The Body of God: "Corpus Christi"
"Take and eat, this is my body which is given for you." This unnerving call to the Eucharist is being invoked for 2,000 years now, hundreds of thousands of times a day across the globe. Its primal cannibalistic holy words help assure the partakers' fertility and potential immortality through the enactment of this most important feast: the eating of our God, of our sacrificial "slain lamb," of the transubstantiated bread and wine that is in some primeval and unsymbolic way the 33-year-old crucified and risen Jesus in flesh and blood.
As St. Thomas observes, Christ didn't say "This bread is my body," he said "This is my body"?which indicates that "this" is bread no longer. Each Eucharistic breadloaf is Christ's passion, Christ's Body dispersed among the open mouths of the faithful; an edible manifestation of that very body he gave up for the sake of the perennially hungry believer.
"Take this.. and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood." The awesome double consecration of bread and wine (which are Christ in his terrible death, in the separation of blood from his body) engages our natural senses, providing us with a physical knowledge of God. It brings us together and transports us outside our socio-economic and utilitarian roles and into the rare opportunity to share sensual and spiritual pleasure, to be a society.
Wine drinking (even more than the brutal springtime sacrifice of a young male god) has been the focal point of sacred blessings, festivals, libations and iconographies from the earliest human civilizations to this day. Osiris and Hathor, Dionysus and Bacchus, Elijah and Noah, were patrons of wine; Shinto, Hindu, Chinese and Jewish ceremonies employ it, and even the Quran associates it with the grace of God. The turning of water to wine was Christ's first public miracle, and his final official act was the naming of his last cup of wine as his new covenant and urging his gathered disciples to keep on drinking it in remembrance of his passage. Not surprisingly, altar wines escaped Prohibition.
The phenomenon of the sacred meal is one of those religious universals that know no boundaries, whether cultural or temporal. Mankind has consistently acknowledged the mysterious character of eating and drinking?as an essential communion with the cosmos and the unspeakable (i.e., God)?and has regularly attached a cultic aspect to it. These ageold rituals reconfirm our deep pagan bond to the physical world, reminding us that we emerge from nature and return to it and for the short time when we remain a tangible part of nature, we sustain our life by taking what it offers and assimilating it into our selves.
By swallowing the Eucharist, we become united with Christ via the mediation of material elements, and are thus able to be resurrected with him. The idea is that Christ's suffering saves us from suffering, and from having to sacrifice ourselves: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up"(John 6:54). Christ's physical death magically brings physical ease, happiness and deliverance for the rest of us.
The Eucharist is the most sensual of the sacraments: it establishes sacramentality in consuming, and evokes in the celebrant the intimacy of the Last Supper. Its vocabulary is revealing: eat me, be faithful, drink my blood, raise you up, celebrate. Here is Jesus Christ making love to us. In the devotion, inside his bride (the Church), the Logos is incarnate, a Real Presence, penetrating and all-consuming even as he is being forever consumed.
***
As a child, I went through many profound reactions to my weekly Communion: at first I felt sheer indiscriminate gratification, at a time when any oral stimulation was inordinately welcome. That was followed by a giddy sensual joy—because the alcohol was aged and sweet and gave me a light head, the bread was soft and sweet and preciously rationed, unlike any other bread, the feeding spoon was miniature and made of gold, the server was sheathed in red and gold gowns, and my family embraced me enthusiastically as soon as I gulped it down. Next came my sense of awe at swallowing this Communion: I feared my hubris, I wasn't big enough to contain a Godly morsel, to retransmogrify it into spirit and soul, to not shit it out, but for ever after hold it within my mortal being. I spent my Sundays tracing the course of that tiny burning bite down my esophagus through inner niche and cranny, intestines small and long, obsessively anxious to avoid the inevitable blasphemy of peeing out my own God. But my dumb little body always embarrassed me.
In time, inconsistencies I couldn't forgive, contradictions that left me near insane, began to torment me. I had trouble mentally processing the logic-crashing paradox that was condensed in that spoonful of crumb and wine. I understood by then the use of simile and metaphor and could have grasped the symbolism of the weekly rite and moved on, if my grandfather, who was our priest, did not insist that this was not a metaphor; I wasn't asked to imagine, he said, that the wine from the cedar barrel in our musty cellar became Christ's blood after he blessed it and raised the chalice. It was blood. As my grandfather had never gone swimming or singing at taverns or fishing or dancing or sightseeing, and fasted twice a week and built churches, monasteries and museums, and all day intoned Byzantine psalms to himself, his self-denial automatically made him an authority in matters of faith. I couldn't argue with him. It was then I also began to feel hypochondriac about the tiny ornate spoon I had once admired, and as I waited in the long line of communicants I worried about the germs in the adhoc mouths that licked it before my turn could come.
I knew the priest lent his voice and his hand to Christ?not as an actor but a humble incarnation in the service of the people who assembled around the altar as the apostles had around the dinner table?as he said: "Take this, all of you, and eat it." But having lost the ability to believe in any direct incarnation, I was left, at prepubescence, face to face with the bottomline ugly reality of it: the barbarism. So I quit going to church, and the homeric fights that ensued week after week between my relatives and myself propped up their stern sense of honor against mine, God against me, my tradition against my education, and tore apart our family fabric, until I had no anchor and ran away from home. That was how I came to America at the age of fifteen. I did not receive Communion again.
Fifteen years later, I have come full circle: now I savor that tiny aromatic drop of body-and-blood, the tangy warm wine-and-crumb that connects me to all I come from, my island, my dead grandDad, my living tongue, my fertility, my euphoria, my body, and, I dare use the word, my soul. And I have come to understand the importance of rituals.
My ancestral Coptic-Orthodox Church celebrates a more openly pagan Christianity which is born of our awe of the same hurricanes and earthquakes and accidents that have timelessly haunted humanity. It gives people hope to go on when all seems futile, when death is at the end of every effort. Its local Maries carry on the epithets and attributes of extinct indigenous nymphs. In my maternal village, for instance, our priest sacrificed a muscular flower-garlanded bull to Christ; after he had toured the village streets to a merry accompaniment of singing, lyre playing and praying all the way to the church courtyard, the bull was briskly decapitated, adroitly skinned and cut into bits that women cooked in large pots on logfires and served to the congregation after mass. The recipe was unique to each saint's day, but the feast resembled dozens in the Christian calendar commemorating the martyrdom of saints on different dates in each village. They marked the social life of the community, bound the people to each other and to their culture, and afforded free food for the poor and a day of civic equality and class interaction that was unprecedented. Christ upheld our democratic customs. Even more than magical reassurance, this has been the primary function of religion from the beginning of time: communal sensual partaking.
***
This is why it makes no sense that the official Christian Church is under the illusion that it needs to rob us of our senses, render us nihilistic, in order to keep us under control. When the Church calls itself "the body of Christ," it refers to a body that is desexualized, flagellated, shaming. And though the Gospels give much more attention to the miracles, parables, aphorisms, symbolic acts and human relations of Jesus than to his final martyr-dom, with the passage of time his Church has gorily capitalized on the "masochism" of his crucifixion and has consistently used it to hold us in fear and in thrall of all suffering.
We know Jesus considered the spirit to be inextricably involved with the body. He taught everything on the body, his own and others.' He healed, whipped, and resurrected human flesh. He understood the pain, pleasure and pressure our bodies feel. That was his gift: physical compassion. He broke the Jewish levitical taboos of cleanness and unclean-ness, and provocatively ignored the intricate laws of purity of his day's official faith, which regulated all dealings with the dead, food or gender. He touched the lepers, the blind, the dead, the whores and the bleeding women?all the forbidden castes. So it is still shocking how soon after his deification, the old body-restraining intimacy-regulating taboos he had abhorred were reinstated by his own Church, and often fiercer than they had been before.
As Jesus the iconoclast was turned into Jesus the icon, his vision was castrated and his social criticism defanged. Even the most cursory history of Christianity today reveals the irrelevancy of our sexual repression to both Christ and his vision of Heaven on Earth:
In its beginning, the Jesus movement arose as a freedom-loving and eros-evoking reform, drawing strength from communal "agape." As it grew in numbers, the Emperors recognized its usefulness in placating unsatisfied masses, and professional church fathers took it over, who fanaticized and at the same time legitimized it. By the time Christianity became Constantine's official imperial faith, replacing the worship of the emperor himself, its power was so substantial it had to be controlled, manipulated and "normalized" by the ruling bureaucracy. This task was undertaken by both practical and philosophical means:
A.The gradual establishment of the monarchic bishop system and the three-tiered structure that included the presbyterium and the deacons, was the Church's first major deviation from Christ's radically egalitarian teachings. (Its timid precursor had been the Christian elder-presbyter system in Jerusalem which had absorbed the Judaic priestly caste.) The establishment of a permanently hired priesthood endowed with disciplinary powers over the laity, inaugurated the serialization and massification of the laity which until then had stayed fused, and the growing desecularization of education that reinforced the laity's oppression. As knowledge came under theocratic control, the original trend that had pulled the upper classes and intellectuals to Christ's Church was reversed: the laity was now educated by its priests and intellectuals had to become either monks or heretics.
The second step in this autocratic progression was the declaration of the primacy of the Roman bishop, who eventually replaced the collective leadership of the bishops as the supreme head of the Church, absorbing the imperial trappings and arrogant pomp of Roman rule into the praxis of the Church. In the following centuries, the Roman bishop had the singular power to exempt himself from his own moral rulings. Dozens of Popes fathered illegitimate sons and were often succeeded by them, like the Emperors of old.
The Sermon on the Mount had made clear what Jesus thought of such dominant structures: "in the Kingdom [the society of the future], there shall be none." To meet its governing needs, the Church transposed Christ's vision of a non-authoritarian translucent society out of real life and on to the promised society of Heaven, which ironically justified suffering in this world. Christians ended up living for the rewards of Heaven. And entry to that intangible egalitarian afterlife was restricted, kept tightly in the hands of the hierarchy who bartered it at will and for profit. Thus Christendom's Heaven replaced life on Earth.
The third step toward the Christian Church's unprecedented iron rule of theocracy, was the obligatory celibacy of the all-male clergy, enforced in the 11th century during the Gregorian reforms. This process completely reversed Christ's vision that all the members of his Church were also members of the priesthood. Perpetual priestly celibacy served to solidify geopolitical power and prestige in the hands of the Pope and to set apart his powerless representatives as morally superior beings; to prevent second sons of nobles from claiming positions as local bishops without papal consent, as they had done; and to stop married priests' families from inheriting and selling ecclesiastic offices and properties.
And the final step in the structural and spiritual sclerosis of the Church was the infallibility of the Pope, proclaimed in 1870 with the stroke of a Pope's pen which in effect turned him into God. The sovereign Pope became the only subject in the Catholic Church.
Clearly, civic laws are irrelevant to the preservation and dispensation of God's word which is the clergy's only confirmed task. Secular power is antithetical to Christ's teachings. Yet the Pope today remains the ultimate temporal ruler for 60 millions of Christians who are excluded from real religious function and who are a priori inessential members of the Church. And after 2,000 years of continuous institutionalization, having survived every big revolution intact, the Church believes it can endure without change.
B.All through the late antique period, Christians had viewed the flesh of Christ as utterly continuous with human flesh. That was the original genius of the Christian faith: In the conception, birth, nurturing and death of Christ, every human physiological process was reaffirmed. Christ's incarnation expunged the "disorder" introduced into the human body by Adam's fall. The Christian religion initially prevailed primarily because it preached Everyman/woman's salvation, equality, freedom, brotherhood. It was itself a revolution. That was much more important to most believers than their allegorical victory over death.
But when the Christians were ushered into power by Emperor Constantine (who used Christianity to found his rule and was later sanctified), the Church was inevitably co-opted, its message distorted by newer apologists keen to help the powers-that-be control the masses. Archaic pagan rites were transferred onto Christian customs, saints succeeded old demigods, and the Christian codes of behavior were adapted to ways of life developed long before the advent of Christianity. Roman administration was moved into the bishop's palace. Bishops assumed the duties, tiaras and ritualized tasks of courtiers and emperors.
One of the easiest ways to deflate the insurgent democratic ethos of the Christian faith was to switch its emphasis away from life and toward the current Gnostic obsession with the democracy of death. In synods and encyclicals, bishops placed new emphasis on the Christian worship of the dead, cruelly reminding the flock of its inevitable destination.
As Christianity came under the influence of the dominant GraecoRoman world view which espoused the dichotomy between body and soul, it exchanged the totality of the Jesus movement for the fashionable Stoic ethic, which reacted to the self-destructive Roman moral decadence by advocating a sexuality devoid of pleasure and used solely for procreation. Soon enough, Porphyry's old phrase about Plotinus, "Shame at being in the body," somehow came to represent Christian piety. Jesus' political message of across-the-board civic freedom and personal responsibility came to mean "freedom from the body."
Rome's Vestal Virgins, the Essene Jews, the Encratite and Gnostic thinkers, were all practicing abstinence then, preaching in their distinct bleak ways that the end of the "corrupt age" would be brought about by the "boycott of the womb," that sexuality was a token of human bondage, and sex contributed to the animal cycle of mortality. Doomsday scenarios were so de rigueur that, in order to gain philosophical prestige, Christian leaders felt pressure to legitimate their faith by emulating these pagan forebodings into Christianity
Monasticism was the first outcome of this influence, popularized by the charisma-tic Anthony of the Egyptian desert. The less talented sons of large families, or men who could not marry because of money or bad health, or men and women of privileged classes who disdained the forced dislocations of marriage, childbirth, and bereavement, found honorable escape in asceticism. A woman's virgin body granted her some freedom from the responsibilities of daily life; her untouched flesh, mirroring the purity of the garden of Eden, afforded her higher public status than she could know within a Roman or Jewish or Christian marriage. At first, monasticism did not massively affect the Christian populace.
At the beginning, the laity simply wanted holy persons it could consult and it was drawn to the strangeness of the ferocious ascetic virgins who lived shorn of normal human attributes and had no fear of death or need for continuity through procreation. Numerous relics of massacred virgins had been preserved in churches and thought to spread sexual fertility, health and longevity to the living. But their spiritual power did not encroach on the profane life of the community and its collective enjoyment of the theater, public baths, and hippodrome, at a time when nudity and sexual shame were unknown among the upper classes. Those early Christians could not have foreseen how soon and overwhelmingly their own Church would come to restrict their private physical pleasures in the name of God.
In Paul's time, the resurrection of the dead was still understood "as taking place through the nature of the human body, and accomplished every day.. [via] the succession of children born from us" (Polybius, Vita Thecla 5). Famously, Paul himself wrote in Galatians that "in Christ there is neither male nor female..., neither slave nor free" (3:28). But Christian values began shifting. The misogynism of the Greeks crept its way into the Christian exegesis, and Paul cautioned: "It is shameful for a woman to speak in church" (1 Cor. 14:35). Thomas Acquinas then defined women as misbegotten men. Soon after that, procreation struck younger Christian theologians as a central contradiction to be resolved.
Until Augustine converted in the 4th century, Christians had understood the story of Adam and Eve as a story about responsibility and free will, noting that as Adam and Eve left Paradise, God encouraged them to give names to things and rule the world. Augustine had previously belonged to the Manichean sect who believed the earth to be the futile kingdom of the devil and all procreation to be diabolical. The sect asked continence from its members and the use of contraception or abortion from sympathizers. (Augustine felt grave guilt for keeping a longtime mistress and fathering a son with her, then banishing her for a suitable wife, before converting to Christianity.) The Manicheans saw the sexual instinct not as a merciful gift to Adam by God to help him overcome death, but a demonic possession of the world; that permanent evil, present in all humans, was responsible for the mindless continuation of a degenerate humanity through the act of intercourse; if sexual activity would cease, the tumultuously repeated constraints of birth and death would be broken. Like other Gnostics, the Manicheans preached the imminent end of the age.
Anxious to make himself a place in his new faith, Augustine passed these old-world fatalisms into the new Christian society by defining the normal sexual drive as poena reciproca, punishment on Adam's descendants for his crime. He preached that sexual pleasure infected the conceived child with original sin—i.e., with eternal damnation. Sex and the grave stood at each end of every human life, delineating the two poles in between which roared a cascade of helpless misery, ignorance, malice and violence for ever after.
This pessimistic vision of life on earth was brusquely adopted by Church authorities who found in it a useful justification of the need to shepherd people by a higher authority—by God's representatives on earth. Carnal sin superceded all other sins, and subsequent theologians went as far as to preach that isolation from sex was the main reason Christ had come to earth. For the next 1,500 years the Church went on to instill the terror of pleasure in its people. Even today, and even those who think of Genesis only as literature or those who are not Christian, live in a culture indelibly shaped by Augustine's dark reading of a text written down by Hebrew tribes thousands of years ago.
The extreme circumstantiality of Augustine's theology was predicated on one line from Genesis: "And the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked." In contrast to other contemporary Greek or Syrian Christian writers, Augustine, the lowly African bishop of Hippo, read there an instant of sexual shame (perhaps due to his own sexual misgivings). In driven prose, Augustine narrowed Christian theology down to the paradigm of the "indecent" summa voluptas of orgasm, which escaped conscious control, and which marked those limits of the conscious self that had first stunned Adam and Eve. His interpretation of that crucial moment when Adam and Eve made their wills independent from God and felt their bodies alien and uncontrollable, presented the Popes with reason to warn against the risks of free will. His reading stuck: Disobedience was the cause of evil, and sex was its manifestation.
So Augustine's politically expedient belief in the moral impotence of human beings confirmed the need for universal government and helped Popes consolidate their power by imposing celibacy or unnatural moral laws on the nations and governments of the world. The Church hierarchy realized that if it could dictate the innermost secret desires of kings, presidents and plebes, its power would remain absolute and unchallengable. That is why the Christian Church, even in this most bloody of centuries, views humanity's crimes as being committed in married people's bedrooms. And that is how the seed was laid for the sadomasochistic dominance of the Church over our natural instincts, which has resulted in a plethora of neuroses and pathologies. Ever since Augustine, the sexual act has retained a central negative role in our relationship with ourselves and our sense of self worth; even in our postFreudian world we fear the deranging effects of lust and seek our pleasure in dark places, guiltily associating normal bodily desire with an evil and ineffable transgression.
***
One of the most authoritative rebuttals of Augustine in his own time, came from a member of the monastic diaspora, John Cassian, who sought to modify the denial of the freedom of will implied in Augustine's notion of predestination. Cassian argued that sexual temptation was universal, thus "natural to man," "congenital"—i.e., "planted by the will of the Lord not to injure us, but to help us." He also thought sexual drive led to compassion.
Augustine's most famous opponent was Julian, bishop of Eclanum, who movingly defended the calor genitalis?that diffused heat of ecstasy which medical opinion then held necessary for reproduction (without it, they thought, the race would end). He argued that sexuality was indispensable to our species, having been offered to us by God in his mercy. Julian contradicted Augustine's credo of despair by demonstrating that sexual desire did not have to be renounced and was not corrupted. He in fact though it impious to suggest that the sexual urge was not what God had blessed in Adam and Eve, and what the priest had consecrated during marriage. Julian preached that sex was what free choice made it. Human libido was amenable to the will and blameworthy only in harmful excess; its antisocial uses were banal by-products that could be soothed by the study of the Gospels.
Yet Julian ended up portrayed in history as the heretic and Augustine as the saint. And the laity ended up sexually subjected to the harsh formative orders of its Popes.
With the passage of time, Christians who disagreed with Augustine's credo were excommunicated, tortured, eradicated. Thousands were burned at the stake, condemned to "shunning" and poverty, sent on far-flung pilgrimages and agonizing penances, forced to confess to heresy and thrown in perpetual imprisonment, all in the name of and for the sake of the God of Love. Guilt was presumed, suspicion of a crime constituted a crime, properties were confiscated, and the taint of the heretic fell on the accused's family for generations. The hoc omnus gene was kept in fear just like in Roman and Pharisean times.
Also with the passage of time, revivalist sects were born that persisted and found refuge in exile?Anabaptists, Quakers, Jehovah witnesses, reborns?most of all in the Americas. There again, the moneymen and strongmen organized the new Christian sects into manageable and profitable institutions. (Latin America espoused a liberation theology, but the money and prestige of competing Christian churches' resources and the iron rule of the Pope in the end diffused it.) It now seems improbable that we may ever return to a pre-Paulinian sexual innocence and natural unselfconsciousness, even as that sort of quest has become the dominant spiritual direction for many social groups in our society.
***
Nevertheless, the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus are central affirmations of the human body. Christ is the Word made Flesh.What would Christ's Passion have been if he hadn't had mortal flesh? His intention was not to deify suffering but to transcend it, to set his life, not his death, as an example. Fighting nature is the product of human vanity, and not divine inspiration. The systematic clerical demonization of the flesh is anti-life and anti-Christ. Disembodiment is a form of loveless, insecure atrophy. Clearly, Christ sent a message not of self-abuse but of self-transformation—of embodiment, of Heaven on earth.
I used to wonder as a child what Christ might have looked like, and imagined him buff as a carpenter—a peasant muscleman with thick bodily hair, a prominent nose, sensual lips—or as a thin gawky near-sighted listless intellectual. I wondered if he'd ever got tipsy drinking wine and if he'd had an erection when Mary rubbed his feet with her fragrant hair or when Judas kissed him on the lips or as he died on the Cross. Jesus was the Proteus of my early imagination, a polymorphous immateriality that gave me cause to create. That is why, I think, we have no descriptions of him by the evangelists—so that he could be a universal deity. The pellucid effeminate dying blond male whose pitiable likeness graces millions of churches across this planet has no historical or theological justification. We worship Christ on the Cross as he lies wilted, a helpless defeated mournful corpse because the Church fathers once again considered advantageous to the longevity of their rule. The Christ of the Last Supper is not our central icon, even though it may be more authentic.
We know that the Biblical Jesus passionately engaged with everyone he met. Much like an energetic modern politician on the campaign trail, he appealed to gentiles and tax collectors, housewives and prostitutes, and even revelled in his public adoration. His mere touch raised the underprivileged from the shadows. There was, in the words of theologian Paul Tillich, an "eternal now" about his life. He was fully present to the unknown woman in Bethany who anointed his head or to the street woman who interrupted his dinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee to wash Jesus' feet with her hair (Luke 7:36); and so deeply did he trust in body language that he chided his host the Pharisee for not having kissed and anointed Jesus too. He invited intimacy with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:7), with the woman whose only desire was to touch the hem of his garment (Luke 8:43), with the penitent thief and his grieving mother (John 19:26), even the soldiers who drove the nails of his crucifixion (Luke 23:34). He used his very spittle, alone (Mark 8:23) or mixed with earth (John 9:1), to cure people. There was an unrestrainable largesse to him, that can be summed up in the image of the open-armed welcoming prototype of the quintessential Mediterranean host. This is the Christ most of the New Testament testifies to: one who embodied a vibrant unabashed physical life, inclusive and unpredictable, and who was so closely attuned with reality that he broke out of all our familiar human limitations. Being what we call larger-than-life, he tore open the barrier of finitude by force of his great uncensored irrepressible conviction. His resurrection was the ultimate experience of Being.
In light of all this, it is not easily defensible that Christ's Church gruesomely focuses on his lurid death, traffics in guilt, and spins our faith into unending cycles of fear, sin and repentance by worshiping the tormented aspect of Christ's experience. It must be disorienting to pray to a bleeding dead man, naked but for a soiled loincloth, hanging off a cross. Pleading to a tortured God for strength produces an impregnable irony. When monks or theologians speak about contemplating the beauty of the dying Christ in church, their usage of the word "beauty" alarms me because it reveals a semiotic distortion having occurred through our centuries of loving the Augustinian aesthetic of human misery. Our Christianity has come to worship the dead undead, glorifying the afterlife and reenacting the seasonal bloody sacrifice of the God of vegetation like the Egyptians, the Summerians, or the Minoans before it. And as the God of the abused, whose ruined body we literally ingest every time we attend mass, this Christ has come to appeal to our sense of despair.
That is not the Christ of the Last Supper and the miracles, or the risen Lord who ate and drank and invited inspection of his wounds; he is not the Teacher who grasped the hands of Peter's mother-in-law (Mark 1:31) and of Jairus' daughter (Mark 5:41) and snatched them back from death, the visionary liberating Messiah whose touch made the blind man see (Mark 8:23) and the bent woman stand upright (Luke 13:13).
The distinctive feature of Christianity is that God became body, and in so doing confirmed and healed our bodily nature. Unlike Zeus or Yahweh, Christ was human. And he used his body in manifold and sacred ways. His life was an outrage from birth to death. God's becoming flesh was and remains scandalous, and yet its significance has hardly been worked out, mostly because Western Augustinian tradition has so vilified the human body.
In his farewell meal, Christ showed us that, as Parmenides had first revealed, body and knowing are one. He made his teaching physical rather than metaphysical, acted it out in the world of food and drink and dress and skin. He lay his hands on the bread and wine as he had on lepers (Mark 1:41) or children (Mark 10:3), and his touch as always created life, i.e., transformation—because Jesus' living body was a tremendous source of intuition and strength. That is the strength that is ideally passed on to us through the Eucharist.
We are all—ugly, horny, tired, ditsy, fat, fallen—the body of Christ. That is Christ's uncontainable democracy. The taking of the Eucharist is our ritual performance of this union: God and humankind encounter each other in the body. That is the core of the New Testament. Our liberation takes place in the body. That is our salvation, and our freedom.
