Holy Week and the Wounds We Try to Avoid
Holy Week and the Wounds We Try to Avoid
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
Dear Henry,
Holy Week has begun, and we are almost to Easter.
It has me thinking about the Passion, about how we tend to move through it. We talk about the Garden of Gethsemane. We talk about the Resurrection. We speak of surrender, and we speak of victory. But we do not linger very long on the wounds.
Resurrection may be the end of the story, but it is not where most of us spend our days. Most of us live somewhere in between, in a place that is a little more worn, a little more fragile, still carrying what has not yet been made whole.
And yet, we are often reluctant to remain there. Reluctant to rest within the wounds of Christ. It is at times like this that I have to remind myself: Christ did not leave His wounds behind.
In the Gospel of John, when He appears to Thomas, He does not come polished and untouchable. He shows His hands. He shows His side. The wounds are still there, not bleeding, but not erased. They are carried forward. Transformed, perhaps, but not denied. Glorified and brought into eternity. It has been within those wounds that Christ has found me.
My own journey to Christ has come through wounds, my own, and those I did not know how to carry.
It began, in part, through the act of one fierce little nun, Sister S., who saw the precarious place my family stood in. Fifteen months after a nearly fatal accident. A cesarean complicated by placenta previa. A 26-week infant in the NICU, two small boys bewildered by instability, and a husband holding everything together by sheer will. We were financially destitute. Losing our home. Often unable to secure food. The religious voices around us spoke of worthiness. Of requirements. Of prayer and humility.
Christ, however, did not demand fasting in that season. He sent groceries. And because of Sister S., Catholicism, even religion at all, was still on the table.
Years later, after my conversion, I began to see how the wounds of Christ had been woven even more deeply into my story.
It was through the wounds that Thomas the Apostle came to believe. Christ did not appear to him in perfection, but in what had been pierced, what had been broken, what had been carried through. Tradition holds that Thomas carried the Gospel to India. And somehow, through centuries and across continents, that same witness reached me. If Christianity had not taken root there, there would have been no Father B. And without Father B., I do not believe I would have crossed the Tiber.
What Thomas saw, I encountered, not in theory, but in people.
At St. Bernard’s, with Father B., I encountered a deeply pastoral Christ. The parish was filled with aging bodies, replaced hips, arthritic hands, and widows with long memories of loss. They were not performing holiness. They were enduring it, and their devotion was measured not by intensity but by persistence.
In that place, my own brokenness was not an obstacle to belonging. It was simply part of the Body.
Christ meets us in the wounds. Not after they are resolved. Not once are they explained or made meaningful. But in the place where they are still carried, where they still ache, where they have not yet been made whole. I think that is why we do not stay there very long.
It is easier to remain in the Garden, where the decision is made. Or to move quickly to the Resurrection, where everything is restored. But most of us do not live in either place. We live somewhere in between.
And it is there, in that in-between, wounded and weary place, that Christ remains most recognizable. Not polished. Not untouchable. But marked. Still bearing the wounds He chose not to erase. And once you begin to see Him that way, something shifts.
You begin to recognize Him in places you might have overlooked before. In the quiet endurance of others. In lives that do not resolve cleanly. In wounds that are still being carried.
And to recognize one another the same way.
xoxo a.d. elliott
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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