These words just came to my mind today. I remember that I read it during a retreat when I was in college.With our culture's fascination for perfection, corrective/aesthetic surgery and the likes, there is no room whatsoever for scars. Scars are like badges of one's imperfections, mistakes, follies and weaknesses, and we never go around parading them, do we? Instead, we try, as much as we can, to hide them or to pretend that they do not exist.
If this is so with physical scars, how much more it is with emotional scars, those scars that nobody sees, yet they are so real that they could make or break a life.
Well, I have a deep respect for scarred people, especially those who carry deep scars that nobody sees. They have within them a resilience made possible by their contact, their deep contact with suffering. And they are wiser, too, as it is only in suffering that we somehow touch the mystery of life.
Of course not all scarred people manage to discover this resilience and wisdom. But they are much much ahead of us in terms of acquiring these evasive qualities, for they are acquired only through suffering.
"through his bruises you have been healed" (1 Peter 2:24)
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