Cut me and I’ll live

Jesus saying:
"No wound? No scar?
Yes, as the master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole. Can he have followed far
Who has no wound? No scar?"
Amy Carmichael.

Three minutes past two am. Hot, airless room, scented by blood and fear like an abattoir. Lit by one halogen lamp and the glow of a heart monitor. New life. Precious, tiny girl. Head of blonde fluff. Miniature hands, curled into determined fists. Wrinkled little strawberry red feet. Yowling like a furious cat, indignant at the world, face screwed up, mouth wide open, chest heaving up and down like a small bellows. And then there is me: twenty-four years old, waist length hair tangled and sodden with exertion, body grimy with sweat and blood, exhausted but jubilant.

“Hello you,” I coo, cuddling her into my chest. She jerks as if I’ve slapped her. The wailing stops and her eyes ping open like someone has yanked on the cords of twin roller blinds. Blearily, she gawps up at me, tiny rose-bud mouth making an ‘O’ shape. She can’t see me properly, since newborn eyesight is terrible, but she knows my voice as well as she knows the sound of my beating heart.

I’m never, ever going to let anything hurt you, as long as I live.

Nineteen years later I pull the leaves from my Begonia Bonfire plant and taking a sharp knife, I make small slits down the main veins on the underside of each leaf. The internet tells me that this is how I’m to propagate new begonia plants, but it seems like a crazy plan and I’m more than a little sceptical. I place the lacerated leaves in a pre-prepared bed of soil (“Don’t forget to add grit,” Monty Don reminds me in my head – the man is obsessed with the stuff!) and I press them down firmly, anchoring them in place with staples.

I can’t imagine how the slashed leaves are supposed to generate new life; how purposely damaging the plant by scoring deep cuts in its veins – its life source – can possibly lead to rebirth. But the lessons learned in that hot delivery room long ago have taught me that new life frequently comes from places of woundedness. Didn’t Jesus come into the world by breaking through the body of a woman, so that he could come and be broken for us all? Christianity is a living faith for the lacerated and the lost, and as any woman knows, blood doesn’t always mean death, it can also mean we get to start again. Blood can mean new life.

Suffering is the million-dollar question of Christian apologetics isn’t it? It was the first question I asked when I was exploring God as an atheist, it’s one of the first questions people ask me when they’re doing the same, and it’s one of the biggest barriers to belief that people have: if there is a God who loves us, why does that God allow us to suffer? As Stephen Fry has famously said: “Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?” Or to use my own words, if you love someone so much you’d die for them, why on earth would you ever let anything hurt them?

There’s probably as many answers to this question as there are people who ask it, and I’ve never yet heard one that entirely satisfies me. I find much of Christianity deeply unsatisfying anyway, but since I’ve never been a fan of easy answers, this suits me just fine. Life has taught me that authenticity and deep meaning rarely comes presented in neatly wrapped up packaging complete with tidy bows. More often than not it gets dumped in our lap like a bundle of tangled yarn that the cat (or in my house, the naughty pug) has been messing with, and it looks like it might never unravel. I’m suspicious of neatness and I distrust fixed certainty even more. So when it comes to the issue of suffering, why is a far less valuable question for me than what now. It’s a question born out of a desperation to learn how to live amidst the wreckage of a life that’s been destroyed, and rather than sit here sifting through the pieces asking why, I want to learn how to thrive in a post-suffering life, because I need to know that it’s possible.  

That we will experience suffering along the journey of life is an absolute given, and like the poem I quote at the head of this piece, if you don’t have the wounds to show for it, have you even travelled very far at all? Indeed, as the poem suggests, choosing a life of faith may well mean more suffering - this has certainly been my experience! One of the biggest questions I’ve asked myself over the past year has been to wonder – and sometimes fervently wish -that I had never met with God at all. This has led to many dead-end and pointless musings where I retrace my steps along the path to ordination and ponder if I’d taken a different turn where would I be now? Living with deep emotional pain that has damaged my mental and physical health continues to be a challenge. It’s hard not to wonder if I didn’t have that conversation, make that particular choice, if I had not known God at all, would my life have turned out better than this? Would I have still known the depth of suffering that I’ve experienced over the past year? You can’t make sense of the senseless and you can’t change the past, which is why what now is a more fruitful question to ponder.

I believe that God doesn’t cause suffering any more than any loving parent does, but like any good parent who wants the best for their child, God’s gift of freedom for us has come with a side-order of stepping back to let us fumble around and find out for ourselves. Richard Rohr has written that “faith driven by love, enables us to give up our need to understand, allows us to let go and for Someone else to hold us together.” This isn’t a way to justify suffering, much less glorify it. It’s not even a way to make sense of it, because so much suffering is completely senseless and to try and recreate meaning from it is not only futile but also potentially offensive. I can’t reconcile my own suffering with God’s purposes any more than I can explain why the sun rises in the east, and the only thing I’m certain of is that God was with me every step of the way. That the God who bled for me on Golgotha bleeds for me still. That for God, suffering is as shared an experience as joy, which still overflows abundantly in my life, and I would no sooner ask God why He has blessed me so greatly than I would ask why He has not prevented my pain. I have no more right to feel joy than I do to not feel sorrow. God’s grace is a puzzle that I will never solve.

I’m never, ever going to let anything hurt you, as long as I live.

I tried to keep my promise. I followed all the instructions in the baby books to the letter. I watched her sleeping form like a hawk, and I fed her all the correct foods, and I did all the right things just so. I cuddled her and coddled her and told her I loved her. I played with her when she was bored and I sang to her when she was tired. She grew and the bigger she became the more I worried about her. When she inevitably tripped and hurt herself, breaking that perfect envelope of skin for the first time and spilling blood, I cried louder than she did. I should have known then that there would be greater hurts to come, more metaphorical blood to be spilled, a painful inevitability that the years bore witness to. Deeper hurts came, ones which wounded so profoundly they created emotional scars that she still carries. I was powerless to prevent those too. I guess I could have done more to protect her by always keeping her close by and never letting her out of my sight. I could have invaded her privacy and never allowed her to be separate from me. But to keep her safe I would have had to deny her the independence that was rightly hers, and that precious human who came into the world at three minutes past two in the morning was born to be free. We all were: Free to feel, free to fail, free to fall. Great is the mystery of faith.

Nearly twenty years have passed since they lay that squalling infant in my arms, and she’ll still come to me when she hurts, even though we both know by now that I don’t have the power to make it go away. She’s comforted by my presence none-the-less.

The begonia leaves that I cut and stapled down eventually withered and died, and I abandoned the pot of soil as a failed experiment (“You didn’t add enough grit!” Monty admonishes me, in my head.) But then one morning, up rose the tiniest little begonia seedling, born from the wounds of the mother plant. It was cut and yet still it lives.

What now? I ask.

And God whispers,

I’m going to be there beside you whenever you hurt, for as long as you live.

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