Scars of Innocence

I'm writing a paper for class that I, on the spur of the moment, entitled "Scars of Innocence"... while dubious in relation to the topic of the paper, the title has an eerie profoundness that I find strikes deep within.

Scars of Innocence.

I tried to explain it to a roommate, but found I couldn't do it explicitly. What is a scar of innocence? Maybe it's only something that can be examined obliquely, like viewing the sun in an eclipse or seeing the wind by seeing its activity on a sheet hung on the clothesline.

I think the idea of scars of innocence is most evident when we see things that outrage us though we have no reason to believe it should never happen. My paper is about the war in Northern Uganda, one that has increasingly been characterized by the abduction of children who are subjected to extreme psychological and physical trauma and then forced to kill their own families and communities in brutal fashion. This should never happen but it does. And the realization that this has been happening in Central Africa for many many generations doesn't dampen the feeling of wrongness (read King Leopold's Ghost if you want). And even in this community that has known very little of anything else than these horrors, people still react against it instinctively.

Scars of innocence reflect this ambiguity between what is and what should be. However much we might try to suppress our innocence when we make really bad and irrevocable decisions, it's still with us in some sense. Our innocence scars itself into our bodies, our memories, and our imaginations. Trauma upsets what once was and it may feel that things can never again be the same. But for some reason, we have this wild hope that maybe, just maybe, we are merely snowglobes. Though shaken and jolted about by numerous outside forces, we too will one day settle to that once perfect past; that though things shake us and we're not in control of when or where they happen in our lives, everything will work out in the end.

While sin scars us too (as anyone who has regret over past mistakes will tell you), we still have the image of God seared into us. I like to think of us as zebras: Stripes of black(sin) and white(innocence).

The imagery gives hope.

There's that old African story of how the zebra got its stripes. And if you were the village elder telling it to a group of children, you'd lose their attention immediately (Parents take this to heart, tell the moral quick if that's the point of your storytelling...there's no telling what kids are thinking by the time you're finished) The first thing any child would wonder would be which color was the zebra to begin with: Is it black with white stripes or white with black stripes? The answer is one any painter would tell you: If you paint a room with black and white stripes, you paint the whole room white first then paint black stripes on top, thus the latter is true. For us, this means that though it seems we're striped with scars of innocence and scars of sin, that we experience both outrage and remorse when unspeakable sin is committed, that our scars of innocence points to a deeper reality. Scars of innocence point that our true identity is one of a white horse. And someday, we'll rid ourselves of our stripes and like a snowglobe that's been shaken, we'll be who we once were and pure white. Scars after all are snapshots of our own selves: skin that refuses to change while the rest moves along.
Hope: Who we once were is who we will be once again: Innocent.