‘Look for the healers’

LOUISVILLE — For Dr. Yolanda Pierce, the author of the new book “The Wounds are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory Into Justice and Healing,” dealing with our wounds is “part of the work that we have to do towards the goal of justice.”

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By remembering and telling our own difficult stories — which in turn helps others deal with their own wounds, deep and painful as they may be — “we actually then have the capacity to move forward,” Pierce, the Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, told hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong during the most recent edition of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” which can be heard here.

Pierce cited this example: during the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people were at times thrown overboard if they were dying or suffering from disease. Sometimes enslaved people elected to jump overboard. “The poet Lucille Clifton talks about how the entire Atlantic Ocean is littered with the bones of formerly enslaved people. She calls it ‘a bridge of ivory,’” Pierce said. “I’m thinking about the ways we forget about those bones. We forget what’s buried at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and that amnesia doesn’t allow us to heal.” Instead of forgetting, “we are called to put flesh on bones.”

It's a story full of survival and horror, “but it’s also a story about possibility,” Pierce said. “For me, as a daughter of the Black church, as a minister and as a theologian, these stories help me remember the biblical text. But they also help me remember my own sacred history — how God was present then and is present now. Remembering the bones — even if that is a terrible story to tell, even if it causes me wounds or distress because I have to remember this history — it’s a way to put flesh on some of these historical accounts.”

An important field of study for Pierce is osteobiography, which she defined as “the way anthropologists and others use the bones of people to tell the story.”

“Even though we have these whitewashed bones, they tell us about the people,” Pierce said. Despite the bones being broken and belonging to people worked nearly to death, examining them carefully helps us “recognize how much pain and trauma is connected” to those remains. “It’s curious to me how we don’t often reflect theologically about the bones, because it’s painful.”

“I’ve always been curious about a nation that wants us to forget but a faith that says part of our responsibility as people of faith is to remember,” Pierce said.

Wounds large and small

Different wounds require different kinds of wound care, she said.

“Whether a wound looks big or small had very little to do with how well it heals,” Pierce said. A tiny paper cut that’s uncared for can become septic and cause infection. On the other hand, people sometimes recover from multiple gunshot wounds.

“We’re talking about justice, and we’re always talking about equity as well,” she said. “Sometimes you have to do more wound care. You have to give antibiotics, and you might have to give surgery. The equity portion is to say, ‘I want everyone to heal.’”

Pierce noted that in ancient Greek, the root words for “salvation” and “healing” are the same.

“To be made whole means you have enough food to eat, a safe place to live and access to education,” she said. “These are things we think about in terms of justice, but they’re things we should think about in terms of healing. … That’s a healing ministry, but it’s also a saving ministry. Those two things go hand in hand, and when we get ahold of that, we get ahold of the fullness of God’s justice.”

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“That’s the work, and it’s hard,” Pierce said. “It’s not attractive work necessarily. I love the soteriology language, but the actual day-to-day healing — the actual day-to-day making sure people are safe and well and whole — that is in fact the work God has called us to do.”

“Before we get to the passion of Christ and all the details about the resurrection and how we understand end times,” she said, “we have the model of a savior who said, ‘I want to be sure that people are fed.’ It seems to me that’s a good place to start.”

When Catoe brought up Thomas’ refusal to believe that Christ was risen unless he could touch the wounds himself, Pierce said that doubt was the genesis for her book project.

“I’m a doubter. Doubt is probably my natural inclination,” she said. The revelation was “as simple as this: What does it mean if we take seriously that the post-resurrection body of Jesus, fully human and fully divine, who we understand is the son of God — that this post-resurrection body still had wounds?”

“All this means to me,” she said, “is that healing takes time.”

“Why do we think we can automatically heal from all the things that bruise us?” she asked. What if we think about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances “not as faith and doubt or who believes and who doesn’t believe. What if we think about it as radical vulnerability,” Christ “being willing to be vulnerable with the wounds and the scars?”

It's about having enough vulnerability to “show someone the wounds and the scars you might otherwise want to cover up. It’s about this deep human engagement. For me,” Pierce said, “that shifted how I understood that story.”

The wounds we share with others matter, she said. They can “bear witness to the atrocity and they can also bear witness to the survival. In the case of Jesus, the wounds bear witness to the resurrection, the greatest thing we can imagine. What if we are sharing with one another the wounds and our scars of healing, our surviving, our thriving — the possibility of life even after we’ve been wounded? There’s some really good theology happening there.”

Healing work is of course messy work, she said. “I think we sterilize our understanding of what it means to be in the trenches in our faith,” she said. “It’s no wonder, of course, that the disreputable are the people Jesus chooses to be with instead of the people in clean, comfortable, elite spaces.”

Fred Rogers, himself an ordained Presbyterian pastor and beloved children’s television pioneer, used to tell children to “look for the helpers.” For Pierce, it’s “look for the healers.”

“When we want to see God’s justice in the world, where we want to see where our theology and our faith meets practice, praxis — where theory meets practice — look for the healers, and by healers I don’t mean supernatural snake oil salesmen,” Pierce said. “I mean those places where people are taking seriously the human and spiritual roots to people, the people who are devoting their lives and energy and attention to making sure others are being healed and made whole.”

“When we look for those spaces,” Pierce said, “that’s where God is.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.