This is the fourth part of an essay series which takes as its inspiration something Wendell Barry said in The Unsettling of America: “Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real.” Resounding in the background, too, as if across an empty canyon where our hearts used to be, is Vine Deloria's rhetorical question to the sunset of the West: “Can the white man's religion make one final effort to be real?” The first essay in the series was All Over the World the Faces of Living Ones Are Alike, which is free for anyone to read.
The fact that Jesus had a deep relationship with physical attitudes, the language of the body, and the world of signs is of great significance, because precisely in this it becomes clear that he lived in an unbroken relationship to human physicality. Jesus is not alien, helpless, or disturbed in relation to the body; for him, body and bodiliness are indispensable aspects of humanity. Jesus takes the body and its needs seriously. No one could have said of him what antiquity said of the pagan philosopher Plotinus and what Athanasius reported of the Christian hermit Antony: Plotinus “lived like someone who was ashamed to have been born into a human body,” and Antony “blushed” when he ate in the presence of others.
—Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth
I want to begin this retelling of the Messianic Feast in a strangely lonely place, and end it in a beautiful and a joyful one. First, though, the lonely place—in a Sumerian temple five thousand years ago, with this statue of the god Enlil, or “Lord Wind”:
In ancient Sumeria, a stone statue like this—silent, motionless, windless, breathless, and frozen in time—was imagined as a body of a god. Of course, not the only body—the god himself was transcendent, and could embody himself in other forms, such as wind and sky, in the case of Enlil, or other forces of nature, for other gods—but his real presence was in the statue, too: Priests would blow the breath of life into its nostrils, confirming this.
And priests would bathe and dress the statue, as a way of bathing and dressing the god thus carved, and they would take food and drink offered by the faceless masses and place it before the statue, who would symbolically eat it in the form of the priests eating it themselves later.
Normal people weren’t allowed inside the sanctuary, only priests. But normal people—or at least the wealthy—could have limestone or alabaster avatars made of themselves, eyes wide open and hands clasped in catatonic piety, staring forever at the god in bright-eyed devotion, breathless except for the first breath of priests, who would arrange those lifeless statues in rings around the lifeless statue of the god, in the stone temple kept holy—meaning, set apart as exempt from the flux of nature—in what must have been the early dawn of what we’d now call virtual reality:
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Here comes the paywall, placing my hat on the sidewalk of the world as a writer. Past the wall, you'll find the rest of the essay, an easily printable PDF version of it, a recording of me reading the essay in soundscape that fits the mood—a seashore maybe, or bustling city, or a sunlit forest—and the comment section, where you're safe to say what you really think.
-graham
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