Christ Has No Body But Yours

Something clicked in my head while I was praying in the mystical union of the Mass last week. The night before I had read the poem by St. Teresa of Ávila through the visual benediction on Work of the People. And the words penned by the most blessed saint remained stuck in my mind. The words are august and haunting: 

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks.

I wish I knew who painted this august and stylized Pietà.

The Mass, when read through the perspective of St. Teresa, becomes the sacrifice where we bring our bodies to the Altar of God so that in partaking of the Body of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, our body becomes transformed into the Body of Christ. It is a mystical union of Man and God. One should not forget the classical theology regarding theosis, or divinization, that remained central among the early Church and the Church Father. St. Teresa's insight forces us to take the notion of the Church as the Body of Christ with much more gravity, and to understand the notion of good works as a necessary part of salvation in a whole new light.  

The Mass read through St. Teresa offers us a non-magical understanding of God, Christ and the World that breaks through spiritualist and materialist barriers. The common ontology is that God acts as an external divine magician in the world. A bolt of lightening here, and your illness is cured, a bolt of lightening there and your soul-mate falls in love with you. The alternative ontology of God proposes that Christ/God has a physical Body with which to move and act in the World, and that this Body is composed of the visible and invisible Church. A human being becomes the literal Body of Christ so far as s/he does justice to the Divine Essence in his or her actions. 

A doctor removes a blockage from a patient's artery and God has effected His miracle, here, a person falls totally in love with her significant other, and God has effected His miracle, there. Divinity is no longer conditional on the result of magic, but rather is conditional on the depth and transcendence in human experience and action. It is a solemn notion, but one that appears much more august and profound than magic, because it speaks to the deepest humanity in us. The further we are joined to the Sacred, the more we instantiate God in the World, the more real the Kingdom of God becomes.

This places new justification for the Roman theological emphasis on works as a necessary component of justification. God's effect on the World is not external to humankind, but rather internal to the process of human life itself. The Kingdom of God cannot come except through the internal development of human action in the life of the Church. There is no grand outside source of effectual change outside human praxis. We cannot sit on our hands thinking that God will magically heal the sick. We need to transform our hands into the instruments through which God effects the miracle of healing. There is nothing concrete outside works, for these are the very concretization of the Miracle of God.