Talking about the Body, 1

Well, here we are a week after the resurrection. The cold continues in the northeast. Yesterday afternoon Eighth Avenue was a flowing river because rain had been falling for twenty-four hours. It was still falling this morning. I have been thinking about the body, not only because this kind of weather makes the body feel miserable--wet clothes, chill in the bone--but because my left wrist is healing from the bicycle fall and I am feeling like a pudding for lack of excercise. I'm not allowed to ride my bike until the hand surgeon says I can.

The hand surgeon told me, as he examined my wrist, that a colleague of his, a doctor and a cyclist, had been killed a couple of months ago along the West Side Bicycle path in Manhattan--which I ride regularly, when I can ride. He was a young man who had been cycling with his wife that morning. I could tell that the doctor treating me was responding emotionally to my own accident, thinking about the unnecessary and wasteful death of his colleague. A day or two before I saw the hand surgeon, we had taken a taxi down the west side and had seen a ghostly white bicycle marking the spot where the young doctor had been killed. Beside the bicycle was an artifical wooden flower, colorful. The kind of thing that makes one think of Easter and resurrection.

The doctor's body is gone, as all bodies will go. Jesus' body goes too. In Christian theology we talk about the resurrection of the body. We read in scripture that we will all be changed, and we think of a new body. Thomas touches the wound. The body matters to all of us; it matters particularly in Christian story and ritual. There is a wonderfully weird painting by Caravaggio of Thomas with his finger stuck in the slit in Jesus' side: it is patently sexual, the slit vaginal. Not so long ago, a group of us were looking at it during a meeting, discussing the painting as if it had nothing to do with sexuality, as if the finger were just a finger, ignoring altogether the other message of the work: we are sexual beings, even in our relationship to God. It is a blatently homoerotic work. Take another look at some of the Medieval and Renassiance paintings that emphasize the private parts of the naked Jesus, the suckling babe, images that today might close down a museum.

The church's vexed relationship with the human body, and particularly the female body, is not news. In a recent communication to someone who had read one of my earlier posts here, I said that I thought we need a theology of the body that is up to date, that takes account of how our thinking about what the body signifies has changed. The church is stuck with a very old paradigm in which we celebrate resurrection but deplore the body.

The lack of a coherent theology of the body is part of the problem the church has with homosexuality (or almost any sexuality)--and part of the problem it has with women. Even though the Episcopal Church ordains women, and has for thirty years, the female body is still a problem for the church. So is the male body (hence the problem with homosexuality). At the ordination/consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, a priest spoke against the action and began to detail the (as he was clearly suggesting, "disgusting") things males did with each other, particularly the parts they touched, as if simply saying the parts--anus, penis, testicles--were themselves sufficient evidence of the horror of the acts involving them.

Part of the problem is the somewhat hidden but very strong sense that Christianity remains a purity religion (as all religions are or have been). The purity of the altar is the primary way in which we encounter this ancient strain of Christian sensibility in the liturgical churches. Only the ordained handle the sacred elements or control how the rest will handle them. But in general Christians sense that the doings of the body are and should remain beyond the concern of the church. Nonetheless, what we do with each other sexuality should be governed by the church in order to preserve the purity of the community. You don't know what that hand has touched! Only what is blessed or sanctified (through marriage) may be touched. All else is impure and may not approach the altar. Ditto for the thrice-married priest or bishop.

The split in the Anglican Communion is to a great extent about purity. One must repent and stop touching impure things to be part of the community. In the United States, the majority of the members of the Episcopal Church are willing to accept gays without imposing purity requirements on them, but at the same time, I suspect that most of those who accept gays and divorce and the routine habits of cohabitation by the unmarried continue in some part of their hearts to suspect that the church is less pure than it used to be. There may even be a lingering suspicion that the impure shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Shifted from the realm of sexuality, this suspicion gets channeled into other aspects of church life. For example, the pure don't move around much or sing songs with rhythm or dance in church. The pure, the clergy, wear clothing that hides their bodies. And so perhaps should the rest of us. Dirty homeless people being are an offense because we can smell them, even after they've gone.

During this Eastern season, when we read of or experience Jesus walking around in his body (or in some body, even ours), it would be helpful to clarify what we mean when we speak of the body we are in, the Body of Christ we ingest, the body we really hate to think of losing to death.