Chaplain's Corner

It is customary to reflect in the early days of January. It is funny how calendars order our lives. No 24 hour period of time is significantly different than any other. Oh, the climate may be different, the activities we are engaged with may be different, but an hour is an hour, a simple measurement of the passing of time.

We often think that just arriving at another 24 hour period will in itself change everything. But time changes nothing, it simply passes, it hasn’t the power to change anything. The paraphrase of the old adage, “Time heals all wounds” sometimes attributed to the English writer Chaucer other times to the Greek dramatist Menander, isn’t true.

We suffer from wounds received decades ago. Not that we don’t learn to accommodate the pain, but it’s still there and healing hasn’t happened. We have suffered wounds that spoil relationships, nothing was ever done to address the wound, time has passed but simply recalling the event can bring back the pain. One of the saddest things is that we want to believe that time heals all wounds even though there is no experience to back up the belief.

A farmer I once knew was dedicated to his work; willing to work long hours to get the job done. One spring while preparing his fields for seeding, he accidently dropped the harrow and one of the tines went right through his foot. He went to the house, found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and poured it into his boot and went back to work. Sure it hurt but he wasn’t going to be deterred by this accident from getting his crop in the ground. His wife did convince him to go to the doctor that evening, but what if he would have just believed that time would heal that would. He could have lost his foot or even his life.

I had another friend who experienced a life altering betrayal. His wife had an affair. Time heals all wounds you say. No it doesn’t. His wife said she was sorry, she did cut off the affair, she just wanted everything to go back to the way things were before her affair. She didn’t want to see a counselor, she didn’t want to explore why she betrayed her vows, in a backhanded way she blamed him for what happened. The wound has never healed. Oh, they are still married but there is no closeness in the relationship, the intimacy in the relationship is just gone. Time did not heal the wound.

As you look back this New Year, you may not have to reflect much at all to have the searing pain of some past wound rise up in your soul. Sometimes all of our efforts to reconcile and address those wounds are met with indifference and resistance. Sometimes we are stuck with the wound. Sometimes the wound leave us with a spiritual infection that weakens us spiritually and prevents us from growing. Other times a scar forms but we are never the same. The scar always reminds us of the wound, of the pain, of the loss: time hasn’t healed the wound.

As we reflect back over the past year we may remember either a wound received or a wound that we are responsible for administering. What will we do about those wounds? Will we glibly believe that “Time heals all wounds” or will we engage a process that works toward real reconciliation, a process that cannot erase the fact that a wound took place, but one that can heal the wound, restore and deepen the relationship and allow us to move into the new year dragging less hurt from the past and releasing more energy so that we can love more deeply in the year to come.