And not giving up trying is at the heart of wholeness and holiness. Our interior scars might be weakened parts of our selves that declare our damaged histories, but they also demonstrate that we haven’t given up trying – that is, if we haven’t given up trying. “Then you will be satisfied to let God lead you to sanctity by paths that you cannot understand.” “Be content that you are not yet a saint,” Thomas Merton prescribes. Besides, they’re good reminders to avoid what led to the original injuries in the first place, and they’ll make us sympathetic toward those with scars and injuries of their own, make us more generous toward them, more kind.Įven so, like Isaiah and Peter, we’re still terribly embarrassed by our sinful scars, and so we tend to draw back from the One who seeks to heal us and deputize us.
It’ll be a second intention kind of healing, taking much time, leaving weakness in its wake, and almost always leaving nasty scars.īut gaping lesions have to be filled up with something, and scar tissue is better than nothing. God can always heal us, but the cavernous holes in our spirits, our psyches, our emotions and equilibrium, will not cover over easily. But more often they’re simply collateral damage that we suffer as a result of dumb choices and selfish behavior. That would mean that God himself creates our wounds: precise, orderly, divine incisions in our souls that are meant to bring about miraculous healing while we passively sit back and await the outcome.Īren’t we responsible for our own wounds? Some of them are downright self-inflicted, serious, and messy. There is no healing by first intention in the spiritual life. It’s an epiphany moment, an encounter with incarnated divinity, and it causes Simon Peter to collapse and confess his own unworthiness, his own deep scars – going so far as to direct the God-man to scram: “Depart from me, Lord,” Peter pleads, “for I am a sinful man.” But Jesus calls him anyway, without even an Isaiah-like healing, and Peter, like James and John, drops everything to follow him. Then, in the Gospel, we see a crew of fishermen marveling at a miraculous catch of fish orchestrated by Jesus. “Here I am,” he tells the Lord, “send me!” Yet God (through his angel) intervenes, the imperfections are addressed, and the prophet steps up to his heavenly commission. He was “a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.” Seriously scarred, in other words. In contrast, Isaiah was plagued by his inadequacy. The first reading had Isaiah cowering before the majesty and glory of the Lord, and overawed by the angelic beings proclaiming their praise. It was last Sunday’s Mass readings that got me thinking about incisions, wounds, and lingering scars. It takes longer, it’s unsightly, and it results in an area considerably weaker compared to the surrounding skin. Since the gap is so large, there’s no mechanism for healthy tissue to fill the void, so the body substitutes scar tissue instead. The edges can be jagged and hard to bring together, and they may be left open to allow nature to take its course - which is healing by second intention.
Other wounds, however, are not so tidy - like extensive traumatic injuries and bad bedsores. Healing by first intention is usually relatively rapid and thorough, with minimal scarring and limited loss of tissue integrity. The cut is bound together by sutures or the like, and so there’s direct communication between the separated sides as the tissue re-building commences. Some wounds are clean and even – like the incisions that surgeons make – and so they heal by what clinicians call first intention.
It’s the same process, more or less, for all kinds of tissue disruption beyond the most superficial ones, although the results vary widely depending on a variety of factors.Ĭhief among these, perhaps, is how clean the original wound was and how closely its edges can be brought together in order to facilitate the repair. Part of our classroom time was spent talking about the wound healing process - from inflammatory response and new tissue proliferation to maturation, remodeling, and restoration of function. So, surgery generally involves some kind of incision, some kind of wound.
#Wound transee oruna tradable skin#
It requires getting past the superficial layers of our skin in order to manipulate, remove, and/or introduce structures underneath. One of the most important of these is monitoring surgical incisions for signs of infection and other problems.īy definition, surgery is invasive. My students just finished a unit on perioperative nursing - the nursing responsibilities and interventions associated with caring for surgical patients.
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