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Less Perfect, More Human: Re-imagining The Body of Christ
Surely He has borne our griefs One bread, one body, one Lord of all, …
Grief can be transmitted wordlessly from person to person, from generation to generation. Unacknowledged grief can show up in depression, anxiety, chronic anger, compulsive behaviours, and addictions. These devastating, transgenerational effects of buried grief can be seen across communities or traced back through family trees. While the field of psychology is beginning to explore these transgenerational phenomena, the spiritual dimension is lacking. Yet when I turn to contemporary theology, I do not find there the connection of the body of Christ to the griefs of the world that I feel so needs to be made. In the exploration that follows I use a personal example. My niece, who was also my god-daughter, died last year at the age of twenty-five from opioid addiction. The grief that came over me in the wake of her death was powerful and debilitating, complicated because mixed with my regret and anger. Painful regret for so many things said, not said, done, not done. Searing anger at her self-destruction. But the most powerful feeling of all was grief. The grief, disabling in its intensity, resonated with every grief I had ever known. Through my grief, I felt a deep sympathy and connection with anyone anywhere who had lost a daughter or son or loved one in this way. My thoughts followed a trail that connected to a complex web: I looked at her history of addictions, at the anxiety that fueled her addictions, and at the societal phenomenon of dramatic escalation in opioid abuse in the past decade. I saw my own history of compulsive eating, anxiety and depression, and my family tree dotted with alcoholism, disordered eating, chronic anger, depression, anxiety. I felt the echoes of the grief of generations, linking me to generations and families past and present, known and unknown. I wondered why these problems were so pernicious and pervasive, so hard to treat, so seemingly beyond the reach of loving family, medicine or faith? In my experience of grief described above, I felt a sympathetic connection between myself and others. This sympathetic connection bears some resemblance to my understanding of and feeling connection to the body of Christ. Christ bore our grief and carried our sorrows. Through him, through his body, we are connected to him and to one another in our grief and our sorrows. I pondered the parallel. I wondered if my sympathy in grief across the globe, across the generations, had not just resembled a connection through the body of Christ, but was instead an unexpected participation in his body? If this state of sympathetic resonance in grief is one entry point to the body of Christ, what might this mean for me, as a Christian? I needed to put my niece’s death and her struggles with addiction in a context that included her spiritual life and my own. It was important to me that her funeral be in a church. I had to ask myself why this was so important to me, since neither she nor I attended church regularly. I felt it would be helpful to her, to me, to my family, and to the church itself, for her to be buried from the church. She is a part of my body, of the body of my family, and she is also and eternally a part of the body of Christ. While the body of Christ extends beyond the walls or membership of any church, there are times when the communal capacity and rituals of a church are very important, and this funeral was one such time. In our individualistic culture, there is little capacity for seeing grief, depression, chronic anger, compulsive behaviours or addictions as anything other than problems of the individual. In the conventional view, each person’s manifestation of a particular issue is unique and they bear ultimate responsibility for the decisions they make. Such a view, while true in many respects, can heighten a sufferer’s sense of shame and isolation, causing them to withdraw. It can also give those who tend to see themselves as unafflicted reason to shun the sufferers as having purely self-inflicted problems. Sadly, isolation heightens the destructive potential of the transgenerational grief and its manifestations. My niece’s addiction to opioids is shared by millions across the globe; she did not invent this problem, she was afflicted by it. Why? These problems beset the culture. We are all given problems which are pieces of the struggles of generations past and present. We struggle with these things, as individuals, as families, but often in shame or isolation which only compounds the problem. We need some way to view these struggles as not just personal work but as faith work, as a calling that is part of Christ’s intention for the world. The body of Christ is often used to refer to the church, or the aggregate of all communicants or believers. The term is also commonly used to refer to the host, the bread taken in the sacrament of Communion. I would like to explore another possible understanding of the body of Christ. As a child and young woman, as I took Communion, I imagined myself lifted up out of my sinful nature, leaving church a cleaner and better person than when I went in. In those days, I left my “bad” (grumpy, rebellious) self at home and brought my “good” (chipper, compliant) self to church. This seems to be a fairly standard practice. There came a time, however, when my two selves refused to be separated quite as neatly as I wanted. In fact, my bad self had a lot of insight I had come to value, and I was reluctant to leave her at the door. At that time, church became uncomfortable for me. The pews were hard, the apparently-required conviction of being saved from sinfulness in this world harder still. In truth, I did not see that I was a better person for taking Communion, nor that my sin was any easier to overcome. Communion potentially linked me to people who were struggling as I did, but they and I struggled in secret and the potential link could not be realized. Nobody dared ask aloud why we were so afflicted or even consider that Christ might have a communal purpose in giving us the crosses we each bore alone. What if, in Communion, we are not so much lifted out of our sinful nature as lifted in to Christ’s grief, into the container for your grief, my grief, and the grief of others? The body of Christ thus forms the crucible in which a new understanding, a new capacity to address the grief of the generations might emerge. Let us imagine all of us, with conspicuous afflictions or not, as part of the body of Christ. Our grief is Christ’s grief; like him, we can bear sorrows beyond our own. If we can recognize our grief as his grief, we become Christ’s body. We become the body of Christ as we recognize in our struggles that our problems are a manifestation of a problem much larger than any individual, that we share with others the vulnerability to and the responsibility for these manifestations. This work of reflecting on and struggling to find solutions to particular apparently personal problems becomes religious work if we can see that we are working on our piece of a religious, collective problem. Sharing and reflecting on this work in communion with others could help us to realize Christ’s intention for us and his body. But the work cannot be accomplished in a religious community that sees itself as above or better or holier than those afflicted. To respond fully to the call of Christ through participation in his body, we need to question our identification with being saved, and to become less exalted through Communion rather than more. I am still uncomfortable in the church but I am not comfortable entirely out of the church, either. My faith and my love for Christianity are strong. The tension between my love and yearning and my discomfort also brings a grief, a grief I believe shared by many in our culture. Perhaps this expanded understanding of the body of Christ can help me and my niece and millions of others to find a way to participate in the body of Christ. • Click here to order Less Perfect, More Human TOP |
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