risen Sun