April 14, 2014
Everyone in ministry is a wounded healer, and I am no different. It is hard to say what my expectations were when I entered the seminary. I had heard some priests talk about some of the healing that can go on in the process, some of the ways that one can address certain hurts head-on and from there be able to move forward. Of course much of that has and will continue to happen, but nevertheless, just the fact of being human carries with it some difficult realities that will always stick with us in this life. We all carry a woundedness.
In my own desire to be holistically “cured” of all that ails me physically and emotionally, I have been surprised to find God respond with a bit of a different insight in my mind and heart. It’s an image that has stayed with me.
There is a powerful scene in The Green Mile (1999: Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan) where inmate and miracle man John Coffey brings a little mouse, Mr. Jingles, back from the dead. (I am sorry that I have not read the Stephen King book so I do not know exactly how it plays out there.) To perform the resurrection, John Coffey holds the little mouse in his big hands, gently and tenderly. He brings Mr. Jingles closer to himself, and seems to begin breathing him in. Suddenly, the little mouse tail starts to wag, and everyone watching reacts with awe. Mr. Jingles, in the hands of John Coffey, is brought back to life. John Coffey puts the little mouse back on the ground, and he promptly scurries away.
I think that even if we don’t get our tails wagging again, even if all the parts of ourselves no longer feel as alive as they once did and if even we don’t can’t exactly get to “scurry” around, there is a comfort and a peace in being in the hands of God nevertheless. In a sense, no matter the outcome, that is the miracle in itself. God began human life by breathing into our first parents (Genesis 2:7), and I believe that when we are hurt, as sadly many are more often than not in their lives, we are held in the hands of God and the deeper hurts are breathed in by the intention of God’s love and care.
Of course, when it comes to ministry, our challenge is the possession of the human limitations of John Coffey. Every time John Coffey performs a miracle in that story, it releases a kind of energy from him. In this I think of the moment in the Gospels where a woman touches Jesus’s clothes and he immediately feels the power go out of him (Mark 5:30 and parallels). For us, it’s not just that ministry is necessarily exhausting in the same sense as other kinds of work – indeed it is quite fulfilling – but some of the hurt in the other person can touch our hurt, and just like that we can be reminded of our own limitations. But that doesn’t mean that we stop tenderly holding the hands of those who need us. On the contrary, I think God counts on us to do precisely that. But we have to do so with the remembrance of whose hands we are ultimately in. You know the song: “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”
I find peace in the knowledge that he will never let us go.