A year of body and blood

On creation, cancer, and communion for Corpus Christi

1. Creation

He could have come and gone as a full-grown adult, healthy and strong. 

Jesus, I mean. Actually all of us. 

Humanity could have been designed differently: a hearty, hale species of fully grown homo sapiens emerging from—eggs? The earth? Other people’s ribs? 

Instead we start tiny and grow large. Over a lifetime we change constantly—bodies, minds, beliefs, abilities—while core parts of ourselves remain mysteriously the same. 

Ask any parent of a newborn, a toddler, a teenager, or adult. Ask any person on the planet. We hold the truths of change and growth in our bodies, in our blood.

God could have strolled onto the scene with a confident stride and complete set of capacities. Instead, Jesus was born, through body and blood, as the youngest, weakest, neediest version of humanity. Then he died, through body and blood, as the beaten, broken, belittled version of humanity. 

Nothing so scandalous as the Creator of the cosmos coming into the world through a woman’s body. Nothing so startling as a dead body coming back to life. Imagine everything that gets hallowed by that holy passage. Birth and death, bodies and blood, all of us.

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2. Cancer

Never before have my body and blood suffered more.

Not when my body broke open, time and time again, to bear new life into the world. 

Not when my blood dropped so low in pressure, during not one but two births, that I felt my body begin to let go as the room flooded with bodies rushing to save my life.

Not when I had to hand over the bodies of two babies, one with too much blood and one with not enough, to the nurse, to the morgue, to the grave. 

Before this year, the pain of body and blood had come from birth. (And death; the two are twinned like shadow and light.) But now I have learned the long suffering of living with body and blood that can kill you, that you are dying to kill. 

I spent weeks sick, months bald, days wondering whether I would see another year. 

No one stares down their own death and returns the same.

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3. Communion

Never before this year have I received communion more in bed than in church, Sunday after Sunday raising tired hands to my beloved, who gave the thinnest wafer with the deepest smile, speaking words of the Word, the Body of Christ. 

Which it was, which he was, which I was, which we are.

Which is why, if I hear one more homily hand-wringing to the people in the pews, preaching to the actual choir, the flesh-and-blood believers who got up on Sunday and chose counter-cultural church over work or brunch or sports or sleep, lamenting how many Catholics don’t believe in the real presence of the Eucharist, mark my words: I shall explode.

The problem is not catechesis. The problem is not theology. 

The problem is that most churches have never nurtured people’s imaginations to see God anywhere, let alone in the smallest, unlikeliest places. 

How on earth can we expect anyone to accept that bread turns into flesh and wine into blood? This belief is not dependent on DNA or scientific inquiry. This question is a matter of lenses, of love, of worldview, of radical reorientation to every single blessed thing our senses perceive, not just a flat circle pressed into our palm or a tiny sip from a shared cup (if we ever get that taste of the holy, most often reserved only for priests; don’t get me started on sacramental minimalism and withered sacramental imaginations and why we are where we are today).

Either we-who-believe start showing people how to see everything differently, or we stop yelling at them for not seeing what we have never shown them. 

The truth of the real presence is the whole truth about humanity and divinity.

What was large becomes small. God of the universe in the palm of your hand.
What was small becomes large. Christ within you, Christ transforming you.

What changes remains. Bread still looks and tastes like bread, God in the ordinary.
What remains changes. Nothing about this is only-bread, God in the extraordinary.

Preach that, and we will listen. 

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4. Credo

Here is what I believe in my bones, my body and blood. 

In the past year of cancered hell, I have known the closeness of so many beloved ones I can no longer see. Christ, of course, sure. Also my brother. Also my daughters. Also my grandparents, my uncles, my friends. 

Someday I will try to tell you how real they have become to me, how our ancestors are thick around us, how any veil between here and there is thinned as mist, how ordinary and remarkable our communication can become with the communion of those who have stepped before us into the sacred time and place where we ourselves shall one day step.

Had they been here all along? Close enough to almost-see, to almost-touch, to hear and be heard? Did I miss this half of existence—more than half, this fullness, this holy abundance, this humanity-meeting-divinity that was always among us? Could I only see it because of cancer, this terrible sentence of suffering that opened my life into a new chapter—no, an entire book, an epic encyclopedia, a never-ending library of stories upon shelves within rooms beyond worlds?

Here is what I know to be true.

When life is reduced, what remains? Bodies and blood.
And when bodies and blood are gone? Still presence.

The whole human-divine story is found between.

This is the mystery of creation, of bodies, of growth, of communion. 
What was large becomes small. What was small becomes large. 
What changes remains. What remains changes. 

Live that, and we will live.

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If you’re curious, here’s more about tomorrow’s Feast of Corpus Christi. Here’s more about my daughters’ twin-to-twin-tranfusion syndrome. But here is always the better story.