Entering the Wound of the World: Revulsion

Around age 35 I was invited by Jesus to do what Thomas was invited to do, and I can still feel the shame of my response.  Psychologists suggest that most of us are held back in our psychosocial development to a point in life where we suffered trauma or loss.  Most of us, they say, find ways of coping with this retardation, compensating one way or another, some combination of masking, withdrawing, or creating a false strength, like the Phantom of the Opera.  One way or another, they say, to be healed and to grow authentically we need to return to that place of trauma, face it as truth, and integrate it into our lives.

Perhaps the same is true of a hard truth encountered, an insight or knowledge from which we have fled.  We cannot honestly become ourselves unless we are honest about that truth we’ve attempted to evade.  For me one such hard truth was revulsion at touching the wound.  My first “Ignatian” retreat, 8 days in silent prayer and meditation in the style of the Jesuits under the guidance of a Spiritual Director, found me, as in its essential method, experiencing a scene from the Gospels (Luke 8:43ff) in which there was a crowd following Jesus. 

The woman with the hemorrhage was the subject of the story, and her faith that if she could just touch Jesus she would be healed.  “Touch me, Jesus,” I heard her say, and soon in my ears I heard the crowd murmuring the same plea, “Touch me, Jesus; heal me Jesus, Love me Jesus!”  I found myself joining the crowd, murmuring with them, and then I stopped, realizing that I wanted to be his companion, his friend.  I wanted to be someone special, and not just one of the crowd.  In my room alone in prayer, I said the words aloud: “I want to touch you, Jesus, to heal you, to love you.” 

Jesus looked at me (this can happen in this kind of prayer, by grace) and said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them,” gesturing to the crowd.  I looked at them, and smelled them, and felt revulsion.  “I don’t want to touch them,” I said to Jesus, “I want to touch YOU!”  I cannot recall the look on his face, of the tone of the words, but I remember clearly that he repeated his words.  “Touch THEM.”

I sat and wept.  I wept the tears of a pupil with a paper full of corrections and a poor grade from a teacher I admired, emulated.  I wept in shame at my revulsion.  But in that meditation, I did not touch them.  I let the scene close and ended my session.  I had been given my truth.  I did not want to touch the dirty, needy crowd.  I wanted to hold myself above them.  Shame on me.

So when I experience Thomas’ invitation to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side, I feel this revulsion of touching something…what…germy?   This is Jesus, for God’s sake!  But it’s there, that revulsion, even with Jesus.  It’s not doubt, though that’s not resolved, merely overshadowed by revulsion.

Next: the gift of the homeless