Communal, Embodied, + For the Good of the World
On corporate meaning-making this Holy Week
This week, those of us who call ourselves Christians, practice centuries-old rites: we wash feet, we mourn, we rejoice.1 We sing the same hymns. We announce the good news: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
In more ancient times, Easter was the time in which catechumenates would be baptized into Christ’s church and take up membership after a long process of education. Easter would mark not only one’s personal relationship with Jesus (with a personal sense of one’s sin and need for the saving work of Christ) but also a bodily, liturgical and corporate identity of meaning-making. A sense of self came from membership into the body of Christ.
Perhaps it was Locke’s “I think therefore I am,” that set us off on this train of overly rational Enlightenment ways of being in the world and that have morphed into our consumptive hungers where we consume people, things, ourselves. But it’s also as ancient as the first garden — when Adam and Eve took fruit and ate as a way to obtain a knowledge and wisdom that was not meant for them. They took what was forbidden, and taking it into their bodies, became dismembered and alone.
If in the goodness of God’s original creation, food and all of life was meant as a way to commune with God as a embodied act of a coherent self, known always in relation, (walking together, God and humanity, as they did in the cool of the evening), then the fall into sin makes sense that it happened through food.
Alexander Schmemann writes of this forbidden food: “Not given, not blessed by God, it was food whose eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end in itself.”2 Life understood as an end in itself.
As I think about food, about the sacramental nature of things as mundane as laundry, dishes, and “women’s work,”3 and as we sit in Holy Week — heirs to the glory of creation, heirs to its ruin, and heirs to redemption in Christ — I’m deeply reminded this Holy Week that the practice of our faith must be communal, it must be taken into our bodies, and it must be for the good of the world.
A faith that is resilient — that bends with tragedy and still finds itself secure — cannot be of the mind or of the emotions, or even of the self. In what follows, consider these characteristics just a few things to tuck in the back pocket of your thinking this week. If life is to be loved and enjoyed as more than an end in itself — as communion with God and gift of the world — what does that look like?
A Christian hope that looks fruitful and is filled with joy, must (especially now) be communal, bodily, and for the good of the world.
Communal
We celebrate around tables. In our family we’ll get donuts for our kids’ birthdays for breakfast; they’ll pick out a favorite dinner food, and we’ll all share a memory or a quality about that person. We take in something delicious, we linger around a table, we speak words of blessing around tables.
We are known in relation. While there is much value in quiet and alone time, we are not most fully ourselves or most fully alive without another to partake in our joy and sorrow. We need someone to look into our eyes and remind us who we are and that we are deeply loved.
The Church is that ancient and glorious bride of Jesus, the people to whom we belong, the ones with whom we gather around tables to know God and know one another.
While we often look to phones or to our own selves to make meaning, the communal gathering for worship — this Lord’s day as we celebrate his resurrection and each Lord’s day — is a counter-cultural declaration of war against self-governance and self-belonging.
The communal gathering for worship is a counter-cultural declaration of war against self-governance and self-belonging.
As we gather, we persist with our bodies that we are not our own.
As we sing, as we pray, as we confess our sin and our faith together, we rehearse the larger story: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. Together, we know God . Together we remind ourselves that we cannot be known either apart from God’s saving work or apart from his Bride.
While the church has been party to and committed grievous sins, what is most astounding is that Jesus has not abandoned her or divorced her, but chooses to cleanse her, to ransom her, to lay his life down for her, to pray for her. Even still.
This week, gather with a local church. Sing the songs. Find yourself caught up into the larger story and a part of something more meaningful than yourself.
Embodied
If Christ was born into the world, walked amongst disciples, healed men and women, held children, and gave his body as a ransom for many, we cannot neglect the fact that our bodies are not incidental, an add-on to a spirit or mind.
While we may think of ourselves as the products of our genes or environments (and we are), we are not only so. Neither are we to fall prey to the gnostic heresy that our bodies, because they are matter, are uniquely sinful and the Christian life is meant be an escape from embodiment. (We can easily fall between heresy ditches on each side of the road).
As a woman in my almost-mid-forties, bodies are complicated. I imagine it’s hard for many women to simply be in one’s body as we’re used to seeing them in relation to how our bodies effect others (whether that’s as a desirable object, a maternal presence, or as youth and fertility begins or fades). For me, it takes great work to practice being embodied — to not chop myself into sections: body, mind, spirit, and assign a letter grade to each.
Also, much in our late modern Western moment in time pushes us towards virtual everywhere-ism, practicing embodiment, too, is a declaration of the goodness of creation. Matter matters. What we do with our bodies is not incidental, it is formative.
Our kneeling, our praying, our taking in the bread and the wine, our singing together, are all acts of our bodies. Worship trains our bodies how to believe. Our bodies are vital to the formation of Christian imagination.
Our bodies are vital to the formation of Christian imagination.
Our worship and life together this week must be communal and embodied, and it must not be for ourselves alone, but also for the good of the world.
For the Good of the World
Way back in Genesis 12, when God called Abram to follow him, he told him that his life was to be a blessing; following God was not some therapeutic perk or even the best sort of life to live for oneself (though these may be part of the effects of a life lived toward God), but following God is meant to be a witness to the world that this is the path to life.
The life we live is never for ourselves only: we are blessed to be a blessing.
Most days this is impossible to remember or embody. I get consumed with the to-do list, enraptured by an idea, worried about the future or my children, or fixated on the endless entropy of household tasks.
But it’s impossibly beautiful too: the very life I lead — from the chores, to the writing, to the worshiping, to the neighboring — is all meant to be an act of adoration to Jesus, and not for my sake alone, but for my neighbors.
Christ hallows the mundane. And our ordinary lives and oftentimes lackluster worship is the process by which our imaginative and communal lives are formed. We are remembered, knit together, made into a temple for Christ to dwell. And this ragtag bunch of miscreants who are often half-hearted and distracted, is the witness to the life-altering, grace-soaked story of grace found in Jesus: that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
It’s fantastically comedic.
So as we enter into worship this week, may we bring our full, embodied selves. May we pray that the gospel work and embodied death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus would make us into congruent, fruitful selves so that as we sing, as we rehearse the Good, Beautiful and True Story in our bodies and in community together around the preaching of the Word and our shared sacraments, we might be a witness — a light for the Gentiles and a joy to our great Shepherd of the sheep.
***
What next?
May the following verses provide a personal meditation for you as you prepare to worship this Holy Week.
Isaiah 42:6
6 “I am the LORD; oI have called you1 in righteousness;
I will take you by the hand and keep you;
I will give you pas a covenant for the people,
qa light for the nations,
Isaiah 49:6
6 he says:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
tI will make you uas a light for the nations,
that vmy salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Isaiah 52:10
10 uThe LORD has bared his holy arm
before the eyes of all the nations,
vand all the ends of the earth shall see
the salvation of our God.
***
Happy Easter! Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
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For The Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973) 16.
A call to Kathleen’s Norris’ volume, The Quotidian Mysteries. You may find some thoughts on that book in the post linked below:
Thank you so much for putting all the time you do into writing these articles. I have been enjoying your series on vocation, art, and middle age and have been contemplating many of the same things. You have inspired a lot of thoughts and encouraged me to keep creating!
Cogito, ergo sum - René Descartes