There is a question that has quietly accompanied me for years.
What is a wound?
We often describe wounds in psychological terms—trauma, anxiety, shame, rejection, abandonment, betrayal. Theology speaks of sin, grace, redemption, and salvation. Neuroscience speaks of neural pathways and the nervous system. These are all important, but I wonder if there is an even deeper way of understanding the wounds that pass between people.
Perhaps every relational wound is telling the same story: a violation of love.
Not simply an absence of love, but a rupture in the relationships of love for which we were created.
This is not a claim about every kind of suffering. Illness, disaster, the losses that arrive without a human or demonic hand behind them—these belong to a deeper mystery of a fallen creation that I won't pretend to resolve here. What follows is about the wounds that pass between persons: the ones we cause, the ones we carry, and the ones done to us.
Love Was the Beginning
The story of humanity does not begin with sin.
It begins with love.
Before there was shame, there was communion. Before there was fear, there was trust. Before there was hiding, there was intimacy.
Adam and Eve lived in perfect communion with God, with one another, and within themselves.
"They were both naked and were not ashamed." (Genesis 2:25)
This remarkable verse says far more than it first appears to. It describes a humanity completely at home in love—nothing to hide, nothing to prove, nothing to fear.
Love was not merely an emotion. It was the very atmosphere of creation.
The First Violation of Love
The serpent did not begin by tempting Eve with pleasure.
He first attacked trust.
"Did God really say...?"
The first temptation was to question the goodness of the Father.
Every sin begins here—not with disobedience, but with a distorted image of God.
It was humanity's first great violation of love—a rejection of communion with the One who is Love Himself.
The consequences were immediate.
Shame entered. Fear entered. Hiding entered. Blame entered. Death entered.
The tragedy of Eden is not simply that humanity broke a commandment.
Humanity broke communion.
The Five Relationships of Love
Every human person lives within five fundamental relationships of love.
God and me. Me and God. Me and myself. Me and others. Others and me.
When love is rightly ordered, these relationships nourish one another. When love is violated, wounds begin to spread.
1. The Violation of Love with God
The primordial rupture began with humanity's rejection of God's love.
The serpent's question was never really about a command. "Did God really say...?" was an assault on how Adam and Eve received the Father's love—as trustworthy, as good, as safe to rest in. Once that trust cracked, they could no longer receive love as love. They received it as a threat to be managed.
Although I did not personally commit Adam's sin, I inherit a wounded human nature. St. Paul describes this as a kind of solidarity: just as we are bound up in Adam's fall simply by being human, we are invited into a new humanity simply by being reborn in Christ (Romans 5:12–19). I did not choose the first bond. I am invited into the second.
Long before I question whether I am good enough, I have already, in some quiet way, questioned whether He is.
2. The Violation of My Love for God
Love was never meant to stop at being received. It was always meant to be returned.
Every personal sin continues the rupture that began in Eden. Whenever I choose something above God, I disorder love.
Christianity is often reduced to a list of rules kept or broken. But Scripture tells a different story.
Sin is never merely breaking a rule. It is loving wrongly.
This is the second wound, and it is mine to answer for—not that God's love toward me was questioned, long ago, in a garden, but that my love toward Him keeps going elsewhere. Every idol, every lesser attachment placed above Him, is a small refusal to love back.
3. The Violation of Love of Self
This may be one of the most overlooked wounds.
Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves. He assumes that authentic self-love exists.
This is not pride. It is receiving myself as God receives me.
Yet many of us live from entirely different beliefs.
"I am not enough." "I must earn love." "God could never delight in me." "I am fundamentally unlovable."
Sometimes these lies arise from our own sins. Often they are planted by wounds inflicted by others. Over time they become internalized.
The deepest tragedy is not merely that someone failed to love us. It is that we eventually begin to believe the lie.
4. The Violation of My Love for Others
Whenever I fail to love another person, I wound not only them but also myself.
Pride, resentment, gossip, lust, indifference—every sin distorts my capacity to love.
St. Augustine described sin as disordered love. We rarely love evil for its own sake. We simply love lesser goods more than the Highest Good.
5. The Violation of Others' Love Toward Me
Some wounds are not chosen. They are received.
Let me say this plainly before naming them: if you carry a wound like this, it is not evidence of your unworthiness, and it was never your fault. A wound inflicted on you does not make you guilty of it. It makes you a witness to someone else's failure to love.
Rejection, abandonment, neglect, abuse, betrayal, violence—these violations of love can leave deep wounds. Some become traumatic, shaping the way we understand ourselves, others, and even God. The body begins to expect danger. The imagination expects rejection. The heart struggles to trust.
The wound was not our choice. But healing eventually becomes our invitation.
The Anatomy of the Fall
Genesis reveals a pattern that repeats far beyond Eden: love is questioned, trust breaks, communion is violated, and in the wreckage shame appears, fear follows, we hide, and blame replaces responsibility until relationships fracture.
The Bible's first pages describe not only the first sin but the anatomy of every wounded heart. Every human story somehow echoes Eden.
The New Adam
If Adam reveals the anatomy of the wound, Christ reveals the anatomy of healing. St. Paul calls Jesus the New Adam.
Where the first Adam grasped, the New Adam emptied himself. Where the first Adam hid, the New Adam came searching. Where the first Adam blamed, the New Adam forgave. Where the first Adam brought death, the New Adam brings life.
Healing, then, is much more than recovering from pain. It is entering a new humanity. The Christian life is God's gradual work of restoring in us the image of the New Adam. The saints are simply those in whom that restoration has gone the furthest—proof, in a human life, that love can be made whole again.
Holiness, then, is not the absence of wounds but the perfection of love.
Healing Is the Restoration of Love
Perhaps this is what every form of authentic healing ultimately is.
Healing is not merely calming the nervous system, changing behaviour, or feeling better.
Healing is God's work of restoring our capacity to receive love, believe love, give love, and remain in love. He restores communion with Himself. He teaches us to receive ourselves as beloved sons and daughters. He heals our relationships with others. He transforms our wounds into places where grace becomes visible.
Every wound tells a story about love. Some of those stories tell us we are abandoned, unwanted, beyond redemption.
But the Gospel tells a different story. The Cross is God's definitive answer to every violation of love.
Not every violation of love becomes a lasting wound. The Cross stands as history's greatest paradox: no one has ever suffered a greater violation of love than Christ—betrayed, abandoned, falsely accused, tortured, crucified—yet hatred never took root in Him. Love remained whole. In Christ we discover that the deepest healing is not merely recovering from violated love. It is becoming so transformed by grace that violated love no longer gives birth to hatred.
Where love was rejected, Christ remained faithful. Where humanity hid, Christ came seeking. Where shame imprisoned us, Christ clothed us with dignity. Where death seemed final, Love Himself walked out of the tomb.
The Christian journey is not merely learning to survive our wounds. It is allowing Divine Love to restore every relationship that was fractured, until, one day, we become fully alive in Christ.
Healing begins the moment we dare, once again, to believe the Father is as good as Christ revealed Him to be.
