Christ’s wounds, our wounds, and the possibility of flourishing

In Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lent Book, Bishop Erik Varden, OCist, of Norway, guides readers more deeply into Christ’s wounds while also helping us to see our own more clearly and not fear bringing them to our Lord.

The book is structured around three themes: the affliction of wounds, the transformation of wounds in Christ, and the flourishing that may be enabled by understanding the relationship of our wounds to Christ’s. The centerpiece of the book is a fabulous medieval poem about the wounds endured on the Cross, accompanied by Varden’s thoughtful, engaging reflections on one section of the poem at a time, wound by wound. The author of the poem was Arnulf of Leuven (1200–1248), who, like Varden, was a Cistercian monk.

Given the persistence of wounds in our lives and thus across the months of the calendar, Varden’s “Lenten” book lends itself both to enriching our approach to Good Friday during Lent and to reading at other times of the year as well.

I appreciate how Varden starts off at a gentle pace to allow time to consider the ways we understand—and misunderstand—the term “wounds.” Varden notes, for example, “the illusion” of some that wounds “do not exist.” He observes how trying to hide a wound can result in its impact growing instead of disappearing.

“Such can be the legacy of trauma,” writes Varden, “especially of trauma sustained early in life, that it seems to acquire an autonomous, ordering force in the forging of a destiny”; a person “may be convinced that their life’s task is essentially the bearing of this wound, as if it were some sort of Sisyphus’s stone, and that a moment’s inattention to the task would be fatal.” At another extreme, “wounds are paraded”; but to what end? Varden steers us away from these two extremes.

A central question Varden asks is, “By what means may I understand and experience Christ’s wounds not just in juridical terms, as the providential means by which God chose to ‘take away’ sin, but as the living source of a remedy by which sin is cured and humanity’s wounds, my wounds, are healed?” He also highlights the need to understand wounds in their context. “A wound,” he explains, “has no integrity. It feeds on what was once whole.”

Throughout the book, Varden reflects on the relationship of our own wounds to those of Christ. After all, merely seeing or hearing the word “wounds” evokes one’s own wounds. Varden shows us how Arnulf raises our horizon far beyond our own wounds. “The poem,” Varden tells us, “calls on me to make an act of dispossession. I am asked to abandon fixation on my own misery. What matters now is simply to have eyes for the work Love accomplishes.”

It is within the paradox of our Lord being wounded as part of our salvation that our Catholic vocabulary related to “wounds” can embrace concepts our culture does not associate with wounds, such as “love,” “flourishing,” “benefit,” “comfort,” and even “gratitude.”

For example, Varden explores “how our wounds, healing, may turn to flourish, readying us to be of benefit and comfort to others.” And Arnulf reflects:

We, who are wounded, give thanks
for such great love,
O you who love sinners, restoring
those who have been broken,
sweet father of the poor.

Significantly, Arnulf reflects on various wounds, not in the abstract, but rather present at the Cross before the specific wounds of Christ. For instance, in the meditation on the wounds to Christ’s feet, “Ad pedes,” Varden explains how Arnulf’s perspective, “prostrate before Christ’s crucified feet,” shapes the way Arnulf experiences those wounds. And Varden adds, “Were more theology written from this vantage point, one would be spared a great deal of nonsense.”

In reflecting on the section of the poem about the wounds to Christ’s knees, “Ad genua,” Varden, a convert, shares how perplexed he was as a non-Catholic boy when he discovered the “counter-intuitive” practice of kneeling during a visit to a Catholic church in Croatia. Next, his outsider’s view of kneeling leads to a wonderful reflection on the meaning of kneeling to receive Holy Communion, explaining that when we say, “Lord, I am not worthy…” it makes us conscious that “there is in all of us a soul-space in which we have knowledge of these things, but the key to that space is mostly lost.”

Where to find the key? “Perhaps,” suggests Varden, “it is only on our knees that we can find it.”

My first encounter with a crucifix was also perplexing. When I was an exchange student in Austria during high school, my host family brought me, a non-Catholic, to attend the outdoor Mass celebrated in 1986 by Pope John Paul II in Vienna. At the event, they handed out metal crucifixes modeled on the one atop the staff of Pope John Paul II. I received one. It horrified me. In the vaguely religious, mainline Protestant background of my childhood, “the cross” never had a body nailed to it. Varden explains what I did not know then, but understand now: “Since God displays himself to us wounded, we dare to come before him with our wounds.”

Wisely, alongside an English translation of the poem, Varden includes the poem in the original Latin. His translation is good, but was, nevertheless, my sole disappointment in this book. While his translation captures the basic meaning of the poem well, this translation carries neither rhyme nor meter—key features of Arnulf’s poem—over into English. In Latin, the meter of the poem has a dynamic rhythm, and the rhyme helps one line relate to the next.

Of course, poetry can be the most difficult genre of literature to translate. Trying to carry aspects such as rhyme and meter (even if a different meter) from one language to another can be wildly difficult, even verging on impossible. At any rate, I encourage readers, even those unfamiliar with Latin, to try to read at least a few lines of the Latin version out loud. This is a poem not only to read but to feel.

Yet, the mere fact that Varden provides this astonishingly little-known poem to us is a gift. As he notes, there is not even a critical text of the Latin original. Opportunity knocks for a scholar to publish one. Additional opportunities knock for Latinists to record and share readings of the poem in Latin online, and for Latinists with a talent for translating poetry to offer additional translations. (For lovers of Latin grammar, the Latin per Diem channel on YouTube offers a study of the final section of this poem, “Salve Caput Cruentatum,” on the wounds to Christ’s head.)

The theme of the closing section of the book is “Flourishing.” Through Christ’s death and Resurrection, the last word on wounds is not sadness; it is flourishing. Flourishing, however, is not automatic. Varden circles back to the word “wounds,” reminding us that understanding wounds requires the acceptance of sin. Failure to accept the fact of sin blocks sight of the horizon beyond the wounds. An example of this is how “Trauma in response to disaster often stems from the unbiblical fiction that the world is, and ought to be experienced as, all right.”

Indeed, not all is right. Nevertheless, in the paradox of paradoxes, it is acceptance of sin, and thus of the need for redemption, that can bring us to the vantage point from which we may see flourishing on the horizon. As Varden writes, “To declare [the world] instead sick, ‘a vale of tears’, is not pessimistic. It is to own that the world needs saving still; that Easter is not a past event, but present; that our life, our joy and hope depend on it.”

Near the end of the book, Varden takes the reader on a guided tour of the tremendous mosaic of “the cross as tree of life” in the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. This mosaic is the image on the cover of the book. “It contains,” Varden explains, “the principal elements we have met in Arnulf’s pathetic meditation.” Just as in Arnulf’s poem, this mosaic “shows that Christ’s redemptive work has a cosmic dimension. No life is untouched by it.”

In this book, Varden helps us understand the wounds Christ endured in His redemptive work and how they touch our lives.

Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lent Book 
by Erik Varden
Bloomsbury, 2025
Paperback, 192 pages