Becoming Flesh
Becoming Flesh
Mixed media on board. 30x15
I really like Jesus. You know, how he looked past a person's occupation or living situation and
just saw the person inside. He gave everybody a chance, despite their failures, to be the person
God created them to be. But you know, his teachings were pretty radical. Not only should you
carry the load of an occupying Roman soldier for the required mile, but give him an extra mile,
on the house, so to speak. And if someone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your
coat as well. And what about this one - love your enemies.
I'll have to say though, that one of the oddest things he said was “Unless you eat the flesh of the
son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you...Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks
my blood abides in me and I in him.” John 6:53, 56.
We Protestants and Catholics do this eating and drinking and call it "taking communion" or
"partaking of the holy Eucharist" or "celebrating the Lord's supper". Unlike the Catholics, who
take communion every chance they can get, the protestants I hung out with had a regular
schedule for communion--the first Sunday of every month. Protestants can be a little leery of
mystery so there was not much talk about eating the flesh of the son of man or drinking his
blood. The communion "bread" didn't look like bread, or flesh for that matter, and the wine was
just a plastic thimbleful of grape juice. “Do this in remembrance of me.“ We obeyed his commandment, but kept the mysterious parts contained.
I remember as a kid singing a song about dry bones. It started “Ezekiel cried dem dry bones,
dem dry bones, oh hear the word of the Lord” then proceeded to go through the bones of the
body “the foot bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone, the
knee bone connected to the thigh bone”, all the way up to the head and then back down again
to the foot. It was great fun to sing, but I never actually pictured what the song was based on. In
Ezekiel 37, God said to Ezekiel “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the
word of the Lord! ... I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons
to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you and you
will come to life...'." Then he said to Ezekiel, "Prophecy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and
say to it, 'This is what the sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe
into these slain, that they may live.'"… And breath entered them; they came to life and stood up
on their feet--a vast army."
For several decades, beginning in the 1950's, our country manufactured and stockpiled nuclear
weapon parts. Apparently "love your enemies" was not a universal moral code. Plutonium
triggers, a necessary component of every nuclear weapon, were manufactured by the tens of
thousands at the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado. Workers stood in front of a long series (up to
64 feet) of interconnected sealed stainless-steel containers known as plutonium glove boxes,
placed their arms into heavy lead gloves and looked through an acrylic window to mold the
"buttons" into shape. In 1957 plutonium shavings in a glove box spontaneously ignited. The fire
spread through the interconnected boxes and ignited the protective HEPA filters. Within minutes
the filters were burned through allowing the plutonium particles to escape into the atmosphere.
More than six decades later there is still contamination from this fire.
Did church leaders worry about what kind of spiritual contamination would be spewn if mystery
caught fire and burned through the filters of conservative Christianity? These filters meant to
dilute mystery by such disclaimers as "it wasn't meant to be taken literally" or "it was a different
time and culture so we can't understand exactly what was meant", and my favorite "I guess we'll
just have to wait until we get to Heaven and ask God directly". Mystery--contain it, and never,
ever, let it catch on fire.
Much later in life, this conservative Christian girl glimpsed the power of communion and wrote
"And the Word Became Flesh".
"And the Word Became Flesh"
I dip his name
into the cup
then hold it up
offering thanks
a drop of blood
runs down
hand
arm
elbow
and there
hangs
wafer thin
his name melts on my tongue
God and man
commingling
death dissolving into life
come from the four winds O breath
and breathe on the slain
rise up dry bones
sinew and flesh
out of my mouth
come forth
pour blood over the enemy
and claim the land
Several years after writing this poem I created the artwork "Becoming Flesh", exploring the
power of communion along with the promise of dead bones being knit back together. Every day
our bodies and souls are assaulted by life destroying elements. We hear unkind words, eat food
that has been altered for the sake of profit, see boundless cruelty and injustice, we might even
breathe leftover particles of plutonium. We find ourselves wanting, in pain, confused by the complexities of a world spinning out of control. Jesus said "I am the truth." "If you eat my flesh
and drink my blood I will become a part of you and you a part of me, forever."
And so I will eat The Word who became flesh. I will drink of his everlasting life, but don’t offer
me a little plastic thimbleful every so often—give me a jeweled challis, running over with the
finest wine. Pour it over my dead bones, and I will be made alive.