Daily Episcopalian

By Donald Schell

My dad was born in 1921, delivered by C-section two months premature because his mother was dying of a brain tumor. The one time my grandmother held her newborn son she asked, ‘Is he beautiful?’ The brain tumor had already taken her sight. She died two weeks later. My grandfather, a physician grieving his twenty-six year old wife of less than a year, wrote to Gerber baby foods urgently asking what to feed his pre-term son. Somehow Dad survived and grew, though while still quite young he contracted scarlet fever, damaging a heart valve and giving him a life-long heart murmur.

‘How our bodies mean?’ is an Easter question, actually a Good Friday/Easter question. What we know of bodies, of living and of dying helps us hear resurrection proclamation.

When he was preaching Good Friday or Easter my friend and colleague Rick Fabian regularly referenced John Dominic Crossan’s claim that Jesus’ body was almost certainly taken down from the cross and thrown on the city garbage heap to be devoured by dogs. After the cruel death, Romans meant their denial of burial to shame the crucified criminal and his family.

Year by year Rick and I took turns preaching Holy Week and Easter through thirty-one years of shared pastoral leadership. Two preachers couldn’t tell the story more differently. When parishioners didn’t hear Rick draw on Crossan’s conclusions, they often heard me say that I think that the Shroud of Turin is Jesus’ burial cloth, the cloth John’s Gospel says Peter and the other disciple discovered in the empty tomb. Part of our Easter proclamation was irreconcilable stories and a mystery – one preaching from Jesus’ empty tomb and the other Jesus’ body savaged on the garbage heap. What we both preached was thanksgiving for Jesus’ living presence with us in the community that gathers to share his body and blood in bread and wine, God’s love that was stronger than death.

It’s Jesus alive and with us that makes us Christian. The ‘how’ of the mystery of resurrection matters because it points toward Jesus and also makes us talk as well as we can, as much as we understand about bodies and selves, the incarnational demand of finding words to preach Jesus’ ‘resurrection from the dead’ and the promise of our own resurrection.

The Boston Women’s Health Collective 1973 book title Our Bodies, Ourselves is closer to the ancient Christian creeds than easy talk of “our immortal souls.” We can’t go very far talking Christian faith without talking about how bodies mean and how persons are embodied. Touching another’s living flesh or even taking a breath is personal.

Here at the Episcopal Café in Holy Week Ann Fontaine posted four series of Stations of the Cross. The Salvadoran stations in that series are charcoal drawings of naked bodies, some tortured and still living, but many dead. These Stations join Christ’s fearless suffering for us to horrific memories and untold stories of the tortures and executions of El Salvador’s bitter civil war. I was glad such brutal drawings were in black and white.

The artist didn’t ask to look suffering “in the face.” Most of the bodies were drawn facing away from us, presenting us not with suffering faces, but with wounded backs and buttocks and thighs. Picturing damaged and lifeless flesh, the artist invited us to see how death squads brutalizing human bodies are really attacking personhood.

In a 2002 my son Peter worked in El Salvador for a year between university and seminary, serving as lay assistant to a recently ordained priest who had been a banker during the war. Like many Salvadorans, Peter’s mentor had family and friends on both sides of the conflict. Fr. Ramiro took us on pilgrimage to the chapel where Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot and killed while saying mass. We saw his bloodstained chasuble shot-through with bullet holes. Then we drove to the memorial shrine and museum at the University of San Salvador where six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter had been slain. We stood speechless before a glass case containing a relic of one of the teacher-theologians martyred that night– a copy of Moltmann’s Crucified God punctured with bullet holes and soaked with the blood.

I think I’d baptized Sara Miles about a year before our trip to El Salvador. In her book Take This Bread, A Radical Conversion. Sara describes her long evening conversations in the Jesuit residence with Ignacio Martin-Baro just six months before he was killed. Sara laughs when I use the church’s official word from baptismal instruction, “catechesis” to describe her frustrated, impassioned late-night theological and political conversations with her Jesuit friend, but his patient hearing and fearless encouragement of all her questions when she was still an atheist war correspondent did start Sara on the road to baptism.

How do bodies mean? These are all hints -
– a father’s premature birth and a grandmother’s death at twenty-six
– a young University graduate making his home in a garden shed to work with the poor in El Salvador,
– political assassinations
– martyrdom
– old blood on a ruined book
– my hand pouring water from a rock font over my friend’s head in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The naked bodies of the Salvadoran Stations were emphatically not “nudes.” A painter friend of mine says every painter must return again and again to life drawing class where the joy of drawing and painting the human figure keeps revealing how ‘all bodies are beautiful.’ Beyond carrying out execution orders, the soldiers who did the violence these Stations of the Cross portray disfigured, punctured and tore people’s bodies in the killing and after it. Witnessing to beauty destroyed, the artist shows how violence depersonalizes people’s bodies. Even in death, these bodies cry out for respect and tenderness, promising beauty’s return.

When poet-theologian Janet Morley’s imagines Mary Magdalene speaking of Good Friday her words point to something similar -

It was unfinished
We stayed there, fixed, until the end,
women waiting for the body that we loved;
and then it was unfinished.
There was no time to cherish, cleanse, anoint;
no time to handle him with love,
no farewell.
Since then, my hands have waited,
aching to touch even his deadness,
smoothe oil into bruises that no longer hurt,
offer his silent flesh my finished act of love.
(Janet Morley, All Desires Known)

Morley’s poem feels like Passion Sunday at St. John’s Cathedral in Los Angeles this year. Watching three vested laypeople carried Jesus’ cross through the congregation, I wanted to hold and comfort my Lord Jesus so he wouldn’t be ‘naked and cold in death’ as the Orthodox Good Friday hymn laments.

Love is part of how our bodies mean. Our desire to touch tenderly is part of the ‘how’ of resurrection. Remembering Jesus, feeling the shattering death of our Friend, I thought of my dad dying in his sleep six months ago when I was 3000 miles away. Since my dad’s death, mother talks about the silence of the night and dad’s empty space in her bed.

At home drifting off to sleep after Holy Week liturgies and the Easter Vigil, I listened to Ellen’s breathing and thought of the first times we’d touched thirty-five years ago, and the many, many moments of tenderness, comfort, passion, and peace we’d shared since. Ellen’s parents died young – in their sixties. I’m sixty-two. I pray for more years. I want to know that ‘love stronger than death,’ but wanting won’t make it so. Partly because it was Holy Week, as I lay so close to her achingly beautiful warmth and smoothness, I wondered which of us would die first.

In our joyful Easter phone calls to the children, the distance was palpable. Our son the priest is a continent away from San Francisco in Washington, D.C.; his oldest sister is even further, a continent and an ocean away in Spain. Phone calls can join us mind-to-mind and soul-to-soul, but I wanted to be close enough to feel their breath, to see them in the flesh, to touch them.

This Good Friday when we joined our whole congregation touching and kissing the burial icon of Christ on the altar and mounding flowers around it, my fingers tingled with the memory of touching my dad’s face after the burial society had laid him out and ‘arranged the features’ of his face to an expression none of us had ever seen. When I touched dad’s face, that touch, my living finger touching his dead forehead, joined the body before me with the father I’d known and loved.

In 1944 my dad enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Did the army physician pretend not to hear his heart murmur? He passed the physical, got through flight school and got his wings, and until the war ended flew a B-17 bomber in daylight raids out from England, over the North Sea to bomb German munitions factories. He came home from the war saying he’d seen and done more than enough killing for a lifetime. The war changed his course vocationally, and he went to medical school to become a physician like my grandfather. He became a healer, touching people with hope, saving lives. In 1980, a few years younger than I am now, his heart valve was giving out and he had open-heart surgery to replace it. Then in his mid-70’s he’d worn out the replacement valve and had open-heart surgery again to put in a new one. When he died just short of his 87th birthday, my wife (a nurse like dad’s mother had been) said, ‘Your dad cheated death again and again to live an amazing long life.’ Of course she was right, but until the last year, his body always seemed as substantial and strong a presence as any living thing could be.

Love, we hear in the Song of Songs, is stronger than death, and in Easter we feel that living power in Christ who lives with and in us. Sometimes. And when we don’t he lives in our aching and hoping to feel it. Easter afternoon, basking in the sun after a glorious Easter Vigil the previous night, “Christ is Risen from the Dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life,” reverberating in my memory and every cell of my body, I wanted to hug my dad again.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

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Comments (12)

Donald,

This is great. As a diabetic, I'm constantly aware of my bodily limitations. As soon as I was diagnosed at age 30, I came to see how many people around me lived with illness. More than anything else, illness keeps death visibly on the horizon. As many do, I find that I live healthier as a result of being diagnosed with an illness, but I also find that I ponder my fragility and mortality more than I did beforehand.

I think we skip over illness when picturing Jesus. I certainly do. I find again and again that I am invested in thinking of the Jesus of the Gospels as a hale, muscular man constantly springing into action. That Jesus is a super hero who can preach up a storm, heal the sick, challenge the Pharisees, die on the cross, rise again, and save me. I leave little room for his weariness, the possibility of illness, and thus little sense of his mortality, which must be part of the story. Jesus the hale super hero can certainly save us, but mightn't he get fed up after a while? Wouldn't he like to take a break and hang out with other healthy folks who don't complain about their aches, pains, fluctuating blood sugars, and chemo doses? The Jesus who can comfort us is someone who needed comforting himself.

Thus, I love this meditation of yours, because however we think Jesus was buried or thrown to the dogs, we can learn a lot by looking for his mortality not only after the words "It is accomplished," but in everything leading up to it.

p.s. Here's the link to Sara's book: http://saramiles.net/

Posted by Jacob Slichter | April 28, 2009 10:29 AM

Hi Donald,

I was diagnosed with cancer a year and three days ago. I have two more months of treatment; I'll stop injecting myself with interferon June 26. I spend a lot of time sitting with the things that my body, my God, and my community have taught me about resurrection.

Thank you for sitting with me, here.

Kirstin Paisley

Posted by Kirstin | April 28, 2009 10:35 AM

Hey Dad,
I like this. I've been thinking a lot about the post-resurrection stories we've heard the last couple weeks in church; and it is precisely the fleshiness of Jesus that stands out:

-Thomas asking, not only to see, but actually to feel the wounds of the crucifixion (maybe looking for proof that Jesus hasn't returned as the "hale super hero" Jake mentioned.);

Jesus breathing on the disciples;

And, my favorite, Jesus eating fish.

Rondesia once pointed out to me that, in the gospels, Jesus always is always eating fish.

It's interesting that, amidst all the disagreements about who this man was, what he taught and what he stood for, the community of early Christians could agree about this one fact: the man really liked fish. Which was true even after he came back from the dead.

I appreciate that little sign that he shared, not only the melodrama of our flesh (all the pains, and all the joys and what not) but also the quirkiness: My left foot is a little bit shorter than my right; When I walk outside on a sunny day, I always sneeze twice. Jesus liked fish. Maybe he didn't like lamb so much.

He shared in the particularity of our bodies; and when he was raised it was still his body, not some abstract waltgeist incarnate.

A lot of what I come to love (and sometimes hate) about friends and family are the particularities of their bodies. The way they walk, or slouch when they're tired; The funny faces they make when they're surprised; the little scars whose stories I've heard.

Part of what's so wrenching about images like the stations of the cross you describe is that all of that particularity is gone. The stories all people carry in their flesh are erased. The bodies are now just images of an abstracted atrocity and crime.

-Peter Schell

Posted by Peter Schell | April 28, 2009 11:51 AM

I was thinking along these same lines, thanks to the late Nancy Eiesland who wrote The Disabled God. She wrote, "“Resurrection is not about the negation or erasure of our disabled bodies in hopes of perfect images, untouched by physical disability; rather Christ’s resurrection offers hope that our nonconventional and sometimes difficult bodies participate fully in the imago Dei and that God whose nature is love and who is on the side of justice and solidarity is touched by our experience.” Isn't that glorious?

Laura Toepfer

Posted by LKT | April 28, 2009 12:18 PM

I love this reflection. Part of what I began to experience at Saint Gregory's was how to live in my body and find within my body an opening to wait for God. That's why I loved the dancing and the incense and the singing and the sheer beauty of the service-- it so tangibly, physically,and sensuously invited us to simultaneously inhabit our senses and await the coming of the Divine.

I too lost my father this winter, as you know. I've been deeply comforted by 3 dreams in which he visited me. In the last dream we embraced, and the astonishing thing, when I reflected on the dream the next day, was how robust and tangible the hug was. Journalling about it, I noted that he felt as warm as a bearskin and as stout as an oak. Now this is odd,that even in the non-tangible world of dreams, I experienced profound physicality, which I believed was a gift to comfort me.

I very much liked too that your piece shared a profound difference between two viewpoints-- that Rick preached about the savaged body and you preached about the Shroud of Turin-- yet your differences were held in the larger truth of Jesus' living presence among us. This seems like an especially powerful and important reminder now, when polarization and finger-pointing and fear are strong currents in our culture. I pray daily for the grace to enter into the unitive mystery where, as the hymn says, "they will know we are Christians by our love."

Thank you for such a beautiful, tender and profound piece.

Joan Stockbridge

Posted by joan stockbridge | April 28, 2009 12:28 PM

Donald, excellent reflection. I've been thinking lately about the future our bodies have with God. I'm certain our bodies say something to us and to God, and that reading them is the task of a lifetime as the words change like wet ink on vellum. But they speak into a future in the resurrection. They are prophesy of something seen only as though through a dusty mirror. Thanks for pushing us...

Tay Moss

Posted by Rev'd Tay Moss | April 28, 2009 4:17 PM

OK Donald,

my cheeks and even my collar are damp now. Thanks for that.

I've always lamented the loss of the part of the old Marriage Rite that said "With my body I thee worship, with my worldly goods I thee endow, with this ring I thee wed." It seems to me that in all the many ways our bodies mean, the thing they always mean is holiness. And to worship another person with your own body, whether in a healing touch or a friendly embrace or sexually, manifests that holiness in both people about as fully as it ever gets manifested.

The deep horror of the images in those Stations of the Cross is that the obliteration of personhood is also the desecration of something so sacred. It sometimes seems a wonder to me that our own bodies can even survive witnessing such things.

Posted by Bill Doggett | April 28, 2009 4:27 PM

This is a wonderful essay, Donald, with which I resonate completely.
It often strikes me in the church's debates and wranglings about sexuality and sex, there is remarkably little conversation about the holiness of bodies and touch, and the loneliness and sacramental searching of those who seek to find partners, marry, and those who cannot for all sorts of causes.
Imagine being single for decades at a time and missing that whole dimension of revelation...all those for whom the Peace in church or exchanging a library book with a brush of hands is the only human touch available.

My Dad died at Thanksgiving - I resonate with that part as well. Interesting that for my Mum (who had seen little of Dad in his last year since he was in a nursing home near me and she -with arthritis etc. - was only able to make it to RI for a couple of visits as traveling even locally became too much for her) seeing Dad's unembalmed but nicely laid out body at the funeral home was really important. She thought he looked so much younger and more peaceful than she had remembered, as she worried about him from afar. I who saw him daily in the anguish and tedium of the nursing home, and rubbed his feet and washed his face and fed him tea and biscuits, thought his laid out body rather strange and unfamiliar, and missed even the pained animation of his presence in infirm flesh.

My good colleague Richard Valantasis wrote a lovely paper "Dazzling Bodies" about his theology and social theory and priestly experience of bodies, not unlike your own. He blogs on the Institute for Contemplative Living web and blogspot.

Posted by Jennifer Phillips | April 28, 2009 5:32 PM

Donald --

I'm struggling hard right now to build a narrative that takes all this in.

Staring in tears at the Salvadoran drawings and thinking the flip side of Peter's comment about the stories they carried in their flesh being erased: of how painfully and tenderly those stories might be carried in the flesh of their survivors.

Of how a woman in my neighborhood lay dead in her front hall for 5 years while the lawn got mowed and the mail got delivered and picked up and my son's friends rented the small house on her lot.

Of not comprehending the possibility of the bodies of strangers or neighbors dead or dying in the street. And their murderers walk those same streets. Again, so close to my neighborhood, as well as far away.

Of having my son ask yesterday what the most pain I'd experienced had been, and wondering if it was ok to tell him it was the pain of giving birth to him. Real pain that forced my brain to dissociate from my body and wonder who it was that was howling so.

Of seeing concentration camp IDs tatood on living arms of survivors, and hearing the whispers of the dead while touring a camp. Of hearing from my brother of the bones and memorials of Rwanda.

Of finding myself profoundly hoping that those who torture don't have the gift of the tender, wonder-filled physical intimacy with a beloved. And being ashamed of that hope.

I SO want a narrative that weaves those together in simplicity....

Posted by leesytag | April 29, 2009 11:59 AM

Dear Donald,

Thanksw again for this piece. It continues to stick around in my head today. In particular, I've been thinking about your words in relationship to the several people I know for whom the part of their body that is failing is their mind. I remember when my mother was dying of cancer, in her last few days time seemed to close up around her -- her body was losing the future and her mind was losing the past, until she hovered, for a day or two before she died, almost completely in the now. But I wonder if there is anything unique to the way our bodies mean when memory and cognition are unreliable or gone while strength and health remain. No insights, just musings.

Posted by Bill Doggett | April 29, 2009 4:12 PM

Hi, Donald and everyone,

As a poet I am constantly contemplating death and attachments to this body. As a nurse I am constantly confronted with life and death issues in the routine of my work.

But I would like to address my comments as a singer, a musician whose instrument is her voice. Many limitations of the body influence the voice. And when the body is gone the voice of that instrument is also gone. To train as a singer is to re-learn basic physiological functions like breathing, movement of the rib cage, using the vocal cords and hearing. It is another way of experiencing limitations that give way, with training and persistence, to liberation expanding into joy.

Like Joan my experience of St. Gregory's is grounded in the physical experience: singing, dancing, sharing the bread and wine. This precedes a profound awareness and spiritual awakening. I know I have said this many times before but part of my early experiences at St. Gregory's was a palpable and physical sense that my long dead grandmother and aunt where with me, with us as we danced around the communion table. They were there in the communion of saints. It was a tremendous comfort and relief.

My father died over ten years ago. I saw him the day before he died and he recognized me and said my name which meant a lot to me. The next day I was to perform and sing Brahm's Requiem at Memorial Church at Stanford. I felt I was literally singing my father to heaven, singing him over the threshold of life into another life. Again this was a very palpable sense. It was hard work but necessary. I felt it prepared his way. A few hours after the concert I got a phone call from my sister that our father was gone.

During the year after my father's death I also had many visitations from him.

I love making music with my voice. I am addicted to the experience of being on stage singing in opera or musical. It is very much like being in church, having to be in the moment, living large in the sense of being required to be present, aware, responding, communing, making sounds or moving. The body essential but also a presence of mind, and unity of spirit, a concerted effort combined with others who have similar intentions. I never fail to learn something from these experiences: my body on stage or at church.

A strong intention and the body obeying, following through, being the instrument of that intention. In that process and manifestation is the mystical experience which is a grounding into the source of body and spirit.

Love Cheryl

Posted by Cheryl Ann Passanisi | May 1, 2009 3:22 PM

I am also reminded of Lizzie playing God a few years ago at Easter Vigil (dressed in a red evening gown). I get this sense of God speaking the world into existence and then to create humans having to step out of the everlasting and into time and space to kneel and form humans and then the act of breathing spirit into the clay. I remember Lizzie forming something with her hands and then Paul handing her Gabriel, living kicking child. And as she held Gabriel she had such an expression of astonishment on her face. It made the moment of incarnation so intimate and personal.

God had to step out of the everlasting to create humans and also to redeem us. I think this is part of our struggle in dealing with the cruelties we experience or witness and the lose of loved ones. This dipping into to time and space is limited and amazingly short. It exposes us to the wonder and awe of creation but also the emptiness and lose of missing someone and the pain the body experiences in illness or torture.

And so why? Why do it? But I think we give God as much amazement and awe and she gives us. I don't want to lose people in my life and the thought of it grieves me deeply. As well the torn flesh of anyone caught up in war and conflict or illness.

So I just sit with this trying and not trying to cipher it.

Posted by Cheryl Ann Passanisi | May 2, 2009 1:44 PM

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