This is a re-post from five years ago.  I was thinking about it this morning and thought I would share it with you again.  Christ had a wounded Heart also.

I did a series of posts on Fr. Iain Matthew’s writing back in July.  I have been re-reading him again.  He’s one of the people I go back to regularly–especially if I’m experiencing some kind of pain.  Because pain is precisely where, Fr. Iain says, Christ is waiting to meet us.  “The place of poverty within us is the threshold where Christ stands.”  He advises us strongly not to avoid our woundedness.  Each wound in our lives is the place where Christ wants to meet us.  The best thing to do is to make that place of pain a place of prayer,

the place within us where not everything is all right, where the wound that is in you aches. John [of the Cross] says: go there.  Go to that place of need, because that is a threshold at which Christ stands; our need is an evidence of God.

It is natural to flee from the place where that hunger throbs. Still, John encourages us to go there. It is what beckons the divine. It is the threshold at which Christ stands. We hunger for him because he has touched us; we want him because he wants us. The wound is the print of the pledge upon us, the pledge of the Spirit who holds us from the abyss. John comments on his poem: we “have our feeling of longing, the sense of God’s absence” precisely there, “within our heart, where we have the pledge.”

And so, we simply stand before God in our pain, with our pain, making our need a prayer.  God loves to hear and answer the cry of the poor. And remember: Christ had a wounded Heart also.