Wednesday, Day 18: Scars

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”—Rumi

The post-Easter Bible readings border on creepy. Jesus keeps showing up when people least expect him. Sometimes he’s totally recognizable, and other times he’s not. Locked doors and other obstacles are no match for him. But he’s not a ghost, exactly, because he eats, drinks, and sports his crucifixion scars.

In one of these visits, Jesus enjoys a meal with his disciples—all except Thomas, who isn’t there for some reason. When the others tell him what happened, he says something to the effect of, “Unless I stick my fingers in his wounds, I’m not going to believe it’s him.”

Maybe he believed he was the recipient of the greatest practical joke on earth, or that the disciples had accidentally purchased bread laced with acid—whatever his reason, the account of 11 soul-brothers just didn’t make sense.

But then Jesus shows back up, and tells him he can stick his fingers in the holes on his wrists and side. I always cringe at this part. If I were Thomas, I would have said, “Nah, I’ll just take a look from over here. Awesome, thanks. I believe you now.” But Jesus wasn’t grossed out by his own or anyone else’s broken body. He’s the one who spit into the dirt to make a paste for healing, who touched lepers and dead children.

I have a book of photos of breastless women that my sister gave me long ago—women standing proudly for the camera, showing off the scars across their chests. Don’t look away, their eyes say. There is nothing ugly about this body. Their photos are especially powerful because the stand in such stark contrast to my memories of my mother’s breasts burned from her treatments in the 80s, always hidden from view.

When I had one of my ovaries and my appendix removed in an emergency surgery, I couldn’t bear to look at the scar for more than a year. I don’t know why exactly. The idea of a knife going in, of skin pulled back—well, I didn’t want to think about it. My visitors didn’t exactly make it easy to deal with my scars, either. One of my aunts shushed me when I said the word “ovary” in front of her then teenage son, my cousin, who got a little red.

But one day, about two years after the surgery, I went to a new doctor for a routine check up. When I explained what had happened—after she saw the scar, because I’d blocked the whole ordeal out of my mind—she said to me, “My God, you must be completely out of touch with your body.” She told me that I should have never been able to bear so much pain, and that the surgery never would have happened if I had actually allowed myself access to my own body.

At some point during the exam, I said the unsayable: “I am afraid I’ll die young, like my mother.”

“Well, I can’t promise anything. We can’t say for sure what causes cancer, or how to avoid it. Perfectly healthy people get it all the time. Still, if you take care of yourself, you’re more likely to survive if you do get it. I can tell you that it’s definitely not going to help to cut yourself off from your body and ignore what it’s feeling.”

I went home knowing what I had to do. I stood in front of the mirror and lifted my shirt and just looked at my scar. I kept my eyes on it for as long as I could. I ran my fingers over the thin red line, which reached all the way from my appendix to the opposite ovary, because I was in so much pain when I finally arrived in the emergency room that the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong until they cut me open.

I can love this body, I thought to myself. I don’t have to be afraid of the ways it’s not perfect, of what might happen to it in the future. I don’t have to worry so much about its scars. That’s where the light gets in. That’s where the story of healing, the starting-over, begins.

And something remarkable happened after that. Slowly, I started taking better care of my body. At the very least, when I was harming myself by overeating or drinking, I noticed how I felt, and stopped myself from going too far, at least most of the time. Slowly, over the years since then, I have become interested in healthy eating, long walks, yoga, biking, running.

Thomas put his hands in Jesus’ scars as he was directed, then confessed his belief. And Jesus said, blessed are those who believe without seeing.

But sometimes, we simply have to see. We are too disconnected from one another, even from our own bodies, if we don’t look. This is how ableism is born, how we end up with a society that can’t accommodate bodies that don’t look like ours—not to mention minds.

What if Thomas wasn’t doubting, exactly? What if, when he said, “Unless I put my hand in the scars on his hand…” he meant that he needed to see Jesus’ body one more time before he could say goodbye? What if he meant he needed to see Jesus’ broken body, to be sure he had actually suffered and survived?

Maybe we’ve been interpreting this story all along. Maybe when Jesus said, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing,” he meant that we are supposed to build a world in which it isn’t necessary to look in order to feel compassion. But, so far, we live in that world—so we ought to be looking.

Sometimes we have to see before we start living in the soul-selves we were meant to be. That’s why we remember Holy Thursday, Good Friday. That’s why we take our time through 40 days of Lent before we reach the Resurrection, why we slow down to take a careful look.