The Man Whose Skin Bore Witness

It is one of the strange paradoxes of our time though perhaps no stranger than the paradoxes of any time that we have become obsessed with the covering of our souls while simultaneously uncovering our bodies. We hide our true thoughts beneath a veil of pleasant civilities, yet we display our flesh with an almost pagan nonchalance. But there are some, the truly original souls, who reverse this process in a fashion that is both startling and illuminating. I encountered such a man last Thursday, and in him I found a walking parable.

He was sitting on a bench in a small park, where the trees seemed to bend inward as if listening to the secrets of passersby. I noticed him first because he seemed a riot of color in a world determined to be grey. Every visible inch of his skin his arms, his neck, what could be seen of his chest was adorned with tattoos. They were not the careful, deliberate artwork that has become fashionable among young people who wish to express themselves while paradoxically looking identical to one another. No, these were simpler, more varied, as if they had been collected rather than curated.

I sat beside him, not out of any particular boldness on my part, but because the only other bench was occupied by a man feeding pigeons with such enthusiastic generosity that the birds had formed a kind of feathered convention around him. So I sat, and because the silence between strangers in a park has always seemed to me a more artificial thing than conversation, I remarked upon the weather, which was behaving in that peculiarly uncertain way of being neither one thing nor another.

After a few moments of the verbal minuet that strangers dance, I asked him about his tattoos, for it seemed the elephant in the room, or rather, the elephants, for there were many, and to not inquire would have been a kind of dishonesty.

"Why," I asked, "have you chosen to adorn yourself so thoroughly?"

He smiled in a way that was both sad and triumphant, like a general surveying a battlefield where he has won at great cost.

"I haven't chosen them," he said. "Others have chosen them for me. I get a new one for every insult or cruel word that's been spoken to me."

I must have looked startled, for he laughed not bitterly, which would have been understandable, but with genuine amusement.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'm not mad. At least, no madder than anyone else. It's just my way of remembering."

"Remembering what?" I asked.

"That words matter. That they leave marks."

"I don't collect them out of self-pity or anger," he added, seeing my expression. "Each mark reminds me that I survived those words. And it reminds me to be careful with my own."

And so they do. The modern tendency a tendency I have often found myself yielding to is to say that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us. This is, of course, one of those lies we tell children, like the existence of the tooth fairy or the idea that hard work always guarantees success. It is a lie because words do hurt; they hurt terribly. Christ Himself spoke of the danger of words when He warned that we would be held accountable for every idle word spoken. He knew, being the Word made flesh, the power that words possess.

The tattooed man (whose name, I later learned, was Loser) had simply made visible what most of us keep hidden. Each word that had cut him he had transformed into an image, a permanent reminder inked into his skin. There, on his left forearm, was a small dagger "From my father, when I was seven. He told me I was weak, that I would never amount to anything." On his right shoulder, a broken mirror "My wife, the day she left." On his neck, a bird with clipped wings "My teacher, who told me to stop dreaming."

As he showed me tattoo after tattoo, I began to see his body as a kind of living book, a testament to all the ways humans can wound one another with mere breath and intent. And I wondered about my own body, unmarked by ink but surely as scarred as his beneath the skin.

How many tattoos would I bear if I followed Richard's practice? How many cruel words have I absorbed over the years, words that have shaped me as surely as the tattoo artist's needle had shaped him? The cutting remark from a childhood friend about my awkward gait. The dismissive comment from a university professor about my "provincial thinking." The whispered criticism from a colleague who thought I couldn't hear. Each of these had left its mark on me, invisible but indelible.

And then and this thought came with a force that nearly took my breath away how many tattoos had I inflicted on others? How many careless words had flown from my mouth like poisoned arrows, finding their mark in the hearts of those around me? The angry retort to my wife during an argument. The impatient dismissal of a child's question. The cutting joke at a friend's expense that earned laughter from others but left him silent. If all those who bear my verbal wounds were gathered together, what a gallery of pain they would represent.

The Christian life is, in many ways, a life of language. We begin with the Word that was with God and was God. We are baptized with words of blessing. We confess our sins in words, receive absolution in words, pray in words, worship in words. The Bible itself is God's Word, given to us in human words. Words matter immensely in the economy of salvation.

And yet, how carelessly we use them. How readily we forget that our words, like God's, have creative power the power to build up or tear down, to heal or to wound, to bless or to curse. St. James knew this when he wrote of the tongue that it is "a fire, a world of iniquity... an unruly evil, full of deadly poison."

As Loser and I continued to talk, I found myself thinking of Christ's body, marked not with tattoos but with wounds wounds endured willingly, wounds taken on Himself rather than inflicted on others. The crown of thorns, the scourge, the nails, the spear all these left their marks on Him. And unlike our wounds, which we usually suffer because we have no choice, or inflict on others out of our own pain, Christ's wounds were accepted in love, taken on willingly as the price of our redemption.

I wondered if Loser knew about those wounds, if he had ever considered that there was One who had been more grievously wounded than himself, and yet had not retaliated, had not returned insult for insult but had prayed for His persecutors. I did not ask him this, though perhaps I should have. Our conversation moved on to other things the pigeons, the weather again, the small details of our lives. But before we parted, I asked him one more question.

"Do you ever regret it? The tattoos, I mean. Do you ever wish you could erase them?"

He looked at me with eyes that seemed far older than the rest of him. "Sometimes. But then I remember that they're part of me now. They've made me who I am. And in a strange way, they've taught me to be kinder. I know what words can do, you see. I carry the proof on my skin."

I have thought often of Loser in the days since our meeting. I have thought of him as I've caught myself about to say something cutting, as I've felt the temptation to use words as weapons. And I've thought, too, of all the tattoos I already bear within myself, and all those I've inscribed on others.

There is, I believe, only one remedy for these hidden tattoos, these internal scars we all carry. It is forgiveness the forgiveness Christ offers to us, and the forgiveness we must offer to others. Forgiveness doesn't erase the tattoos; even Richard's could be removed with enough laser sessions and enough money. But forgiveness changes our relationship to them. They become no longer accusations but testimonies, no longer sources of pain but reminders of grace.

This is what Christ does with our wounds, both those we've received and those we've inflicted. He doesn't pretend they don't exist; that would be a cheap grace indeed. Instead, He transforms them, as He transformed His own wounds. After the resurrection, Christ's wounds remained the disciples saw them, Thomas touched them but they were no longer sources of pain. They had become signs of victory.

And so it can be with our own wounds, our own invisible tattoos. Through forgiveness both given and received they can become not badges of our victimhood or our cruelty, but markers of our redemption. They can remind us, as Loser's tattoos reminded him, of the power of words, and they can teach us to use that power more wisely, more kindly, more in keeping with the Word who gave Himself for us.

As I left Loser on his bench that day, with the pigeons still holding their convention nearby, I felt strangely lightened, as if a burden I had not known I was carrying had been lifted. I walked away thinking not of the tattoos that marked his skin, but of the grace that had allowed him to transform insults into art, wounds into wisdom. And I prayed that I might learn to do the same with the invisible tattoos I bear, and that I might leave fewer such marks on others in the days to come.

For we are all, in our way, like Loser marked by the words of others, marking others with our words. But we are also, thanks be to God, like Christ capable of taking those wounds and, through the alchemy of forgiveness, transforming them into something redemptive, something healing, something that speaks not of hatred but of love. And in the end, it is love, not hatred blessing, not cursing that will have the final word.

-The Seeker's Quill