“…the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man.”

How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points? How many women who are not mothers spend years mothering some mysteriously wounded man? How many apparently strong and successful men seek out love like a kind of topical balm they can apply to their wounded bodies and egos when they have withdrawn from combat? Herein lies the great differences between divine weakness, the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man. Two human weaknesses only intensify each other. But human weakness plus Christ’s weakness equals a supernatural strength.

-Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (2013).

You’ll have to forgive me if I quote from this small book multiple times as I make my way slowly through it.  Wiman’s observations – and the words he employs to make them – are the sort that beg to be shared.