The Wound at the Center of Everything

And the healing that can only happen when we stop hiding

When I was 40 years old, I got cancer.

It was the kind of diagnosis that yanks your hand off the steering wheel of your life. Suddenly, everything slowed. Or maybe everything sharpened. Either way, it changed me.

I had no choice but to fall.

But what surprised me… is that the falling became a kind of rising.

Not instantly. Not cleanly. But slowly, gently, over time, I began to realize what Richard Rohr describes as the “falling upward” of spiritual transformation.

And that’s when I first began to see:
There’s a wound at the center of everything.

Not just my story.
But everyone’s.

The Incurable Wound

Rohr says it plainly:

“In order to arrive at the second half of life, you have to realize there is an incurable wound at the heart of everything.”

For years, I tried to fix it.
Make sense of it.
Muscle my way around it.
Pray my way out of it.

But somewhere along the way, maybe in a hospital room, or a whispered prayer, or in the eyes of someone else who was holding their own ache, I started to believe that this wound wasn’t a detour from the spiritual journey.

It was the journey.

The Wound We All Carry

For a long time, I thought my pain made me different. Marked. Set apart.

But in the last five years or so, I’ve come to believe something deeper and truer:
The wound I carry is the same wound everyone carries.

It has different names.
Different stories.
Different shapes.

But it lives at the center of every life, the ache of being human in a world that cannot give us what only God can.

And when I began to see that… everything shifted.

I no longer looked at people through the lens of judgment or disappointment.

I began to see each person as someone doing the best they can with the wound they’ve been given.

And that, right there, opened the door to compassion.

We Can’t Heal Ourselves (But We Can Be Healed)

There was a time I believed that if I worked hard enough, prayed long enough, or performed well enough, I could heal myself.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Healing, as I’ve come to understand it, doesn’t come from self-improvement.
It doesn’t come from pretending we’re fine.
It doesn’t even come from being right.

Healing comes from being honest.
And being held.
And not being alone.

The wound doesn’t go away. But something happens when we live vulnerably and honestly in community with others who are also learning to stop pretending.

We realize that God isn’t waiting for us at the end of our healing.

God is the One doing the healing:
Through grace,
Through presence,
Through love shared in our weakness.

Falling Into Wisdom

Rohr writes:

“Your persistent but failed attempts to heal the wound… your final surrender to it… will ironically make you into a wise and holy person.”

I don’t claim to be wise.
But I am learning to surrender.

I’m learning that holiness isn’t about escape from pain.
It’s about presence in pain, our own and others’.
It’s about being willing to sit with the ache without trying to tie it up with a bow.
It’s about trusting that even when the wound doesn’t close, love still gets in.
Maybe even because of the wound.

Reflection

• What wound have you been trying to fix or hide?

• What would it look like to bring that wound into community, into honest relationship with others who are also hurting?

• How is God meeting you not in spite of your brokenness, but through it?

There is an incurable wound at the heart of everything.
And that is not the end of the story.
It’s the beginning of love.
And maybe, just maybe, the beginning of wisdom.