Spiritual Wounding

A spiritual wound violates our sacred or spiritual core. Some might say it is a break in one’s relationship with God. Others might say it is a rupture that increases the distance from one’s true self, that part of us that is alight no matter how dark the night. A spiritual wound may happen over time, or it may be triggered by a single incident. For example, our culture has long suffered from the wounding of racism that furthers division and disunion. The great poet and essayist Wendell Berry proclaims that racism remains a “hidden wound” for White folks the more we trudge along as if it is not real. This is a wound so profoundly embedded in our history and society that it snakes through our DNA and continues to be passed down. The hidden wound causes explicit wounds to non-whites. A single wounding incident may be exclusion (especially in religious spaces) because of gender or sexual identity. Many carry both collective and individual wounds which makes us all the Walking Wounded.

One of the things I’ve learned from studying psychology is that our true self is recoverable. It’s strange that this thing that we are born with is also the thing we spend a lifetime trying to get back to. It’s like the fancy gift we got a glimpse of and then put away for safekeeping until we were mature enough to play with it.

What I love about spiritual direction is that it invites curiosity about the true self. When we can notice the body patterns, the mental patterns, and the spiritual patterns that shape us, we can slowly begin to unravel the wounded places. As both Rumi and Leonard Cohen once said, “There’s a crack, a crack in everything, and this is how the light gets in.”

The dark and the light, the wounding and recovering, are necessary for healing.