Laura Kelly Fanucci ‘03

I had to turn around to see it.

(This is how I know it was a conversion.)

I cringe to admit I was on my cell phone, making a call in our church’s gathering space while my family scarfed hot dogs during faith formation night. Pushing potato salad around my plate, I had remembered an appointment I needed to make for our kids, so I slipped outside the fellowship hall to escape the noise.

And there in the quiet, bored on hold, I realized I was standing with my back to him.

Not to Him, of course, but the statue by the doorway. The Sacred Heart, the solemn stare, the flowing robes, the outstretched hands. Out of instinct—Midwestern politeness? Catholic guilt?—I turned around to face him.

Suddenly, cell phone still pressed to my ear, I saw the wounds.

Blood-red gashes in his palms. Impossible to miss, at eye level from where he gazed down from his pedestal. For the first time I noticed the back of his hands. The side you can’t spy on crucifixes nailed to walls.

I leaned forward, almost dropping the phone I had forgotten.

What did it mean that his wounds went all the way through?

. . .

In our culture we prefer closure. We prize healing. Moving on and getting over.

But here is what happened after Christ died, after soldiers nailed his hands to a tree and let them hang as he bled, after his friends pulled him down from the cross and buried him in a tomb, after everyone who loved him slipped under the thick sorrow of grief.

He came back to life. And his wounds never healed.

We mistake the resurrection if we think it to be magical or mystical. His rising was in body and flesh. His wounds still bled—they did not scar, even though marks would have been proof enough. No, the blood left stains on Thomas’ fingers.

In the gaping wounds in the flesh and life of God—the suffering and death of God’s own child—healing never happened.

This was the proof of his love: the wounds went all the way through the back of his hands, pierced without stopping, nailed without hesitation. His arms were slammed onto cruel rough wood, and he clenched no fist to fight back. He opened his life to death.

This is what defined a God willing to be broken by love. We would know him by his wounds.

. . .

I grew up with grief. My older brother died when I was 10, breaking all the rules just as I was learning them. Young people don’t die. Prayer works. Good triumphs.

A hole in a family remains. There is no way to fill it in. Not with the last shovel of dirt into the grave, not with another year’s calendar tossed in the trash, not with the arrival of new babies or in-laws.

Decades later my husband and I had twin daughters. They were sick and premature and died in our arms. Their deaths are wounds I will carry with me until my own days end. Wounds that pierce through the back of my hands.

But grief has taught me this: how broken God’s love can be, torn apart for each of us; how the heart of God bleeds compassion, poured out for all of us who suffer.

. . .

Here is what I have learned, the conversion that has changed my mind about almost everything, including God: wounds are how we know each other.

And when you start to see it—when you notice the back of God’s hands for the first time, when you realize that the way God works is not around suffering but through it—everything changes.

His wounds let us see all the way through. God’s love makes a way where there is no way, even through flesh and bone, beyond the limits of all we know.

This is the back of Christ’s hands: the unseen work of God in the world. He stands there loving, suffering, while we bustle around Him, too busy to notice.

I stood there on my phone and saw it for the first time. His wounds are love.

Our lives are called to be nothing less.