THE WOUNDED HEART

Taken from "The Heart of the Gospel" by Rev. Francis P. Donnelly

Bring hither thy hand and put it into My side.


I. One kind of a heart-wound is inflicted by the loss of those we love. The
separation may be brought about by estrangement or by death, and who shall say which
wound is deeper or more painful? Who sorrowed more, the widow of Naim or the
father of the prodigal? Bride, in all your blossoms and beauty, which will you have,
the dark weeds of death or the dismal parting of the divorce court? God forbid you
should have either, or that the heart which now beats happily beneath the blossoms
should ever bleed. Now, Christ's Heart was wounded that ours may be healed. He says
to every heart: "Peace be to thee," and invites every sorrowing soul, as He did St.
Thomas, to find its solace in His open side. "Bring hither thy hand and put it into My side."

Death indeed has its sorrows and sharp is the edge of its reaping-hook. In many a
home the voice once heard is heard no more; its echoes have died away. The eyes that
glistened there with the regret of a daily departure, the smile that flashed with unfailing
brightness a daily welcome, all have disappeared in gloom, and the household look
and listen in vain. A familiar shadow will never more darken the door; a well-known
step sounds no more on the stair-way, and the chair in the family circle, vacant forever,
is a sad companion in the gathering twilight.
Yet even that wound will be closed by the healing touch of time and by the blessed
forgetfulness that comes with new duties and new affections. The tomb is final, and, bad
as it is, we know the worst. But the wound of separation stays open longer. Estrangement
is a daily death, and is ever presenting
to the apprehension new fears, more dreaded prospects. The heart made vacant by a
death may be filled again with new growth, but the desert sands of living separation put
forth no blooms to refresh the aching gaze.
The widows son is at rest in the graveyard, where she may go and pray, but the prodigals
father is ever on the torturing rack with rumors of riotous living and famine and
disgrace and filth and starvation, and is oppressed by the darkening despair that the prodigal,
as often happens, will never come
home.

It may be hard, or even impossible, to determine which of these two wounds of loss
death or estrangement is the more painful, but there can be no doubt that another kind
of heart-wound, the wound of pride, gives the keenest of all tortures. The heart
wounded by pride often develops a running sore. It does not, and will tell you it can
not, forget as those bereaved by death can do. Pride is, in reality, the cause of the
worst anguish in estrangement, because what chafes in such separations is the thought that
other persons have been preferred to us.
How long is the life of a compliment? No one has yet determined the age to which it
will attain. For years and years a compliment is music and fragrance to the memory.
But if a compliment is long-lived, a humiliation is immortal.

The wounds of pride fester because a poison has tainted the weapon that made
them. If a humble heart is wounded, it is not surprised. It does not identify itself
with the universe, does not consider itself the crowned king of creation. But every affront
or quarrel or humiliation for the proud heart is an offense against kingly majesty. The
wound may be concealed; it refuses to be cured. To be cured, pride must go out of
itself, and it would not be pride if it did that. Humility feels the hurt, but it does not feel
hurt. Pride transfers the wound to personality; it recognizes a defeat; it smarts from
anothers superiority. In a foot-ball game the ball is only a distraction, while twenty-two
souls and bodies grapple for mastery; the real issue of endurance and tactics could
be determined just as well with a pin-cushion or a ropes end. In a wounded heart, in
like manner, the real issue is not the word said or the deed done, but the fact that
one king is rolling in the dust and feels the heel of another upon his neck. That
feeling is the poison which festers; that is the heart-wound which does not heal.

II. "Bring hither thy heart and put it into My side." So says the Heart of Christ risen
from the dead. Christ went about consoling His stricken ones during the days that
followed His Resurrection. Mark His wonderful condescension, King Pride, who art
enthroned in the wounded heart; mark how He submits to the conditions imposed by
Thomas, how He humbly bows to his followers haughty, "I will not!" It is the
evidence and practice of God to draw good from evil. Never was there a more striking
instance than here. Should we ever have known that the way into Christs Heart was
open except for Thomas' lack of faith? Perhaps not. At all events, there is no
doubt about it now, that, when Christ glorified His body, He did not remove His
wounds, but kept them to console us. The first stage in the consoling of wounded hearts
by the Heart of Christ is the restoring of faith. "Bring hither thy hand and put it
into My side; and be not faithless but believing." A wound is not a reason for loss
of faith in man and God. The wound of Christ is a proof of His Divinity. Christ
has not promised that our hearts will not be wounded, but He has proved that our
wounds will be our glory; He has proved that if we go down into the dark hollows
on the sea of sorrow, we shall mount again to the heights of joy. The trough of the
wave of Calvary rose to the white crest of Easter.

The Heart of Christ is the healing of wounded hearts because He has traveled all
the ways of loss and separation. We can enter upon no path of sorrow where His
cross has not cast its shadow, where His feet have not left footprints of blood. He entered, too,
into the valley of death. His body was made, it could be said, for
immediate immortality, unlike ours, which must pass through dust to immortality. So, besides
the deaths which through life wounded His Heart, St. Joseph's and that of Lazarus
and of many others, His own death, the separation of His soul from His body by
death gave Him the sharpest of wounds, and it was especially hard for His Heart to die,
because death was not Its due.

There was, then, no wound of death which His Heart did not feel, and there was, too,
no wound of estrangement which He was not called upon to suffer. He felt the exile
from friends in Egypt. If Mary and Joseph sought Him sorrowing, much more did He
sorrow staying away from them. These were but shallow wounds if measured beside
the gashes of His Passion, when His people abandoned Him and His Apostles, and when
by His own wish His mother was forced to abandon Him, and when, finally, deepest of
all wounds of estrangement, the cry was wrung from His lips, "My God, My God,
why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

"So, you also who have a heart wounded by a humiliation, bring it hither and put it
into My side," Christ says to us all. "I who am true King and God of all, have been
humbled to the dust. The hand behind the spear-point was one to which I was reaching
out My hand that I might grasp it in love and lift a soul to Heaven. Many would
have festering heart-wounds if the one to whom they gave a cup of water would cast
it in derision into their face. I gave of the brimming contents of My Heart, and mocking
insulters have flung My useless, unavailing Blood back upon Me. More than that,
wounded heart; the very blow which festers within you fell upon My Heart. This is no
exaggeration, no figure of speech. I died for all sins and for the selfsame sin which
wounded your heart, and because I know God better and understand sin more fully,
and because, too, I love you better than you do yourself, the wound that was dealt you
was dealt to Me and gave Me more intense pain than it did or could possibly give to
you. Bring hither, then, your heart, whether wounded by loss or humiliation, and put it
into My side, and you will find there a Heart more deeply wounded."