To Be A Body

Broken and becoming

I.

Body of Christ, they say. As if bodies are good things. As if bodies aren’t our downfall.

Body of Christ, they say, pressing a circle of wafer or a square of bread into hand after hand, peering into each face, speaking the same words as the long line shuffles forward. As if a mere mouthful would nourish. As if a sliver could fill our hunger.

Body of Christ, they say every Sunday. We could have said love of Christ or hope of Christ or peace of Christ. He came to bring us those, too, and more besides, and we need all of it like air in our desperate lungs. But no, we say body and blood. 

Because he said it, and we have been arguing over such strange words ever since, knowing in our bones their strength and power even if we muddle over their meaning, these mysteries of faith. 

Because bodies and blood are the basic building blocks of life, so of course Christ would care about them—enough to offer up his own for ours. 

Because bodies and blood are what carry and make manifest all the rest: hope, love, peace, joy, goodness. 

Because we can feast on ideas, we can feed off energy, we can fight for ideals, but we cannot live long without food or drink. 

Because bodies need bodies, and this is our sacrament of embodiment: not a grotesque dismembering but a glorious re-membering. 

A body offers a body to a body.

II.

Do you want a copy of the pathology report, they always ask me. As if I want to read the same bad news served up again at every appointment. As if I don’t already have every detail seared on my brain.

42 yr-old female. Invasive ductal carcinoma. ER-Negative. PR-Negative. HER2-negative. Ductal carcinoma in situ. Malignant neoplasm of breast (right).

I could offer no shortage of words to describe what my body has suffered through the past ten months. But no noun or verb could tell you who I am becoming over the course of cancer. No adjective or adverb can translate a disease into a person. We are all more than our diagnosis or prognosis.

33 yr-old male. Insurrectionist. Threat to society. Rabble-rouser. Heretic. Blasphemer.

Years ago when I was wading through the empty pain of infertility, at war with a body that would not yield to my deepest desires, I wondered if I had been looking at the humanity of Jesus wrong. What if fully-human meant not merely that his DNA would show up like ours on a slide, but that as God he could embody the fullness of humanity—every shade of pain, every horror of suffering, every physical and mental and emotional and spiritual anguish we might know? 

What if, as his tortured body hung on a tree, a part of the whole weight of humanity he bore was exactly the grief I carried, as a woman who feared she couldn’t carry?

I still spy that side of Christ when we go up to touch the cross each Good Friday. Every hand that reaches out to honor the wood is a hand who has known suffering. Everything he knew, too.

III.

As a theologian, I care about the spiritual life more than most. But there is a bodily truth I am beginning to understand on the far side of health, in the land of the sick. Bodies matter. 

Everything is easier to spiritualize when you are strapping and strong, hearty and hale. But when you are consumed with your own flesh and blood, when all the energies of your days drive toward tending what is sick and treating what is broken, when you cannot control what happens within you, whether you will live or die, then you realize the full worth of human skin and bones. 

How easily we slip into the dangerous dualism of loving soul, mind, or spirit more. As if we could shove aside the pesky meat bag of flesh we must drag around, its meddlesome needs and hungers and frailties. As if we are not bodies ourselves.

But what if nothing matters more than bodies, since we get to keep them—in some strange new form—for whatever glory comes next?

What if bodies aren’t our downfall, but our uprising?

IV.

“the Lord is for the body”
(1 Corinthians 6:13)

Six small words made my 
tired head and weary ears
snap to attention
that Sunday.

After such long struggles
with my body
in my body
for my body

I had lost sight 
of the goodness of bodies 
in the eyes of the One
who made them.

What God is for—
goodness, justice,
healing, peace—
will last.

Even if we never see it here.

So fighting against
whatever harms bodies
(especially weak bodies,
especially sick bodies)

and believing that God 
is for bodies,

re-members me
and all my body’s members—
internal and external,
even the ones I struggle against—

back into the embrace

of a tender, loving
powerful, vulnerable 
God who became
a body
for bodies.

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If you enjoyed this essay, check out more variations on a theme:

These bodies. Half-elegy, half-lament.

To be broken. On crumbs & children & cancer & communion.

A taste of the holy.