Given, helpless
Sticky with blood
Slippery with sweat
Enfolded into his mother.
First words; first steps:
Giggles and tickles;
Sneezes and coughs;
Tears, hiccups.
Body of Christ
Falls from trees
Scraped knees, bloody noses;
Splinters, ‘too hot!’ burns;
Nettlerash, pimples;
Dirt ingrained in fingerprint whorls
Calluses, bitten nails
Blistered shoulders
Slipped chisel scars
Body of Christ
Face of a wanderer
Laughter lines etched deep
Leathered skin
Speaking of Love
Giving peace with a kiss
Courage with a word
Sharing of Body and Blood
Food for the journey
Body of Christ
Surrendered
Agonised flesh
Tortured, tormented,
Defiled, pierced
Given, helpless
Sticky with blood
Slippery with sweat
Enfolded into his Father
Body of Christ
Wordinthehand2013
The
light went out. He was the Light, so that seemed odd; the paradox of
being and not being was hard enough when he became human but after all he had been through this was
beyond his poor brain’s understanding. Then he realised his brain
couldn’t understand anything anymore.
He was dead; the betrayal, torture
and execution he had foretold had happened; his body devastated; broken
beyond any ability to function. The valves in the chambers of his heart
blasted open; his lungs like wet sea sponges sodden with fluid, the air
sacs filled with black stagnant blood soaking up the redundant oxygen.
The unwieldy drop from the cross had left its mark; marrow seeping from
stress fractures in the once strong bones of his thighs. The cells that
had rushed to heal the many cuts and bruises now surrendering to
putrification and decay
He wasn’t sure what he had expected. A pause in time? There was
something in that that would have been welcome after all the trials his
recent life had caused him. But not all trials – there was so much joy
that also belonged to his humanity – remembering his life; how he had
grown; to see, to recognise; to name the world before him; and now for
his tongue to shrivel in an agonised mouth; eyes to turn milky and
hardened in their sockets. Remembering the uncoordinated mysteries of
babyhood. Learning to touch, to hold, to create with tiny fingers and
thumbs that had gradually become strong and callused. To hold on to his
father’s same strong fingers as he had pulled himself to his feet and
toddled across the kitchen floor. The spare frame of his body that had
carried him out of the Galilee to an outlaw’s death twisting and
contorting as the fluids in his joints calcified into stony crystals.
And no words; no thoughts to create words; no mouth to speak; no ears to hear.
Yet he was the Word; or was he? What was a God in a dead body? No
different to any human corpse? His mother had not felt his presence, his
friends had sobbed and wailed into their robes. He was dead. The inside
of the tomb was black; he didn’t need to see - he knew this because his
Father has turned away and that was the moment the whole of Creation
had turned black.
Did his Father continue to turn in on himself, stilled to despair;
distressed beyond the meaning of distress that his own child could be
killed by his chosen people; was the Spirit still raging her grief
across the air currents? The Creator and the Creative lost without their
guiding star. They, who were completeness, now driven apart. How long
would they last without him? Beloveds grieving the Beloved; how could he
ever find them again?
He was here; woven into the physicality of this parody of flesh, blood
and bone. He had delighted in the living; the sensations of touch,
taste, smell; the glory of language, gesture, nuance; the experience of
friendship, frustration, laughter and fear. He had stepped into his
Father’s dream and it had been wonderful beyond words. The dying, too,
had been part of that life. Unwelcome, suffering the agonies of pain
caused through betrayal, corruption and violence, but still, somehow,
life. How his body had borne so much; how his brave heart had driven him
to rise and rise again knowing the path of descent that he was taking.
And now dead, apart, alone, deaf, mute, paralysed, out of time, nowhere.
The miracles he had worked to bring wholeness to others would not work
here; the call he had sent out for Lazarus could not rise from this
emptying shell. Without the Father’s power to draw upon; without the
Spirit’s breath to bring life; he was helpless. Condemned again and
again to death.
The God of Nowhere, fell truly silent; mindful in a body without a mind.
Meanwhile, his body, seemingly inert, did not understand this concept
of dead. The taking of his life had given his body a mind of its own.
Chemical reactions were in place; bacteria worked and fed and grew,
nails and hair pushed on through the skin. Tiny inhabitants of the tomb
visited the body, in spite of the unfinished anointing with myrrh and
the spices; feeding on skin flakes and bone fragments. His flesh began
to disintegrate but then, its own miracle, to transform, to find a new
way to be; seeking to be absorbed into the great universal melee of
life. His body still sang its song; at a quieter level; a slower
cadence; a softer melodic frequency; but it sang.
And as his body became less and less attached to its worldly memory it
turned more and more to God; each cell; each atom knowing the Creator in
a way the collective body never had. Noticing the God nearby; they
turned first to him for guidance, seeking the next step in the weaving,
instinctively knowing that death is never the end; for there is nothing
that God had made that has been lost; simply another threshold, another
becoming. The Word roused himself and smiled at his own foolishness;
remembering how often he had shepherded these small awareness’s back
into the weaving; feeding the complex minutia of the earth. Here was the
Father in their very existence and here was the Spirit in their
eagerness for life; their capacity for rebirth. And he was here;
acknowledged by these tiny lives’ desire to be transformed. No longer
the fear of separation – knowing that God was completeness.
He, who had borne every ill in Pandora’s Box had found Hope hidden at the bottom.
‘Dead’ was the refusal to believe that this could happen; the despair at
losing what he had; the fear that Love no longer existed. In the air
around him he felt the souls of the dead; drifting aimlessly; the
certainty that they had been forsaken by God cruelly cocooning them;
each into their own private Hell. Death had closed their eyes and the
darkness had overcome them. He called to them but they would not listen;
hope was a lost dream in their everlasting sleep.
Instead he called to himself; the cells that had made up his human form
crowded round him. ‘I will be myself again’ he told them ‘myself inside
and out.’ The weaving began; the flesh and the divinity dancing together
drawing Light and Life into every atom, every pore. The healing knit
bones and drew torn skin together, stitched sinew and counted fingers
and toes until there were only the places of piercing left. ‘Leave
them’, he said ‘so they will know me’.
Hope drew on memory then to feed the heart; the unwavering look of love
in his mother’s eyes; the ‘that’ll do’ nod of pride from his father; the
rousing cheer of his friends when he finally threw a fishing net
without making a cat’s cradle of it; the soft kiss of a woman’s
understanding of his dream; the trusting arms of a child around his
neck.
He began to shine; the brightness of a nova star; incandescent beyond
imagining. The darkness retreated; finding no place to hide, no shadowed
corner, no place so deep, no exile so far that the Light could not
reach. So bright that the eyes of the dead were opened and their veiled
vestiges of flesh warmed. They turned to him at once and were gathered
gratefully into his arms. ‘We are going Home’ he reassured them, ‘there
are so many rooms in my Father’s house.’
He opened his eyes to the clammy, dusty darkness of the Tomb; a
grey-pink light finding cracks in the stonework; a hint of a new dawn.
He felt the rhythm of the Dance through the soles of his feet and heard
the song of the Spirit in the arms of the fruit trees. Distractedly he
rolled one of the winding cloths between his fingers as he listened to
the faint, grief-laden heartbeat of a woman standing watch in the
morning shadows of the garden and the mournful echoes of loss and
despair from the locked windows and upper rooms of an old friend’s
house. He could think of no reason to be still be here, when Hope, Light
and Love were needed out there. The stone surrendered easily, unwilling
to hold the Lord one single second more, and, as he stepped out, the
grass rose up to bathe his feet in the morning dew of the first Easter
day.
wordinthehand2010
