A friend sent me a quote yesterday from Jeanette
Winterson’s New Memoir, Why Be Happy When
You Could Be Normal. It’s the kind of thing (like her title) that gets a
lot of juice out of a few words,
“What we notice in stories, is the nearness of the wound to
the gift.”
In her memoir Ms. Winterson lets us know right off that she
knows about wounds:
---
"I'm locked out and sitting on the doorstep again. It's
really cold and I've got a newspaper under my bum and I'm huddled in my duffel
coat. A woman comes by and I know her. She gives me a bag of chips. She knows
what my mother is like. Inside our house the light is on. Dad's on the night
shift, so she can go to bed, but she won't sleep. She'll read the Bible all
night, and when Dad comes home, he'll let me in, and he'll say nothing, and
she'll say nothing, and we'll act like it's normal to leave your kid outside
all night, and normal never to sleep with your husband. And normal to have two
sets of false teeth, and a revolver in the duster drawer . . ."
"Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear. ...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world."
“What we notice in stories, is the nearness of the wound to the gift.”
I’m always so grateful to writers and storytellers who give
us an honest glimpse into a life that, though desperately challenging, is still
a life worth living.
All of us have wounds. Some more than others. Some are
wounded so deeply that it’s hard for many of us to fathom.
Thank God that many people who recognize their woundedness
and seek healing…find it.
How? When?
The answers to these questions unfold over
a lifetime.
But as to the question of Where, Ms. Winterston gives us an
answer Now. Almost always, maybe even always,
we find healing in “the nearness of the wound to the gift.”
And so we come to trust, over time, though we are never
healed always and forever, that every time we are in the grip of our wounds we
are also near the source of our healing.
