The Scars of the Crocodile Spirit
The Scars of the Crocodile Spirit
Amelia Rasmusen Buzzard
On Life that Doesn’t Take an Eye for an Eye
Following an accident in which an Amtrak train hit a small car at noon on a summer day, paramedics recovered two living bodies from the wreckage and transported them to Rockford Memorial Hospital, where one went into surgery for a splenectomy. That body, one of a 10-year-old girl, emerged breathing, with a line of staples down her belly.
I was that girl. I remember absently running my fingers over the bumps of steel as I fell asleep at night. It’s strange to think that I know what it’s like to be stapled, the ends of steel slivers curled beneath my skin. Months later, when they removed the staples, the holes bled, sixteen of them, and left a scarry constellation on my belly. I felt unsafe, like I had been unbuckled from a car seat, missing the familiar tug of the staples on each side of my midsagittal plane. The metal strips were quite literally holding me together, and when they disappeared, I thought I would fall apart. But over the course of the months, my body had quietly grown its own adhesive.
Over time, scar tissue bloomed where the staples had once been. The pink line faded to white against my natural tan. My mom gave me a round-capped tube of Mederma and said to give myself a belly rub each night to fade the scars. I never used it. I didn’t think my scars were ugly. They were a glimmering cloud in the desert sky, a stretch of the Milky Way. They were vast and terrible and irrefutable. They were nature. And they were beautiful.
My scars set the scene for a larger story that the world has tried many times to tell but only God can finish. Though just a child, I bore upon my belly a glyph that told humanity’s story: We will be broken. We can heal. But the mark of pain remains. My scars, like all of our scars, remind me of past pain and that future pain will come, and more pain, and eventually death. I cannot control that.
*
The crocodile people of Papua New Guinea have practiced ritual scarification for thousands of years. Still today, there are men who submit their bodies to be slashed hundreds of times by razor blades in a rite of passage so brutal that some die in the process. But when the initiate emerges from the spirit house, he has taken on his god’s form. His back, like the crocodile’s, bears a gnarled pattern of scales.
In an interview with the BBC, the chief-councilor of New Guinea’s Parambei village declared of the crocodiles what pagans have always known about their gods: “We fear them but draw energy from that power.”
The scars serve as the initiates’ reminder that they have undergone intense physical pain and are now capable of anything. By being figuratively eaten by the crocodile and taking on its appearance and ferocity, the initiate becomes the power he feared. Upon his back, he wears the crocodile’s hide. When he looks at himself in the river, a crocodile stares back.
But the tribesmen can never feel secure in their scars. Faced with the vast indifference of bloody Nature, they choose to meet it on their own terms, exerting what little control they possess in order to escape with their lives. They feed the gods some bloody flesh, and, in doing so, spare the village. It is a fear-based business. If they fail to placate the gods, the gods will have no use for them but to devour. At their most basic level, the scars remind the Parambei tribesman to beware the crocodile, or suffer once again.
The Parambei aim to complete the story of suffering by deriving power from pain, but ultimately, it’s still just suffering, more suffering, and then death. The pagan story of scars may be rich with symbolic meaning, but the ending ruins everything. Embracing scars is not the answer to life’s suffering.
*
For the Christian, the most important scars are not our own. We look upward, to a God who bears his own marks upon his body. Instead of looking at the world around us to find meaning for our scars like the pagan, we look to the scars of Jesus.
In the spirit houses, the crocodile stamps the bodies of his worshippers with his image. In the Garden of Eden, the Christian God stamped mankind with his image. The crocodile spirit and the Christian God don’t sound so different, although God’s tender forming from clay is less violent than the crocodile’s slashing knife. Where the two stories really diverge is when the Christian God stamped his very self with the image of man.
In the Old Testament, God’s people complain he has forgotten them. He responds through the prophet Isaiah: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:16 ESV). In “The Glorious Deeds of Men,” writer and podcaster Spencer Klavan explains how this verse metaphorically describes how creators are changed by creation. God, who shaped Adam from the dirt, has been indelibly altered by that act. He can never forget his creation because when he made it, it became etched into his very being. According to Strong’s Concordance, the primary meaning of the Hebrew word translated “engraved” is “to cut.” It is likely the same word the crocodile men would use for their ceremony—but in this case, it is not the man who cuts his body to bind himself to god. Instead, God cuts his body to bind himself to man.
It sounds like sacrilege to say that the eternal God would allow himself to be changed by the temporal. It is most definitely sacrilege to suppose that he would ever sculpt himself into the shape of a man. But why stop there? If he wanted to engineer the ultimate obscenity, God would cause his man-self to be born in a stable, whipped, beaten, nailed to a cross, severed from his own goodness, and killed. I should shut my mouth now, lest a lightning bolt destroy me. The Almighty would never allow himself to be pierced in such a way.
Yet, that’s exactly what he did.
*
In the years following my own scarification, I came to adopt the mindset of a crocodile man. It is, I believe, the one that comes most naturally to us. As I ran my fingers over the ripple of white on my belly, I convinced myself that because I had been spared death, I must pay the god who scarred me. I must pay him not for power, but for the privilege of living. God became to me a stern face and a wagging finger, like those teachers who say, “Playground time is a privilege, not a right. You must be a good girl, or I will take it away.” Like the crocodile men, I lived in fear that if I did not appease the god, he would take away the life he had given me.
That, in our world, is how power operates. Might makes right. Eye for an eye. Tit for tat.
Though the crocodile men of Papua New Guinea at first seem strange and foreign to Western ways of thinking, their rationale for scarification is as common as mud. Scars remind us that we dodged death, but next time, if we aren’t careful, we might not be so lucky. God’s scars remind us that he did not escape death. His own broken body is proof. When the whips bit into his back, piercing the skin with the stripes of a crocodile's back, he did not become like the crocodile, powerful and cruel, but instead went straight into its jaws.
It just doesn't make sense. Why would The All-Powerful subject himself to this humiliation?
The textbook answer is that God sacrificed himself to fulfill the demands of justice, once and for all. Read the theologians for a deeper analysis of the finer mechanisms of substitutionary atonement. But that does not get to the emotional heart of the question. When people ask why Jesus died on the cross, they are not wondering about metaphysics but why he would do it this way. In the moment that God created man, surely he would have seen the future stretched out before him like a map—Cain striking Abel, the Canaanites burning their children for Moloch, all suffering reaching a climax in the moment on the cross when God abandoned himself and experienced the purest form of Hell. Surely, an all-powerful God could have written the story so it did not involve any scars at all? Wasn’t there another way?
This is the problem of evil. I’ve thought hard about this question, like most of us have, only to come to the conclusion that the scars of God are themselves the only sufficient answer.
When I first read Isaiah’s words about God’s engraved palms, I imagined an angel scribe using some sort of spiritual laser to paint God’s hands with our names in glowing henna. But that’s not what happened. Instead, God recruited Roman soldiers in a godforsaken hinterland of a world empire to shatter the bones of his hand with iron nails. The soldiers treated God, whom they viewed as an ethnic, social, and political inferior, with less dignity than they would have treated a stray dog. The fists that held cyclones and galaxies—the entire universe—chose to suffer wounds inflicted with injustice, racism, and cruelty. His choice to engrave that moment forever in his eternal body silences all accusations.
If he was willing to suffer for this world as it is, in all its exquisite pain, then who am I to say he should have made it differently? But even the most humble of us can wonder, and ask what we are being taught.
What the story of God’s scars tells me, first and foremost, is that he takes delight in alchemizing the filthiest evil into good, even if it costs him everything. Because he suffered willingly, because he bears scars on his body, my own scars are symbols neither of power nor survival but of hope. We will be broken. We can heal. But God, unlike the crocodile spirit, has sealed our temporary, fleeting, healing into eternal scars. Those scars will last.
*
Despite the conviction I feel when I meditate upon this story, it is difficult to live in its truth. It is not just keeping one’s thoughts kind and pure, remembering to pray, and following one’s vocation with energy and faithfulness that makes the Christian life a daily battle. It is resisting the urge to make a deal with the crocodile spirit.
We all accumulate mental and physical scars as we go through life, even amidst our materially easy and modern life. We are tempted to glorify our scars, to say that what does not kill us makes us stronger, and even to deliberately scar ourselves to show our power. But whatever we may pretend, the only scars that can save us are those of the Crucifixion, accepted not as a deal, but as a gift. If we are to cling to Christ’s scarred hands, we must drop the blood sacrifices, stop the incantations, and burn the spirit houses. If we let them go, we will find that what has held us all this time was nothing more or less than God’s grace.
Amelia Rasmusen Buzzard
Writer
Amelia has written for The American Spectator, Evie Magazine, Medicinal Media, and Perishable Goods. Find her on Instagram @ameliajane_writes or read her blog at writersblogck.substack.com.
Photography by Shafi Marshall
