A reflection on human suffering and the broken body of Christ:

Yesterday, we spent most of our time with the children at the hospice day care in Makindye. There weren’t very many because school is back in session, so the children that were there were especially sick, because they had to drop out of school. Most were pretty active, most likely because they are HIV+ but are on ARVS, so they feel healthy enough. Except for Patience, who walks slowly with a crutch, due to a bad leg, or perhaps something more grave, as in neurological.

The daycare for children doesn’t consist of much programming, for better or for worse. Just a lot of sitting around, talking and joking with one another. For those who feel healthy, perhaps a game of football or catch. They speak mostly in Luganda, so it’s difficult to know what’s going on, but they all seem genuinely happy, easy going, despite their grave diagnoses. I’ve wondered what this sort of experience would be like in the US – spending the afternoon with dying children, children who are supposed to surpass me in years, but will likely die within the next 5. I’m not sure if the atmosphere would feel the same in America….I have a hunch that it would be pretty difficult, even though (or perhaps because) America has much better health care. In a place where sickness is the norm and medicine is not a god (or at least an unreliable deity), one must learn to live with illness better, or accept it as a normal fact of life.

In America, to be sick is to be a leper; few terminally ill people are seen in everyday life, just like people with disabilities. Their illnesses or malfunctioning bodies do too much to remind us of our own mortality and frailty, and in a nation so obsessed with the Baconian project of immortality, it’s best to shut up the ill and frail in institutions rather than allowing the incurable to teach us something that Amy Laura Hall describes as ‘embodied discipleship’ through caring for real bodies, bandaging real wounds, seeing real scars and imperfections on the human body, scars and imperfections similar to those witnessed by the disciples when Christ appeared to them in the Upper Room after his resurrection.

I saw a man yesterday with a gigantic hole in his leg, maybe an inch wide and an inch deep. Both legs were extremely swollen and he said he was in pain. When he pulled up his pant leg, my first instinct was to look away, as we are apt to do in America out of respect (or, more realistically, out of fear and revulsion). But this man, Richard, seemed to take comfort in our presence there with him, knowing that he could reveal his broken body to us without judgment or disgust on our part. There is some sort of imparted dignity, some sort of empowerment or respect that comes with witnessing the wounds of others. In my witnessing, I bear the pain and burden of the one who is sick. I begin to have compassion (which literally means “co-suffering”). The wounds of others are there and they are real, and I, a mere observer, am only a witness to that pain. But through that witness, I must come to grips with the reality of what I am seeing, rather than pretending to live in a world where bodies are perfect and suffering is nonexistent.

Jesus laid his wounds bare for us. St Francis, when he received the gift of stigmata, struggled with whether or not show his wounds to the world, though he eventually decided that they could serve to edify the Church. Mother Theresa, whose feet were deformed from years of wearing the cast-off shoes too small and ill-fitting for her (or anyone’s) feet, let her feet serve as a witness to her discipleship. I think there is a lot of mystery surrounding the physical healings that Jesus performed, but I think we can glean some meaning from the fact that Jesus didn’t heal everyone. The healings he did perform were, according to the author of John, SIGNS of God’s power, glimpses of heaven, of God’s intention for the world. But those left broken in body were no less loved and blessed by God. In fact, through Christ’s death on the cross, their brokenness has itself become a sign of God’s love for the world. Just as their bodies are broken, so was Christ’s, on behalf of the sinful world. Just as they experience the pain of mortality and falleness in their bodies, so Christ bared that pain in his own body, thereby redeeming human flesh through the incarnational mystery.

In no way am I trying to idealize suffering nor am I attempting to make it sound better or more holy than what it actually is. I do not want to minimize the need for good medical care, research, and institutions. But in light of modern medicine and ever-growing medical technology, we cannot forget the cruciform Christ, the body BROKEN for us on the cross and at the altar. Each time the Eucharist host is broken, we remember Christ and God’s saving work. Could it be, also, that when we gaze upon the wounds and brokenness of our fellow brothers and sisters, that we, too, can remember Christ? Could the suffering we experience in our mortal bodies serve to remind us of the suffering servant, our lord and master, Jesus Christ? Perhaps suffering is not an absence of God or a question of theodicy. Perhaps instead it is an opportunity to identify with Christ’s own suffering, for as Christians, the cross lies at the center of our faith.