the marks of the shackles

"Even the Congo has tried to slip out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn't scarred. Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is a tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. All the old injuries have been renamed: Kinshasa, Kisangani. There never was a King Leopold, no brash Stanley, bury them, forget. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear the marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from." The Poisonwood Bible - Barara Kingsolver


I recently read The Poisonwood Bible, a book I had been meaning to get to for years. I was not disappointed. Barbara Kingsolver tells a compelling story of American missionaries caught up in the drama of the Congo's precipitate independence from Belgium. The story is masterfully told, or rather revealed, through the voices of five women, the wife and daughters of a brash, passionate, tormented southern Baptist (not to be confused with "Southern Baptist".) As a child of a Baptist minister I found some elements did not ring true (can there be a Baptist on earth who actually uses the Apocrypha?), but these were not enough to detract from the narrative, or from the author's considerable skill in creating five consistent personas with distinct voices.

There were several pages I dog-eared, but the passage I have come back to several times is this one. Kingsolver is commenting on the wholesale renaming of every place in the Congo/Zaire when the country was finally emancipated from Belgian control. In an effort to erase all vestiges of colonialism the new government apparently abolished the old place names and created new, African names to take the place of any names that made reference to Europe or Europeans.

I don't believe renaming is really the issue here, though it is a fascinating subject - how the ways in which we name things do or do not alter how we think or feel about them -. People have always chosen new names at baptisms, confirmation, taking Holy Orders, and other life changing moments in order to affirm that something new is beginning.

But I think the real question this passage deals with is what to do about wounds, injuries, injustices suffered in the past. Is it better to try to forget, to wipe out the memory, or to allow it to see the light of day; is it better to efface or to embrace our pain, our history, the scars that have made us who we are today.

A case can be made for either approach. Scripture itself encourages us through the example of the Apostle Paul to forget those things which are behind, to run the race before us; yet it also tells us to boast in our weaknesses, and reminds us to not forget what we used to be; to remember that we have been washed, cleansed, healed, made holy.

While there is nothing necessarily wrong with renaming places, people, events, (contemporary historians make a regular practice of it), we need to understand when dealing with our own history that calling something by a different name does nothing to change the underlying reality of what has been and what is. God is still the only one who can speak things into existence.

And I believe there is something to be said for scars. Even Jesus in his resurrected body retained his scars. They became part of his glory. We might do well to learn to love our own scars, even as we embrace our Lord's. If we forget, if we try to cover up where we've been, if we whitewash the past or hide it somehow we are left with the choices the narrator of this passage gives us: seeing ourselves a maimed and ugly, or spending a lifetime turning our faces away.

Christians have a quaint word for "the story of where you came from" - it's called your testimony. It's a story we should not be afraid to tell; a story we should embrace; a story we need to remember to know who we are today. Christ made it clear that he came as a Physician for the sick, the lame, the halt (I love that archaic term), the blind, the lepers. There is no inherent virtue, no glory in being uninjured, in having escaped somehow.

In The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver describes an African man whose face is covered with ritual scars which are unpleasant to the the narractor at first, but come to seem so much a part of who he is that they become beautiful in her eyes. I like to think that we might all come to the place where we can treat our own scars, and those of others with reverence and tenderness, since they remind us that chained is where we all have been.



*The present Democratic Republic of the Congo has changed its names several times throughout history. It has been Congo Free State (1855-1908), Belgian Congo (1908-1960), Congo-Leopoldville/Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960-1966), Congo-Kinshasa (1966-1971), Zaire (1971-1997).