Souls and Bodies

It's 4a.m. and I don't know whether it's the rain or my back that's awakened me. The pain is smaller than a dime, just left of center. It's smaller than a dime, but so is the tip of an icepick. It's reminding me that I'm a body.

I don't know how many dime sized areas there are on my surface. A lot, even though I'm not a very big guy. Perhaps I ought to be thinking about all those comfortable spots. A better person would be. A better person would think themselves in the direction of everything well and uninjured.

But when I'm awake in the middle of the night and mindful of being a body I read the undertaker: "We are bodies in motion and at rest--there in George's master bedroom, in the gray light of the midmorning, and hour or so after his daughter found him because he didn't answer when she called this morning, and he always answers, and she always calls, so she got in the car and drove over and found him exactly as we find him here: breathless, unfettered, perfectly still, manifestly indifferent to all this hubbub."

I don't think I'm a paranoid hypochondriac. Nothing in me is worried that my little portion of all the world's pain this morning is the beginnings of swine flu, or some other dreaded force soon to lay me out like poor George. No, I don't read the undertaker because any little ache or pain brings thoughts of doom and demise.

I read the undertaker because there's no mystery greater, or no access to great mystery more reliable than the bodily ones. And sometimes it takes nothing more than a dime sized discomfort to remind me that I'm a body, and, as such, a mystery.

On Sunday Jesus ate a fish, pointed to his hands and feet, insisted that the mystery before the gaping disciples was bodily. Not ghostly. It was a body in motion that should have been at rest.

Now there is plenty in these stories to suggest that the body of Jesus that stopped breathing at about 3pm one Friday, did not simply start breathing again early Sunday morning. His friends don't recognize him. I considered this in my sermon on Sunday.

But one thing these stories suggest is that a body is enough. The mystery of God, the mystery of meaning, of why and whether we matter comes to us most powerfully not in invisible forces and spiritual powers, but in bodies. In bodies at rest, like George's, where the mystery of being is unbearably present to us, and bodies in motion, even like mine, shifting away from the dime sized annoyance in my back, just to the left, screaming to me that I'm a body. Awake. Aware. And a body just the same.