Memory Scars and Other Markings

One of the reasons that I began this new blog is because I want to write some chapters of my life down. If there is such a thing as scars of memory, I guess I have a few, but then who does not?

This year the awful anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was Friday. I did not write anything, not for lack of want. One must see Katrina post is Grandmere Mimi’s. She posts this annually and it was one of the first posts of hers that I read in 2007, when I was a but a baby blogger. The photo of Our Lady, whose head had come off and was then placed back onto her body is from New Orleans; read Mimi to learn more.

Recently I read an article about a sports related injury in Sports Illustrated. (Hey, my husband gets the magazine and this cover story caught my eye.)

The power of memory, scars physical, emotional and spiritual have all been swirling around my brain of late and I keep seeing reminders of how these things are played out in life.

So I was astounded to read this post about Katrina Day. The blog is written by Brother Patrick who is a Catholic brother. He has ties to New Orleans via his order.

His blog has recently become familiar to me via my Catholic blogging circles, but I share it without hesitation here. His reflections are thought provoking in every way and I am grateful to have him on my reading list.

Here is an excerpt from his post about Katrina:

Today is the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making lives interesting in Louisiana, and as it so happens, I’ve been reading for a class on how religions institutionalize memory. What particularly interests me is how we make wounds into sacred wounds to memorialize trauma. There is actually a show on MTV called Scarred (or something like that), which is mostly about extreme athletes telling stories of hurting themselves really badly and showing off the resulting scars while videos of their accidents replay over and over. (Seriously, I only watched it for about 3 minutes…really.) I remember seeing the news from Halloween in New Orleans in 2005, and a lot of people made costumes that poked fun at our collective plight – wearing the spray-painted markings that the National Guard put on houses they searched, for example. Some people have deliberately kept those markings on their houses, or kept the waterlines on their outer walls, as a way of remembering what happened here. People who go through initiation rites often receive some kind of permanent marking (scar, tattoo, wound, lost tooth, branding, whatever) as a way of marking them as initiated men or women and reminding them of their own mortality.

His words really resonate for me as I reflect upon my own “scars.” For me some visible signs of where I have come from are my weight and my ragged nails and cuticles. I would like to be thinner and have pretty hands, but that may not be as straightforward as it would appear and maybe I should not be in such a hurry, health concerns noted, about “being rid of them.”

There is so much more that I would like to say, but time is short. I will post this and perhaps add to it at another time.

I wonder what your memory scars are? Do you wear them with wisdom or pride or do you hide them and wish them away like I do sometimes?