The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing
Yolanda Pierce
Broadleaf Books, 196 pages
Published February 4, 2025
My partially written thesis, “This Is My Body: Prophetic Presiding, Justice and Embodiment — Black Women and the Practice of Communion,” remains on the shelf. It neither saw the light nor recaptured my imagination until I read these words from The Wounds Are the Witness: “I relish the opportunity to preside over the table and invite others into a moment of remembrance and reflection. Whether in the most modest of sanctuaries or in the grandest of buildings, standing before the people with unleavened bread and a cup of wine (or grape juice, as in my own tradition) is a humbling act.” As scholar Yolanda Pierce’s womanist approach invited us to challenge the status quo of familiar scriptural interpretation, I was both humbled by the act of remembering and reassured by knowing I was not alone.
Pierce elegantly writes us into stories of our humanity and faith without caveats as to why we belong. She centralizes the witness of childhood hearing, seeing, listening and imagining as an “on-ramp” for how we process the world, remembering the Black women who surround us have the gumption to live in spaces that were the source of their wounds without allowing it to decide if or when they would heal. The Black church experience that brought the valley of dry bones from a distant shore to our backyard still begs the question asked of the prophet Ezekiel: “Can these bones live?”
The Black church experience that brought the valley of dry bones from a distant shore to our backyard still begs the question asked of the prophet Ezekiel: “Can these bones live?” Pierce responds that they can …
Pierce responds that they can — through the hard-earned faith of our ancestors and the audacity to declare our “is-ness” (in the face of active racism, classism, sexism, other ‘isms and open wounds). Our faith does not remove us from reality. It propels us to bear witness, take actions and disrupt assumptions that make anyone believe we are all treated the same.
The Wounds are the Witness stands alongside the American notion of “never let them see you sweat,” as well as Zora Neale Hurston’s haunting words, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Pierce convinced me that our wounds have been weaponized to silence us and weaken our agency; instead, we must accept our call to remember, do justice and heal, for these are all calls from God.
Pierce invites us to reconnect with Scripture and offers rich insights to hear the sacred text anew, even when it challenges what we thought we knew. For example, Pierce uses the story of “doubting” Thomas to invite a collective exhale, releasing the pain we carry and permitting ourselves to heal. She asks what if “Thomas’s request to touch and feel the wounds is to not only assuage his doubts but also to acknowledge the profound fact that healing takes time? If even the wounds of the risen Christ do not immediately close, why do we expect our own wounds to heal in such a hurry?”
The Wounds are the Witness is for anyone who wants to remember their own existence, ask challenging questions of Scripture, and keep pressing toward wholeness, healing and justice for themselves and the Black church.
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