The painter Stanley Spencer served in the ambulance brigade in the Balkans in the Great War and he depicted a scene from his experience in a painting with the less-than-memorable name; ‘Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916’. Spencer was deeply religious, as you will probably be aware, and there can be no mistaking the references in his painting to a nativity scene, with animals looking in on a lit central focal point. But in this case, the animals are stretcher-pulling horses rather than the ox and ass, and the central scene is not a birth, but a kind of re-birth being worked by surgeons attending to a wounded soldier. Other wounded soldiers wait their turn on the travoys lined up in the foreground.

This image came to mind when I first heard Pope Francis use one his favourite metaphors for the church, which is that of a field hospital. It’s a vivid and compelling image, especially when combined with Spencer’s painting, because it is not merely a place of healing, but a place of healing situated in the most extreme context – the battlefield. This accentuates the urgency of the need for healing and the gravity of the injuries that are presented there, injuries sustained in the fray of human violence and human failure, in the place where our longed-for peace has been forsaken. It feels like an extreme image, but I think its intensity is needed to wake us up to the wounds that cry out for attention in our day. What are these wounds? I would suggest, on a corporate level, they are the wounds of our separations and disconnections from one another, the wounds that result from insular or self-serving thinking, wounds that manifest themselves in the refusal to see our actions as having any impact on the lives of those who do not appear to be like us. They are the wounds of inequality, chauvinistic nationalism, persistent misogyny, structural racism and, perhaps above all, the failure to recognise the image of God in the other.

In many respects, these wounds are the ones suffered by the leper who came to Jesus in today’s Gospel. On top of the undoubted physical dimensions of his condition are the communal ones. He is shunned, distanced, separated, excluded, reviled, and, in the religious context, regarded as unclean – perpetually incapable of participating in the life-giving and restorative rites of the temple. That’s why Jesus, moved with urgent, gutsy and angry compassion, sends him to the priests to shame them for their shrivelled, petty sense of purity.

There are other kinds of wounds, and many of them are the result of internalising the stigmas the come from sources we feel to have authority over us. For the leper, his experience of having been excluded from normal human interaction may well have taken root deep within his own sense of self, leading to a sense of unworthiness and shame. He may even have blamed himself for his abased position in society. Jesus overcomes this with two powerful movements that flow from his infinite mercy: he reaches out and he touches. He transgresses the isolated position he is given by religious social norms and declares the leper to be a brother, an equal, a beloved child of God – and all of that with a simple touch.

For us, these internalised wounds are legion: low self-esteem, lack of confidence, self-loathing, resentment, self-righteousness, deep insecurity. They eat away at us from the inside and inhibit our free interaction with others. These wounds, no less than the ones that manifest themselves in our bodies, are crying out for a field hospital where they may be tended and soothed, put into remission so that our lives may not be dominated by their constant presence.

I think it is this category of injury that Lent addresses most powerfully. If the church is a field hospital, then Lent is the time of that hospital’s greatest therapeutic activity. We are reminded at this forthcoming time of blessed restoration that the word for salvation might just as appropriately be translated as healing. And if the church is more of a field hospital than a courtroom, then we need not fear the pain that might come from allowing our wounds to be exposed to the healing light and the fresh, invigorating wind of the Spirit. Think less of the hot breath of an accusing judge and more of the cool breeze of an alpine sanitorium. We know that some cures may sting a little, but their pain is fleeting and gives way to relief. In the same way, the church offers some simple practices that bring us inner healing: confession, self-awareness, humility, fasting, resolute silence in prayer that chooses to stay put rather than give way to the myriad distractions that lay claim to our attention.

Lent will be upon us in a couple of days. I invite you to check in to the field hospital for some restoring therapy. The prescription is for slow reading, moderated consumption, much silence, constant prayer, steady resolve, and the willingness to be touched by the one who reaches out to us in love, the one who says to us, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’