How Can Love be a Wound?

This Lent, I’m pondering the Lord’s passion every day. His vivid wounds show us the urgency of his love and the urgency of our response to his healing love.

Love heals, and love can wound us, too. Sounds contradictory that love should be a wound, right? If God’s love is perfect, how can we experience it as a wound? And why would that love hurt us?

Think back to the Valentines we gave our classmates in grade school – how often they depicted a heart pierced by an arrow. That arrow hints at the wound of love, which happens in two ways.

Wound of sorrow
The Stations of the Cross describe Jesus’ heart as “bruised for our offenses.” In these days when violence, perversity, and lies swirl around us, uniting ourselves with the Sacred Heart means we are willing to suffer with him. We stand up for the truth, yes, but if we want to imitate Jesus, we suffer in sorrow rather than anger.

Especially during Lent, as members of his body, we unite with his heart, bruised by our sins and those of the whole world. It is said that the greatest suffering Jesus endured was in the Garden of Gethsemane when he foresaw the souls who would reject his love and willfully go to hell rather than submit to the sweet yoke of his love.

We, too, feel pain like no other when our love and sacrifice are thrown back in our face, rejected. And we feel great pain when we see Jesus’ truth and love trampled on and mocked in the public square. Let’s make this a “holy pain,” united with Jesus’ sorrow and not let it escape as anger or hatred. “Pray for those who persecute you.”

Wound of joy
We feel another kind of wound when we are confronted with something bigger and more beautiful than we can take in—a vast mountaintop view or a baby’s smile—anything that brings us to tears of joy or gratitude. This, too, unites us with the heart of Christ, whose joy is in loving the Father beyond all imagining, which love vents itself in the Holy Spirit, who is love.

Our hearts share with Jesus the very joy of the Holy Trinity. Because God is infinite and we are finite, the stretching of our hearts to contain it feels like a wound of love that yearns to possess such infinite love. And yet, it’s true: “Jesus has bestowed on us the precious and very great promises, so that through them you may come to share in the divine nature, after escaping from the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire” (2 Peter 1:4).

I pray you are allowing your heart to be stretched this Lent, as you walk with Jesus in the sorrow and joy of his Sacred Heart “which has so loved men.”

Love always,
Rose