The body of Christ

When was the last time he thought of the body of Christ? What did the body of Christ mean to him then? Has the meaning changed for him now?

The writer of kinutil is thinking this.

He was taught as a young child how the host of Communion was the body of Christ, how it was Christ’s real and actual presence. Thus did he grow up thinking how Christ was everywhere around him, always at the edges of what he could see with his eyes; there, but beyond the farthest reach of his vision.

And yet, he warned himself against allowing his faith to be a constraint. In the course of his life, he searched for other discourses, other viewpoints; each one of them, just as interesting as the one native to him. He realized, over time, how he loved the concept of religion, how he loved the act itself of believing.

There was a time in his life when he decided not to have anything to do with all these. He could have stopped believing in God altogether. He remembers atheism was a convenient resting place for him, away from the din and fury of noisy religious discourses that accompanied his youth.

He had seen, after all, how there were people who seemed so easily inclined to hate, to condemn and kill for their god. And he had seen so much corruption, so many weaknesses, and sin, that it seemed right to simply not believe.

He felt this way until he came to understand that the sanctity of the body of Christ is not the state of pristine-whiteness of the communion host. He learned to imagine the body of Christ the way the early European Renaissance artists imagined Him: bleeding, suffering, and in torment. Such as the crucifixion painted by Matthias Grunewald in his famous Isenheim altarpiece.

This body of Christ is not “sanitized” into an idyllic vision. It is real. It is reality like the reality which is all about us. Inside this reality, we see suffering, weakness and corruption. We see ourselves here: we, the sinful, the weak and the corrupted. We are not saints. We do not believe absolutely well.

And we see ourselves here, divided as well by a line drawn as if on sand. The line divides the fortunate from those who are less so. What euphemism could we make that would in turn make acceptable the grinding poverty that is all about us?

And the poor do not look pristine-white like the communion host either. They are like us, sinful, weak and corrupted. And yet, they and we, are the body of Christ. This is the Christ who is all about us, not pristine-white but suffering, tormented and hanging from a cross. And though, it would seem an ugly and awful sight, we would, if we looked closely enough, see here also a mysterious and sacred beauty. It is the same mysterious and sacred beauty in all of us who suffer.

And when he contemplates this body of Christ he cannot help but remember how we are called upon to ease each other’s suffering in even the smallest ways, in simple acts of love: real and actual, and no less sacred as the act of communion.

To walk up to the altar and partake of the body of Christ in an act of personal salvation is all very well. But he still wonders: Would it carry the same weight in Christ’s eyes as the act of loving each other in the same way he loves us? Without finding fault? Without condemnation? In communion with each other’s suffering?