The Holes

“If Only I Could Kiss it and Make it Better”    W. Zeitler [PIANO]

“We Cannot Measure How You Heal”

Amidst all the loud allelujas and trumpets that rightfully characterize Easter and its season, there’s a little detail of the story that recaptures my imagination again and again, namely: The Resurrected Christ still has the holes in His hands and feet.

And not only that, He uses them to prove to the disciples that it really is He – “put your fingers in the holes.” In other words, they are now part of His Eternal Identity.

You’d think that if someone can be raised from the dead, that a little plastic surgery to fix the holes in the process would be trivial. Instead, apparently they’re important.

They’re important because they are an essential part of any enounter with suffering and death. When we experience our own ’sojourns through the underworld’ — a life threatening illness, the death of a marriage, of a loved one, so many catastrophes to which we are prey in this mortal coil – with grace (and time to heal) we emerge and live to see another day. But it marks us — it changes us. We can’t help but see the world differently. And there will ever be odd-cast days when the old ’war wounds’ ache once again. In other words, in our own way we too have our own ’holes’.

But when you have your own holes, it becomes much easier to identify others who have their own — and identify WITH them: there is a familial recognition between ‘survivors of the underworld’. And one’s own holes can make possible a tougher, more resilient and comprehensive compassion.

So OF COURSE the Resurrected Christ still has the holes in His hands and feet. He must! Not to have them would forever undercut the very purpose of His suffering and death. They forever demonstrate His Identity – He’s the Risen Christ, and simultaneously they show how He identified, and continues to identify with us mere mortals.