Scars

Looking down at my hands I see two thin white lines…one below my second finger on the back of my left hand, the other a jagged “V” on the back of my right thumb. They are marks from brief moments in time, the mementos of hasty gestures that first were red and pulsing and now have faded white and numb.

The scars on my hands are not the dramatic kind. They just make me shake my head at my own clumsiness when I remember the shattering of a glass in the sink…or other such mishaps.

Other scars mean more than that. Some scars make us feel stronger, and we wear them like medals for bravery. Some are made on purpose to get underneath the surface to fix something more deeply wounded. These scars are reminders etched into our skin of how our bodies have failed or betrayed us…and that we are growing older. Some scars make us ashamed. Some we try to hide.

How do you wear your scars?

My most painful scar is one that I hide in plain sight.

On some days it is a badge of pride in my uniqueness and my ability to thrive. But on others, it feels like the brand of an outcast or a freak.

I wear this scar on my face for the whole world to see, even as it is partially hidden by cosmetics, by humor, by my hair, by clever prosthetics (which even I sometimes forget are a particular luxury of the wealthy and privileged).

I am blind in my left eye. In fact, I have no left eye. As gruesome as it is to imagine, the scarred tissue that remained of my eye at one and a half years old was cut out of my body. Thrown away like the useless thing it had become.

Sometimes days go by when I hardly think about how differently I see the world, and how differently the world may see me. On others, an chance encounter as brief as bumping into someone who I couldn’t see coming in the hallway leaves me feeling humiliated and diminished.

When people ask about my eye, or notice that the difference between the prosthetic and my good eye, I don’t mind talking about it. I know that people ask out of concern, and out of curiosity about a life experience beyond their own. But it can be hard to feel like an object of curiosity.

I suspect we all have  scars like these, whether perceptible to others or not. In thinking about this, I find that there is something profoundly comforting to me about the scars of Christ. After he so amazingly returned to them, his disciples poked and prodded his wounds. He had to endure questions and curiosity. He had to remember and relive the experience that marked him that way, even though his death was no longer the last word for him.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be partially blind in the resurrected life, whatever it may be. I don’t want to feel incomplete anymore. But the wounds of the resurrected Christ make me wonder if my lack of physical sight is really where my sense of incompleteness comes from.

Perhaps, Christ’s scarred hands will reach out to me some day, and I will truly, finally understand that I am complete…scars and all. And that is where freedom truly comes from.