July 8, 2025 // Perspective

The Wounds We Share

Molly Jo Rose

“Mom, look! I have an owie on my ankle, I scraped my knee, and my toenail is ripping off.” So begins my 8-year-old daughter’s nightly litany of injuries her body has acquired throughout the day.

She’s fascinated with the scars of her “summer legs,” those limbs that suffer the most from the onslaught of mosquitos and scabs in the summer. She loves nothing more than to pore over these cuts, competitively sharing boo-boos with friends and begging for sympathy for all she has endured. Sometimes, I am tempted to give her the dad response (“Do you want me to cut it off?”), but on this night, I still have some patience left, so I go with maternal sympathy instead.

“I’m so sorry. I bet those really hurt.”

“They do,” she coos, delighting in the attention. Looking up hopefully, she asks, “Should I get a Band-Aid?”

“We only need Band-Aids when we are bleeding. It just covers things up. Do you need anything covered up?”

She shakes her head slowly and answers, “’Guess not.” I send her off to bed where sleep will knit her skin back together just in time for another fall from the monkey bars or collision with a corner taken too sharply.

I don’t remember at what age I stopped telling everyone about my daily hurts. This is partly because I have made a thousand tiny adjustments to the way I walk through the world that has resulted in less injury. But I have made other adjustments as well – a thousand tiny maneuvers away from sharing my pain, choosing instead to cover up my wounds.

This begs the question: Is there a virtue to suffering in silence? Is it somehow more Christlike to cover what troubles us and hide our metaphorical summer legs from the world? In response to the question, “How are you doing?” a priest friend always answers, “Flourishing!” And while in general I am certain he is doing well, is he always flourishing? Isn’t he sometimes – by virtue of the fact that he is human – in pain, in crisis, or, at the very least, terrifically stressed with the burdens of his parish?

Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit and a compelling argument for the value of faith in our lives, but it wasn’t Christ’s joy that attracted St. Josephine Bakhita. When she saw Christ on a crucifix, it was His suffering that pulled her toward Him. The contortions of His crucified body told her she was not alone in her suffering, and it was in this sharing that she found redemption. While the crucifix is a more dominant fixture in the Catholic church than in others, Christ does not hide His cross from anyone.

To be Christlike, we should not hide our pain – nor expect others to. Grief, struggle, and hurts are meant to be shared burdens. It is not that we are called to wallow in our injuries and enthusiastically seek sympathy in the way my daughter does, but we should be more open to the whole of human experience, and like children, embrace the vulnerability of exposing our hurts. Real vulnerability gives rise to both real love and the daily opportunity to vividly see the cross active in the world.

Watch children share their cuts, scrapes, and bruises the next time you have the opportunity. Watch them tell their friends the stories of their hurts and then watch what comes next. Relieved of carrying their owies on their own, they jump up on those summer legs hand in hand and rush back into the world together, their loads lightened, and their relationships richer. This happened to me, they say. See my scar? Now, let’s move on together. It is a habit of childhood we still need if we want the cross to live fully among us.

We may not need a nightly cataloguing of bruises and cuts and scrapes as my 8-year-old does, but we do need to see the whole of Christ in one another, which includes the crosses He asks us to bear. We are not always flourishing. We are often in pain, our wounds fresh and jarring or old and festering. Covering them up with a chipper voice and false smile not only discourages intimacy, it denies the opportunity to see the cross for what it is – an active and daily part of each of our lives that holds, at its other end, the extension of Christ’s hand pulling us up toward Him.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer and English professor living with her husband and three children in Fort Wayne, where they are parishioners at St. John the Baptist. She walks a lot and writes a little.