in line for execution
watching others strapped in, terrified
one by one bodies keeling over
bodies falling over lifeless.
Being led to the chair
being strapped down in dread.
I am much more courageous
than I feared I would be.
Seeing the crowd gathered,
I face my death with grim resolve
surprisingly calm
feeling the jolt
feeling the pain
as it increases
burning my flesh
and my awareness passing beyond…
I remembered this during my Intro to Christian Ethics class today. We were learning about the mystical body of Christ. This is a teaching of Paul’s, the key text being Colossians 1:17, “God is before all things, and in God all things are held together.”
Is the mystical body of Christ only a metaphor, as in all these separate individuals making up the body of the Church; or is Paul really speaking of an ontological understanding of being, as in a relational concept of being? Western understanding is that being is the sum total of all things, but this is problematic. Life is more than what we can see, touch, and quantify empirically. The mystical body is therefore not about things.
Edmund Husserl states that “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” Subject and object are always given together, but being includes both in relationship.
Subject & Object in Relation = Being
Conceiving of God as a thing is idolatry, reifying, ‘thingifying’. But God is not a thing. Paul’s mystical body is relational: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is closer to no-thingness than to somethingness. As someone once put it: all we ever get to see of God is his backside as God passes by—every time we try to focus on God, God disappears.
Every thing is contrasted by the dread of our own death, the potential of our own nothingness. There is no “I am” apart from “I am not.”
This understanding makes clear some baffling statements of Jesus: “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” He doesn’t say, “where one is, there I am,” because he is in the relationship between them. “In as much as you have done to/for the lowest ones, so have you done to me.” It’s relational:
This understanding leads to the realization that Christ’s resurrection was not of the physical body, but of the relational body of being. This realization is most easily seen in love, especially erotic love where one merges with one’s lover and goes outside one’s limited bodily experience.
Some concrete illustrations of this understanding:
Friends function as mirrors to the self.
In fetal development the mind doesn’t develop without interaction with the human community.
Ecology is the queen of science. Modern physics understands relationships at the macro and micro level to be a symbiosis of subject and object.
The relationship is more important than the objects in relation. Basic reality is:
God, Ourselves, and Our Neighbors are all Related
We always have problems whenever we try to collapse this triangle.
Thus, the end of my poem is
I wake up.
The writing home of David Soliday