The two-inch incision runs at a rakish angle down the side of my left cheek and bends at my jaw line before terminating well shy of my Adam’s apple. It’s still puffy in spots. It gives me a good pirate or gangster vibe at the moment. The stitches came out two days ago. If all goes well, it will soon look no more obtrusive than the one parallel to it, twenty years older but there for the same reason.
I have been a frequent flyer with dermatologists for over half my life. I’ve been with my current one for over fifteen years and we know more about each other than most doctors and patients. She is a Conservative Jew who currently attends an Orthodox synagogue, so we always talk religion, both of us being equally fascinated by the other’s practices. I love passing the ceramic mezuzah mounted on the door post when I enter the waiting room.
I have freckled Irish skin damaged for many years of my youth living under the sub-tropical Florida sun. Sunscreen was called “sun tan lotion” back then and even though the acronym SPF (sun protection factor) was coined back in 1938, it didn’t enter the lexicon of my family of origin until the late 1980s. My first skin cancer diagnosis was in 1989 and I’ve had dozens and dozens of spots scraped, frozen or sliced out since then. The ones on my arms and face are more noticeable. One on the center of my sternum looks like a reset button and itches regularly. They are a part of who I am and they each have a story buried below the dermis.
The word scar serves as an apt metaphorical jumping-off point for some of our emotions and most if not all our trauma. We hear people refer to their “emotional scars” from a challenging childhood or turbulence in an adult relationship. Many of us can name more of those scars than the ones visible on our bodies. The difference often lies in how these less-visible scars show themselves: anger, resentment, fear, anxiety. When we are self-aware enough, we can stitch the emotion to a trauma which gives a sense of order and sometimes justification for our reactions. But as I have scratched, picked at and learned to live with many of my own emotional scars, I have come to embrace the protection and resiliency they provide. I know I am a more compassionate person because of my scarring. I understand that my capacity to be vulnerable had to be developed and nurtured by facing some old wounds that I avoided looking at and acknowledging for too long.
One of my most prominent scars is my status as a survivor of addiction and person in recovery. I use those terms very specifically because they label me differently than just calling myself an “addict” (I’m much more than that). My addiction is a permanent scar on my personhood, something that will always be with me and will be itchy more often than I’d like, but I can live with it. I now have better tools to employ for scratching that itch.
Now don’t get me wrong. I hate these scars, visible and invisible. I hate being shirtless because my skin looks like the surface of the moon in places. I hate the fact that I will spend the rest of my life attending 12-step meetings and fighting the itch that will never ever go away completely. But I am alive and my scars, uncomfortable and unsightly as they are, are signposts of my healing…and healing is a wonderful thing.
Our whole person—body, mind and spirit—has a tremendous capacity for healing. Many of us have significant medical and mental health resources and services at our disposal to rub balm on our wounds, especially in those places that are hardest to reach on our own (metaphor alert). In a community built on love, as all faith communities are supposed to be, we are called at times to scratch each others’ itches. This can be uncomfortable and even embarrassing work, but the stories from my faith tradition of Christianity remind me time and time again of the prominence of scars in our collective narrative. Perhaps no quote sums it up better: “By his wounds we are healed.”
Healing is a communal process. Without my dermatologist, her nurses and lab technicians, my skin would be toast and so would I. “Scarred and healed” beats “wounded and dying” any day.
I write this less than a week away from the beginning of the church season of Advent, a time of watchful waiting. In the six months between my regular rota of visits to my dermatologist, my job is to keep deploying sunscreen and my hat when facing too much sun exposure, and also keeping watch over my skin, paying attention to questionable spots, noting them in my phone to tell the doctor when I see her next, and then being willing to be vulnerable to her invitation to add more scars to my body as she fulfills her call to keep me healthy and promote my healing. Perhaps we can use this season of preparation and anticipation to pay more attention to our bodies, listen for what they can teach us, and be grateful for our scars that remind us not just of our woundedness, but of our healing.