Touch the Wounds

Several years ago, as part of a book club, we read I Want You to Be: On the God of Love (Notre Dame) by Tomás Halík, an enigma of a man. Halík, a Czech author and theologian, was secretly ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in East Germany and ministered “clandestinely” as part of the underground church in Czechoslovakia during the difficult final years of the communist regime there. He’s survived a lot; he’s not afraid to provoke.

Halík’s latest work, newly translated into English, is Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation (Notre Dame). I know some people skip prefaces and forewords and the like, but the preface to this English edition—dated “Easter 2020”—might be the most moving thing I’ve read all year. Writing during that season of such obvious vulnerability—the initial stages of a pandemic with no end in sight—Halík, a pastor to hurting people, sensed it was necessary to remind us that the risen Jesus was identified not by some kind of superhuman buoyancy, but by his very wounds.

“The wounded Christ is the real, living Christ,” he writes. “He shows us his wounds and gives us the courage not to conceal our own: we are permitted our own wounds.”