Touch the Wounds: On Suffering, Trust, and Transformation - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Tomáš Halík is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scholar. He is a professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague, pastor of the Academic Parish by St. Salvator Church in Prague, president of the Czech Christian Academy, and a winner of the Templeton Prize. His books, which are bestsellers in his own country, have been translated into nineteen languages and have received several literary prizes. He is the author of numerous books, including I Want You to Be: On the God of Love, winner of the Catholic Press Association Book Award in Theology and Foreword Reviews' INDIES Book of the Year Award in Philosophy.

Gerald Turner has translated numerous Czech authors, including Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, and Ludvík Vaculík, among others. He received the US PEN Translation Award in 2004.

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We’re part of a world full of wounds. For many people, the dark cloud of pain conceals the certainty of faith; the face of a benevolent God is hidden in the darkness that we are passing through together. But the Easter scene that inspired this book can speak to us with enormous urgency precisely at such a time. It is through Jesus’s wounds that the Apostle Thomas sees God.

Let us not seek God in the storms and earthquakes. A God enthroned somewhere beyond the world, sending upon His children cruel punishments, the like of which would rightly land any parent in court, truly does not exist, thankfully. Atheists rightly maintain that such a god is simply a projection of our fears and desires. The vengeful god used by preachers, who trade on the world’s misfortunes to arouse fear, and exploit it for their religious ends, is simply a product and servant of their own vindictiveness: they use it as a stick to beat people that they hate, and as a curse and punishment for what they themselves reject or fear. Their god of vengeance is simply a fictitious extension of their own malice and vindictiveness. When they brandish a God who punishes us with wars, natural disasters and disease, they commit the sin of invoking God’s name in vain. They are replacing the father of Jesus with a bloodthirsty pagan idol that thrives on the blood of human sacrifice.

Like the prophet Elijah on Mount Horeb, we are more likely to find God in a quiet breeze, or in the unaffected expressions of love and solidarity, and in everyday heroism generated in the dark hours of calamities. It is in those expressions of love and service, which restore our hope and the courage to live and not give up, that true holiness manifests itself. That is where God happens.

We can observe the wounds of this world in the way that Pilate observed the scourged Jesus: Ecce, homo! Behold the man! Is this man covered in wounds “without dignity, without beauty” really a man still? The mob to which Pilate shows Christ, covered in wounds, is like a wild beast, incensed even more by the smell of blood: Crucify him!

But on the way to the crucifixion Veronica emerges from the crowd. Jesus imprints the image of his face forever on the veil of compassion. Whoever wipes the sweat and blood from the wounds of our world may see and preserve the face of Christ. And whoever gazes from the gloom of their doubts – like “doubting Thomas” – at the wounds on the body of our world and in the hearts of our neighbors, may – precisely through that wounded humanity, through that image of the humanity that the Son of God took upon Himself – see God. “I and the Father are one,” said the one who bore our wounds.

Scripture doesn’t express the unity of the Father and the Son in dogmatic definitions, but in a dramatic story. Part of that drama are also the moments of painful abandonment, as witness Jesus’s cry on the cross. Sometimes the time between the darkness of the cross and the dawn of Sunday morning is long and arduous. The present book seeks also to address those who are enduring such moments – and it is not intended to offer them “religious opium” – sweet-sounding clichés of tawdry pious reassurance.

Let us not expect faith to provide the answers to every question. Instead we should derive from it the courage to step into the cloud of mystery and bear life’s many open questions and paradoxes. St Paul tells us that here on earth we see only in part, as in a mirror, as in a riddle. Faith mustn’t stop seeking and questioning, it must not petrify into an ideology. It must not abandon its openness to an eschatological future.