From Wounded Feeler to Wounded Healer
For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.
It was September 2001. And that thing, the thing that defined an entire decade and generation, hadn’t happened yet. I was nine, in fourth grade, and headed to school on a cloudy and sunny Tuesday in southern Oregon.
Pretty normal phenomenon, right? Most kids go to school in September. But this was different for yours truly.
This was my first day in “school” school. I had been homeschooled from kindergarten to third grade up to that point. For the most part, it was pretty dope. I could plow through math textbooks in a few weeks, reread the history textbooks about presidents over and over to impress my grandparents, and occasionally memorize scripture for literal nickels and dimes. My brother Zack was incredible at it. I felt like I lagged behind. The best part of being homeschooled though? When the phone rang. Strange, I know, but let me explain. My mom is a very social person. Many people now and many people then come to her for advice, for understanding, for love, for attention. And since all of those things require great durations of time? Whenever the phone rang, the Keller kids got a half day of school. If it was an old family friend or relative? Maybe an entire day off. Homeschooled life was weird and makes you weird, but it was normal for me and for us.
Anyway, in September 2001 new things came on. Money was tight, as is often the case for average people. My mom got a new job. My dad was scrapping and busting his behind in overtime. My brother was a junior in high school, slowly feeling the weight of popularity and puka shell necklaces and Avril Lavigne. I avoided my sister at all costs; an encounter with her led to mild pestering at best or outright invasive altercation at worst (an exaggeration, but I am remembering how my nine year old self felt about it). She was in 8th grade and was going to the same private Christian school as me. Yet she was on the complete opposite side of the building. And remember the pestering bit? I was afraid to ask her for help.
See on those fateful early September days, I sobbed incessantly every time I was dropped off. A nine year old boy… cried for forty-five minutes straight for an entire week every day I got dropped off by my mom. I didn’t know where to put my backpack. I don’t know why I remember that bit but I do vividly. All the kids stared at me, a balance of confused concern and relieved “saving face” because they weren’t bizarre like this hypersensitive kid.
But then on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, everyone’s problems stopped. And everyone’s eyes were glued to the tv because planes were crashing into buildings.
The label “wounded healer” is based on ancient Greek myth. According to legend, Asclepius, a doctor and physician of the BC era, recognized his own wounds and their potential to be a healing agent for others. Soon afterward he built a sanctuary at Epidaurus where others could be healed of their wounds. This involved a laborious process of cleansing the body so as to transcend straight to the “soul.” Afterward, the patient would go to sleep and either receive a healing dream from the gods… or be bitten by a snake.
Thankfully I’m no healing “god” and I don’t have any snakes.
The first place I heard this term, however, was from Henri Nouwen, one of the three of my “trinity” of Catholic-ish writers I love, love, love to read (Brennan Manning and Thomas Merton are the others). It’s been a minute since I read it, as this book gets blurred together by the slew of his other great books. Yet the term immediately leapt out of the page in resonance for my entire life.
Pretty soon here I’m shipping off to grad school for counseling. This realization to “therapize” others has been dormantly known in my heart for years, but through my own prodigal son style wanderings, I’ve avoided this call of Christ. A call I’ve had for my life ever since I first worked at TYM as an awkward, navel-gazing 16 year old.
TYM, Today’s Youth Matter, is a non-profit based close to the Bay Area. Their focus is helping at-risk youth, sending them out into a nearby wooded wilderness with a bunch of high schoolers to survive off the land and to sing goofy songs and to engage with serious culture shock. How my high school buddy and I didn’t accidentally forget or seriously injure our little guys is a full blown miracle. We never got a second of sleep trying to keep our boys quiet for longer than fifteen minutes. But it was the best of times in the four year purgatory they call high school.
One kid, Dayvion, wasn’t in my tent. He was a rabble-rouser, always getting up in people’s business and causing strife. Shorter than most of the fourth or fifth graders present, there were three or four occasions he nearly clocked kids twice his size trying to “get his.”
Yet I liked this kid. I always ended up smirking watching him “front” with other campers. It didn’t make an iota of sense. He was a trouble-maker. He created so much more work for the campers, the high school staff, and the program director. But my heart surged outside of my body whenever I got to talk to him. I connected with the angst, the frustration, the desperation all of this “bad” behavior was communicating.
Fast forward a few days, quite a few arguments, and maybe one or two hugs later, and this little guy was unofficially a part of my tent. Something about our connection transcended logic. Even writing this now, I tear up even thinking about this little guy I only got to know for a little less than a week all those years ago. If for whatever reason you find this obscure blog from a twenty-something white guy you used to know, Dayvion, I hope you are doing well. I hope you know how much God will always love you.
This is the power of using your own weakness to understand the weaknesses of others. This is how empathy becomes the breeding ground for the transformative work of the Holy Spirit.
I remember empathy not being a buzz word like it is now when I was in high school. I remember feeling like being an empath was a curse.
I couldn’t perform then. I can’t perform now. My heart was always on my sleeve because I couldn’t fit it anywhere else. I was existential and reading Kierkegaard when I was 15, 16, 17. I was so out of place, out of touch, out of my own mind. Thank God, literally, for the few teachers I knew who connected so powerfully with me. Their lessons and curriculum was never in the classroom; it was during tear-soaked lunches, angst-ridden rants after the other students left. It was when I, being a kid with loving parents and good siblings, was contemplating suicide often. And having not a clue why.
One class, Mr. Gritters had us all calculate how many days “left” we all had to live. This was the kind of “Bible” class I always dreamed of having. Arguing about Bible verses got so tiring after years of hearing arrogant classmates and pompous teachers puffing their intellectual chests and bickering back and forth. We wrote some whopping number on an index card, something in the 10,000s range, and then he told us to turn the card. I’ll never forget the class waiting for at least a minute, which for a tech-addicted millennial is like eternity, before Mr. Gritters ended the silence by saying, “now write the number 1.”
I wrote it down, as did my peers. Then he gave the best “what would you do if this was your last day on earth” pitch I’ve ever heard. This was smack dab in the middle of my rich descent into suicidal thought. He asked us what we would want others to know us for. What our legacy would be. What we would be remembered for doing, even as young people.
I didn’t have the term for it like I do now, but on that fateful day in 2009 I would’ve told you that I was nothing but a wounded feeler. Someone who had big feelings for no reason at all and who nobody would ever like or understand. But now, if you asked me the same question? I think I would want to be known as a wounded healer. Someone who has big feelings often so that I might help others when they, too, get big feelings. I would want them to hear my voice whispering “you are not alone. You will never be alone.”
I struggle with the Old Testament. Sometimes it seems like Yahweh is kind of a jerk for no reason. This is due mainly to my lack of contextual awareness of the story of Israel but also because these stories were never explained in an emotionally compelling way. I was handed a tradition and a theology of “objectivity” which felt more like a tradition and theology of “heartlessness.” That is a cutting judgment, but it’s the way I felt after all those years in churches and private schools.
But if we flipped to the New Testament, read a Jesus story, and the pastor shut up and just let Jesus say what Jesus wanted to say, I felt so relieved. This Messiah guy totally got it. He was so kind to people who sucked at life. He was so harsh with people who were so harsh to those who sucked at life.
This connected to me because I felt a lack within since the time I was a wee little lad and first began to complain about everything. I just wasn’t a good Christian. I could never be. I didn’t read a daily devotion. Praying always felt really weird and awkward. And I always sensed I was a complete outsider at church, whether it be reformed, Baptist, non-denom, or whatever the new, hip church might have been at the time.
Yet occasionally the OT has some passages that make me sob just like that fourth grader who didn’t know where to put his backpack. Here is one.
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
There’s so much good crap here I don’t even know where to start. For one, this says, in a bunch of different ways in case our thick skulls don’t get it the first time, that this Messiah will take all of our bad stuff. All of our scars, all of our weakness, all of our sin, all of our struggle, all of our “suicidal thoughts.” We no longer have to endure anything in life alone. God is with us. That’s why they called Jesus Emmanuel. Second, this task Jesus undertook to save us was incredibly costly. A lot of times, Jesus’ life sucked. He was constantly misunderstood. Constantly verbally and ideologically assaulted (later, physically too). Even though He gave and gave and gave, so many people turned away from Him. He knows very well what it is like to be rejected. Third, a life of success is often marked by a lot of failure. Jesus didn’t imperially take over Rome like the Jews wanted him to. He failed their expectation of a conquering king. Additionally, as mentioned before, despite a lot of compelling parables, teachings, and scathing critique of the then accepted theology of His time, a lot of people did not end up following Him. He might’ve fed the five thousand, but when He was about to die, there was only one left of His twelve that were there with Him when He was on the cross.
The thing is though, I used to read things like I just wrote and feel intense guilt, borderlining on shame. Like it was proof of how much of a terrible person I was for putting Jesus up on that tree. While it is true that, like the passage in Isaiah says, He was, indeed, crushed for my iniquities, the next question we should ask is why would He do such a thing? Why is He doing this for a terrible sinner? What does He think about all these people who keep missing the mark over and over in life? Does He want me to follow Him out of a place of shame? Or does He want me to love Him deeply because He first loved me deeply?
I think Jesus is the clearest example of how to be a wounded healer. That great passage in Isaiah aside, I believe His whole life, ministry, death, and resurrection are signposts of how to heal others while still being broken yourself.
Disclaimer: I am NOT saying Jesus was morally broken. Obviously that’s not true, and we could find dozens of NT passages that point out His moral perfection. Moving on.
Jesus identified with the four thousand and the five thousand who were hungry. He wandered into the wilderness for forty days without food. Jesus understood the plight of being lowly regarded. His own disciples made fun of the fact that he grew up in Nazareth. So when He engages with women, tax collectors, and other outsiders, He is drawing from an understanding of not being on the “inside” in society. These people He always approached with tender mercy and reckless compassion. He made a fool of Himself by associating with the “least of sinners,” and yet changed the entire landscape of the world by doing so and teaching His followers to do the same. After all, the foolishness of God is better than the wisdom of men.
This is why He whispered to me when I first met Dayvion all those years ago. This is how He shouts to me when I work with the “bad” and “troubled” kids I do now. This is how He sings to me when I step into the brokenness and darkness of the beloved brothers and sisters around me. This is the Gospel; that we might be present to the pain of others and offer healing, using our own wounds to remind others that they are not alone in theirs. This is the model Jesus gave to us to heal others. This is the most compelling truth I have ever believed. This is why I could never fit my heart anywhere but on my sleeve; because by it being on my sleeve, others might be comfortable to reveal their own knowing that someone else understands.
I really hope that in these words you feel like someone understands. I hope that in this blog Jesus might whisper to you that He understands, too.
To conclude, I will quote Nouwen’s book, The Wounded Healer. Thank you Father Henri for helping me not feel alone:
Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.