Saving Bodies

"Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul (whatever exactly that is) left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself. It needs the gifts that only the external life can deliver: the actual events of God’s action in history, heard by physical ears, the actual material fact of the meeting of believers where bread and wine are shared, the actual wonderful, disagreeable, impossible, unpredictable human beings we encounter daily, in and out of church. Only in this setting do we become holy — in a way unique to each of us.”

Rowan Williams, "Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another"

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Dear Kate,

Yesterday my neighbor told me he lost his dog two weeks ago.  I was walking mine and he flushing his balcony with a hose.  He called and I looked up.

Not all losses are death, but this one he made clear was more than a foretaste.  From where I stood he moved like a ghost, showering on me pea-sized droplets of bittersweet.

Last night, maybe this morning, I dreamed a dream: at my backyard scavengers (vultures?) roundtabling on the carrion of (maybe) a yellow dog.  That's obscene, I thought, looking down out of my kitchen window.  I'm gonna kill ya all sons of bitches, I turned around for downstairs, ready to break up the orgy with my bare hands.  Though hardly as rude an awakening as Jesus' dying to Peter, the vulgarity of killing set my indignation ablaze.

Only the body saves the soul to save the body...  And so on.  For so long.  There's a place of damnation we often call hell, where I don't think one would have the benefit of even a fire.  Everything would have been picked apart and burned up by then.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

Summer feels softer, looser. Mornings are pink and evenings frail. A deer wanders in my neighborhood. Flesh and thoughts drift on porch.

The washing machine, my first one bought 3 years ago, took over 3 hours to wash bed sheets a few nights ago. It seemed stuck on rinsing, unable to cycle to tub spinning. I reset the buttons and waited for a happy end. An hour later towards midnight, my washer re-routed to ceaseless rinsing before it stopped with this flashing code on display: “ub." I ignored it in favor of sleep.

The next morning I willed my body to save the soul of the washer. I tapped on more buttons but in swifter, broader gestures as if to regain control. Water refilled the tub but again spinning stalled. More jaded the “ub" signal looked on screen.

I dashed for work to return 12 hours later for an atonement of this wretched machine. I resisted the thought of replacing it. It was my first and only one in the laundry room without a dryer, handpicked then for love and function, hands-off rascal of plastic and metal now.

After two nights of bodily efforts to save it, I relented and reached for the instructional guide. A page on troubleshooting demystified “ub”: unbalanced load. To resolve, manually redistribute items for even loading in the washing tub. Saving grace comes to hands open to receiving help and flesh morphing the soul to re-balance.

Rowan Williams piques the intrigue of bodies saving souls by his casting this truth in his book, "Open to Judgement”:

     “The opposite of flesh is not spirit, but stone:
       ‘A rock can feel no pain,
        And an island never cries’.”

Loose and languid is summer. Nights are sore, dawn brittle, stones rolling, flesh rumbling.

Yours, Kate