The jar was sealed and marked with masking tape explaining its contents. “Peppers and Garlic” in big dark letters indicating that, in fact, the jar did contain these ingredients. Finally, after watching a video on YouTube about homemade hot sauce a year prior, I was going to be able to make some of my own. A friend of mine had inspired me to try out some fermentation projects that he had done. I was especially motivated after seeing his entire furnace room full of jars of various pickles and vegetables, all living in some sort of brine. Each one was different but held in common one thing: bacteria. I should not have been surprised that this friend of mine was making fermented foods as we had been brewing our own beer in his basement for a few years at that point. Our most delicious offering was a cherry chocolate porter brewed especially for Remembrance Day, and it was one of the best things I have ever tasted. So, for me, this friendship consisted of a lot of waiting for bacteria, either to impart flavour or completely destroy our hard work.

“Time heals all wounds.” Well maybe it did for somebody. However, in my experience, wounds left to the sands of Time often end up getting infected. It is not the Time that ensures the healing, but the cleanliness and care of the wound in question that prevents foreign bodies that may otherwise seek to exacerbate the problem. While this is certainly the case for physical wounds, we tend not to think the same for emotional, spiritual, or psychological wounds. With these intangible injuries we find it harder to understand, clean, and care for them so that they can heal over Time healthily. Left unchecked, these wounds may wreak havoc on our lives in more ways than a physical one ever could. Against the cliché of Time as the ever-present healer, we must hold the reality of the experienced pain and bitterness that comes from a life of conflict and internal wounds left to Time. I would be hard-pressed to find a better example for this than my own experience with emotional injury, and I would be edging too close to hypocrisy if I were to use another as an example. So, while my life may not be the most exciting and the wounds not as gruesome as others, it is my life that I have come to know best as the ground where healing and infection have done battle, and so that is where I will speak from.  

I wish that I was well-read enough in the Patristics to understand where the topic of emotional hurt and healing has been addressed (or if it even has for that matter), but I am not. This topic struck me as an important one while reading a poem by W.B. Yeats called “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner.” In it, as Yeats straightforwardly says, an old pensioner is lamenting the effect that Time has had on him. Transfigured is the word he uses to describe said effect. As I was reading this – indulging my inner hipster on the shores of the Irish sea, pipe clasped in my teeth – I realized that we are all subject to change, to transfigure even, at the hands of Time. This notion stuck with me, and  as I pondered if our inner life writes the script to how we will be transfigured. I began to examine myself, my inner being, and I saw things that were not pleasant. The consistent infection I found inside was bitterness. Somehow, some way, bitterness had planted a seed inside of my soul and it had now grown full into a swarm of weeds reaching every part of me. I realized that I was bitter about almost everything in my life, and things that I had no reason to even be upset about I had twisted and morphed so that bitterness would find a foothold. 

One wound that I could trace this back to was a particularly painful split that had happened in our church years prior. I will spare you the details of another all too familiar account of egos dividing the body of Christ, but in short, it was a split that saw two pillars of faith in my life breaking fellowship and attacking each other. Lifelong friends had been torn from relationship with each other; animosity and violent words were the center of the conversation. Needless to say, it was the most painful thing I have experienced in my faith. But, trying to be faithful, I decided to, trying to avoid painful conflict, “get over it and move on.” This was a mistake. I didn’t realize at the Time that the wound I had gained from this schism in fellowship would continue to fester, uncleaned, unbandaged, and unhealed, until it ate away at my very soul. 

I think that is the danger we face in emotional health–we don’t see the wound, so we don’t feel the need to heal as primarily as if we slice open our hand trying to peel potatoes. In that case we see the blood, probably use an expletive or two, call for help, and begin the cleaning, and eventually the healing process. But our soul doesn’t bleed like that, our inner lives don’t show their wounds as readily. So we (I) avoid the pain, and move on. And then a few years down the road when life is not my romantic ideal, bitterness rears its ugly head and devours me. From the inside out, bitterness works its evil, bringing death to anything it touched. While this is a bit dramatic, that is truly how I felt. Every part of my life was infected with bitterness. It had spread from that wound I received, that I had never addressed, to the rest of my life. Joy was gone. I looked through bitter, hardened, negative eyes, and I let that become the reality I engaged with.  

Three weeks after I had set my jars aside to ferment, I checked to see the progress. I could smell the spicy aromas leaking from the sealed jar. Garlic that had a slight hint of sourness and bold Fresno chilis mixed to form what I wished essential oils could smell like. I twisted off the lid and looked with excitement. Mold. Green, blue, and white fur coated the top of the peppers. I sank in disappointment. “What did I do wrong?” I thought. I checked my brine calculator–it was correct. I checked everything else, but there didn’t seem to be any glaring issues. I had to concede that something, despite my best efforts, had made its way into the jar and caused the mixture to mold. Had I checked on it earlier and more consistently throughout the fermentation process, I may have gotten a hold of the issue before it came to such a violent head. While I sat there thinking about how I could have avoided this catastrophe, I began to think about my life in a broader sense than just fermentation. While the initial realization of my festering bitterness came as a result of reading poetry, my understanding of why it had culminated as such came at the hands of a failed fermentation project. I began to contemplate what this could mean for my current state, and more importantly, what would this change in my life? What could I learn from this, and what would I change about the way I dealt with emotional wounds? 

I saw that consistent interaction with my peppers would have potentially saved me a lot of disappointment, and similarly, consistent attention to my inner life would have probably saved me from a lot of bitterness and resentment. Like mold grows over Time, pulling nutrients from whatever it can find, so wounds fester and grow within us, sucking joy and truth from our lives until all we see is cloaked in bitterness and anger. Time well spent caring for your inner life may well heal all wounds, or at least help healing on its way. But Time itself only allows for wounds to become infected and will leave lasting damage.

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