Here is what J.K. Rowling says about Harry Potter’s iconic scar on his forehead: “I wanted him to be physically marked by what he has been through inside. I gave him a scar and in a prominent place so other people would recognize him. Someone tried to kill him; that’s how he got it. I chose the lightning bolt because it was the most plausible shape for a distinctive scar. As you know, the scar has certain powers, and it gives Harry warnings. I can’t say more than that, but there is more to say.” There is more to say and one of the things everyone says in the books, and often in a whisper, as they point to him in awe is that Harry Potter is “the boy who lived,” scarred up though he may have been.
In our family, we have the girls-who-lived–all of the oldest of the granddaughters. They gave me permission with joy to share their stories. All three are in their 20’s, strong and confident women, scarred for life. Elizabeth, at the site where the suctioning tube was placed in her side when she was in the hospital, left with what looks like a dimpled gash, most visible when she inhales deeply. Julianna is missing a finger, the only outward evidence of a horrific car crash when she was still in high school. It turned out that crumpled heap which had been a Ford Escape, really did make possible what its name implied, an escape. And Sandie, when she was only 11, experienced a strangulated intestine resulting in a life-threatening spill of poison into her peritoneal cavity. She hovered near death for days. It look months and months for her to recover, and from then on to the present day, she wears a two-piece swimsuit, and also wears openly and without shame, her full length, prominent scar, splitting her entire torso, from stem to stern, saying to all that something tried to kill her, but she is the girl who lived. In the books, when Harry Potter is vexed by the presence of the one who has taken so much from him, his scarred forehead throbs. I wonder if our girls’ scars must not pain them sometimes, but they say it is important for other girls to see them, to have joy and pride in their bodies, unashamed. Once Khalil Gibran wrote, “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
There are many biblical stories of massive characters, seared with scars, but perhaps none so clearly marked by what he has suffered as Jesus in this story Brandon read for us today. Apparently, the disciple Thomas has missed the previous post-death Jesus sightings, and so he becomes the exemplar of all of us who need some tangible evidence for our practice of faith, as he declares forthrightly, “Unless I see the prints of the nails and put my hand in the scar in his side, I will not believe.” All through the post-crucifixion appearances, folks who encounter Jesus, seem only able to recognize him by the marks of his suffering. The phrase is repeated through every post Easter story, “he showed them his hands and his side.” It was their experience of the wounds that helped people believe.
Through the centuries, this story became a favorite subject of religious artists. Various depictions abound through medieval art: Thomas, leaning in to examine Jesus’ side, or gingerly poking at a bore hole in a palm…Jesus, guiding a curious and hesitant doubter’s outstretched hand toward a well-closed sword nick between his fifth and sixth ribs. And then, oddly, over time, the disembodied wounds of Christ took on a life of their own. They began to appear on ancient icons and in illuminated manuscripts of Scripture. One of the most fascinating uses for them came to be as ancient medical talisman for childbirth. Illuminated prayer scrolls were wrapped around women in labor, the depiction of Christ’s wounds serving as an object of prayer, but also of hoped-for protection by one who also knew suffering and the creation of new life. More than one writer has commented on the striking similarity between the wound and the birth canal’s appearance and the mystics and artists reflecting on this story seemed to understand flesh as a portal of life and wounding as one way to rediscover and redefine one’s own divinity-within-humanity and connecting with the wounds of the world. Eamon Duffy wrote, “The wounds of Christ are the suffering of the poor, the outcast, the unfortunate. Our remembrances of them translate into acts of love, tending the living, wounded, corporate body of Christ in the world.”
As the centuries have passed, our art and sensibilities have changed. And probably most of us prefer not to have hanging in our living room portraits of anybody’s gaping wounds—it’s hard to decorate a room around that theme, I’ve found, but I do wonder about the power of wounding, physical and soulful in our lives. Harry Potter’s scar is a mark of what he has suffered and survived–and serves in the story, as Jesus’ scars do in his, as an inescapable connection to past trauma, a portal into the depths of the paradoxes that make up human existence: good and evil, shadow and light, pleasure and pain. Harry’s arch-enemy, Voldemort, whose name, some fans believe, means “way of death,” dwells within Harry as well as without. This enemy is obsessed with blood purity, annihilation of all he deems unworthy, and he is, according to Rowling, a “self-hating bully.” Harry Potter’s highest self struggles mightily as time after time, Voldemort proves to be stronger than wizardry, spells, weapons, anger, and revenge. Harry only grows into the ways of life and the power of love over time and through many dangers, toils, and snares, and in the company of courageous companions who offer him the power of their own scarred selves.
What about our magical life stories with their adventures and losses and cracked places of the soul? What if it is that the best version of ourselves is not demonstrated most clearly in perfection and strength—what if, as Mary Oliver puts it:
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
What if we don’t have to pretend to follow the letter of the law, what if all have fallen short, what if there is a crack in everything, what if the Sunday face is not what we need to wear to church, but our scars? What if we help to heal each other by grace, through faith, and that not of ourselves, lest anyone of us should boast, as the old scripture puts it. Maybe we are joined on life’s journey by those who are also moving as best they can, inhaling tentatively because it hurts to breathe, and picking up the tools to rebuild their best new life, but gently as the holes in the palms and the heart are still new and quicky. Wounded healers–that’s what Carl Jung and Henri Nouwen called us.
Scars still mean that wounding has happened. Brokenness and loss are death-dealing and abound in this life and can separate us from each other as we withdraw to care for our own woundedness. I think that wounding and withdrawal are at the heart of at least some of what we are seeing in our world today. It is a spiritual and physical truth that being in this world and seeking to act in loving ways will expose us to wounding, to the giving and to the receiving of pain, just as they did in Jesus’s life, in Harry Potter’s life, in the life of all those who love. But the mysterious and paradoxical invitation inherent in wounds that break us and then grow in us new strengths is that they invite us out of our own vulnerabilities, wearing our wounds, and into new life. We are not being invited to seek out wounding…no, that will come readily enough when we live fully human lives in this world. Rather, the challenge is to allow our woundedness, endured for the sake of life and love and compassion to draw us together and to move us out beyond ourselves. How may our wounds serve as birth canals so that we are born and reborn to new life, scarred though we may be, living authentic lives of love?
Wound care textbooks say, “Wounds heal by primary intention or secondary intention, depending upon whether the wound may be closed with sutures or left to repair, damage restored by the formation of connective tissue and the re-growth of skin.” Sometimes we have some body or soul wounds that will close up by secondary intention–all on their own, like Hogwarts magic, but sometimes that healing is however known and takes a long, long time, bit by bit, filling in, smoothing out. It gives me hope when the cuts are raw to remember that in God’s great wisdom, creation itself is bent toward healing, homeostasis, recovery after devastation. Sometimes, we get to participate with primary intention—actively helping one another heal through intent and actions of love, compassion, peace, forgiveness, equity, justice, and reparation, scarred up though we may be—able to help one another to live and to live again after grave injury, and even after death. In all the best of our stories, it is the experience and power of love that brings healing. Sometimes the scarring is deep and the wound healing may look like something else entirely–even like death itself. But the old stories of Scripture and the Harry Potter books, too, include the important reminder, even in our woundedness: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
Finally, at the end of the Harry Potter saga, he finds a measure of healing. Before the release of the last book, Deathly Hallows, Rowling said on numerous occasions that the last word of the book would be “scar.” But, if you have read it, you know that is not how it ends. The last words are “All was well.” Similar to words uttered centuries before by the great Christian visionary, Julian of Norwich who said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” Why did Rowling change her plan?
Here’s what she says in a 2007 interview:
“For a long time the last line was something like: “Only those he loved could see the lightning scar.”. so they were the only ones who were really near enough to see it, even though other people were looking. And it also had a kind of ambiguity. Is the scar still really there? I changed it because I wanted a very concrete statement that Harry won. And that the scar, although it’s still there, it’s now just a scar.”
I both regret and revere our scars. I regret the wounds and I revere the courage. I don’t know the answer to this question, but I think about it a lot: our scars…could we have become ourselves without them? Amen.
Prayer: Spirit of the ones who lived, we are grateful for life and pray for strength to live in ways that are authentic, scarred and sacred. Amen.
Wound Care
John 20:19-27
July 22,2018
Shelly Wilson