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    Wounds Are Where Light Enters: Stories of God's Intrusive Grace
    Wounds Are Where Light Enters: Stories of God's Intrusive Grace
    Wounds Are Where Light Enters: Stories of God's Intrusive Grace
    Ebook141 pages2 hours

    Wounds Are Where Light Enters: Stories of God's Intrusive Grace

    By Walter Wangerin Jr.

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    About this ebook

    Many know the acclaimed author Walter Wangerin Jr., the storyteller who gave us the national bestseller The Book of the Duncow.

    In Wounds Are Where Light Enters, you’ll see how God’s love breaks into our lonely moments in unexplainable ways. Wangerin tells the stories of memorable characters facing the same struggles we all face as we try to trust in God’s faithfulness.

    Wounds Are Where Light Enters is a collection of stories that are warm, sometimes funny, sometimes not, but always taking unexpected turns to find the care of God in all the pathways of life.  In them we find the grace that enables us to live with the answers we see and the answers we don’t see.  In this collection we meet Arthur Bias, the retired black police officer who loves those who hate, Agnes Brill, the shrill piano teacher of patience, Junie Piper, precious of the homeless, Melvin, who honors his aging mother by honoring the little girl she has become, Lucian, the lover of thieves, and Blue Jack, the hammer of God. 

    Readers will discover in these stories a powerful display of God’s working in the lives of all of us.  They’ll find a place where he works even in the dark, even in the struggles, even in the wounds.  This is the place where God’s light enters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZondervan
    Release dateNov 21, 2017
    ISBN9780310350347
    Author

    Walter Wangerin Jr.

    Walter Wangerin Jr. is widely recognized as one of the most gifted writers writing today on the issues of faith and spirituality. Known for his bestselling The Book of the Dun Cow, Wangerin’s writing voice is immediately recognizable, and his fans number in the millions. The author of over forty books including The Book of God, Wangerin has won the National Book Award and the New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year Award. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.

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      Book preview

      Wounds Are Where Light Enters - Walter Wangerin Jr.

      PART 1

      WHERE IS JESUS?

      CHAPTER 1

      WHERE JESUS IS

      In 1948 little Wally was small enough to crawl under the church pews, young enough to be hauled up one-handed by his mother. At the same time, he was old enough to suffer a spiritual crisis. Wally had never seen Jesus with his own eyes. Surely, the Savior should be strolling through the rooms of God’s house.

      Wally was convinced that all the other Sunday worshipers had seen the Lord face-to-face or they wouldn’t be singing hymns without anxiety, nor would they merely murmur their prayers. They didn’t have to shout, for their Jesus was nearby, wearing a robe and a rope and sandals, eating sandwiches, and drinking soda pop.

      Maybe Jesus was hiding from Wally particularly. Maybe he was mad at Wally for some sin. But what sin? Wally couldn’t remember. But shouldn’t a kid remember a sin so bad that Jesus would reject him? Wally tried hard to remember so that he could say that he was very, very sorry.

      The preacher preached gobbledygook. During his sermons, then, little Wally slipped from the pew-seat to the floor and peered through a forest of anklebones and pant cuffs and shoes and shoelaces. No dice. Not long and his mother grabbed him by the shirt collar, dragged him to the pew, and clapped him to her side with an incontrovertible grip.

      She was a very strong woman, his mother, and her will was absolute. Once in Glacier National Park a ranger said, You meet a bear, give him the right-of-way. Don’t look into its eyes. Don’t run. Move slowly, slowly away.

      When Virginia did meet a bear coming out of the woods and ambling toward her tent, she went after it, whacking two pans together and yelling, "Not my kids!"

      The bear said, Woof, and turned away.

      But Wally, he remained obdurate.

      I wanted to see Jesus!

      One Sunday, then, he clutched his crotch and jiggled. He said to his mother, I got to go pee.

      She said, If you have to, you have to. But come straight back.

      The heart of a child is capable of great desolation—and thereby of great cunning. The more I felt abandoned, the sharper became my baby wit, trying to figure out where Jesus was concealing himself. I thought I might catch him off guard in, say, the pastor’s office. I looked there but found him not. I looked into the roaring boiler room. In the church kitchen. In the boy’s bathroom. And then, with a fearful thrill, I ventured the Holy of Holies, the girl’s bathroom. Boys never passed it by without spasms of awe.

      The room had the aroma of woman-mystery. Along one wall was a counter before which were small cushioned stools, on which were little spray bottles of perfume and boxes of Kleenex, and behind which was an elaborate, wood-framed mirror, but no Jesus. On the other hand, there were two metal potty stalls. Nervously I swung their doors open, one after the other—then returned to my mother, a gaunt, lost little boy.

      The next thought that occurred to me was downright brilliant.

      When the pastor turned to face the altar and began to chant, I couldn’t believe that the deep bass voice was his. This was a pale, bespectacled man, too short and too mild to produce such a voice. So what? So he was only pretending to chant. That voice had to be the glory of the Lord! Now, the altar was a long, wooden affair, shaped something like a coffin. That’s where Jesus was hiding.

      As soon as the service had ended and the people were filing out of church, I crept up the chancel steps and tiptoed to the altar. Then, suddenly, I jumped (booga-booga!) behind it. Lo, the altar had no back to it. A dusty floor, an old hymnal, a broken chair, but no Jesus. My Lord was not lying in there, reading the Bible or sipping orange juice.

      The heart of a child can grow heavy with sorrow and cold with loneliness. I knew that I was not a pretty boy. Moon-faced was what my mother called me. Wooly-headed. Maybe I was an embarrassment to look at.

      My life was over.

      Sometime later again, during the same worship service, I noticed for the first time what my mother must have been doing all the years of my life.

      The ghostly preacher faced the altar and said, Bread, and then he said, My body. Everyone was standing. My mother was standing.

      The preacher said, Blood. Drink.

      Gruesome.

      The preacher turned to us and said, The peace of the Lord, and everyone sang, Amen.

      Then a man came up the aisle telling the people in each pew that they should go on and walk into the chancel. There was a railing between the people and the pastor, and a long cushion on the people’s side where they could kneel. The pastor was moving along that rail.

      When it was our pew’s turn I noticed a change in my mother. Her head was bowed and her hands were folded, you know, like the angel in our stained-glass window. Like everyone else at the rail, she knelt. But the most astonishing thing was that when the pastor came to her, she put out her tongue and the pastor stuck a little cracker to it, and my mother chewed and swallowed—just like a baby eating Pablum! Then he tipped a big golden cup to her lips. A sippy cup! And Virginia Wangerin drank! This was not the woman who could scare bears. This was not the mother so strong that she could haul a kid right off the floor with one hand only. This was—this was different from anything I’d seen before. I mean everything was different.

      When she came floating back to our pew, my mother’s face was beatific, was the face of an innocent little girl.

      And when she sat down beside me, my mother smelled different. It was as if she’d come back in a cloud of a mystic, rich aroma. She sat down, bowed her head, and began to move her lips. Praying, I thought. I kneeled on the pew-seat and put my nose close to her face. She looked up at me with that old irritation, but I said, What’s that?

      She said, "What’s what?"

      That smell, I said. That smell in your nose?

      "Oh, that, she said. It’s what I drank."

      What did you drink?

      Wine, Wally.

      No, I said, "what’s that inside of you?"

      Virginia sat a while in thought. Then she said, "Blood. It’s the blood of Jesus. Jesus is inside me."

      Oh, my Jesus! My mother is your room!

      After all the people had finished kneeling and eating and sipping, and when all were in their pews again, we stood up and sang, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word—for mine eyes have seen thy salvation . . ."

      CHAPTER 2

      A BUNCH-BACKED OLD WOMAN

      On a raw March afternoon I took my daughter to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. I had been lecturing and giving readings in the church where President George Washington is reputed to have worshiped.

      In those days I had promised to take my children on a travel-trip, each by each, wherever I’d been invited to lecture: Joseph to St. Louis, Matt to a Bulls’ game in Chicago, Talitha to San Francisco and Alcatraz. So now it was Mary’s turn. She was ten years old.

      The vast, vaulted sanctuary took my breath away. As for Mary, she was simply curious. She said, Where’s Jesus?

      The space echoed with the distant voices of companies of people: tourists wandering about with cameras looped around their necks; students taking notes; devout nuns kneeling and counting their beads and murmuring prayers; priests moving their lips, mumbling Mass in the side chapels, looking to me like black, solitary, lonely, and melancholy figures; and the homeless who had staked claims to tiny territories, lying under worn-out coats, beside grocery bags filled with their few possessions.

      Of course they would be here. It was a biting weather outside, and though St. Patrick’s was not much warmer, it gave protection against the ripping New York winds.

      Actually, I had not brought my daughter here to sightsee. I wanted to teach her things like the cruciform architecture, the Bible stories in the stained-glass windows, the marble columns, the carvings of saints, the symbols and the traditions of the ancient Church.

      We moved slowly up the left side of the nave.

      Nave, I said. That word comes from a Latin word that means ‘ship.’ Sometimes Christians thought of their churches like big boats floating on the waves of a bad world. The boats kept them safe from the sea-swells of wickedness and danger and war. They were sailing, you see, to the shores of heaven.

      Mary nodded. Maybe she understood. Maybe not. She said, Where’s Jesus?

      I pointed to banks of slender, fire-flickering tapers, spilling a watery light on the sand that held them upright. I said, "See those candles, Mary? Each one signifies—I mean, stands for—a prayer

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