No body but yours

“… Vedic philosophers in India… welcomed the erasure of the individual self and its fusion with the universal. They rejected the Greek dualism between the body and the soul–and, indeed, between the individual body and the cosmic soul. They termed the self atman… The universal, multitudinous self, in contrast, was the Brahman. For these philosophers, the self was an ideal fusion of atman and Brahman, or perhaps more accurately, the seamless flow of the universal self through the individual self… There was a cosmic ecology that bound the individual and the spiritual collective into one Being… You, the self, the Upanishads proclaim, is permeated and penetrated by That, the universal. In an ideal body, the universal flows through the individual.”

~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell

“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.”

~ Teresa of Avila, Christ Has No Body

Oh, that the universal could flow through us unimpeded.

I don’t know about you, but I can find ten thousand ways to block, to bind, to constrict, to stuff the banana in the tailpipe. I am a master chucker of wrenches. I am a professional grade mucker upper of the works. And I don’t need much to work with. One banana will do. One wrench. One other human with which to interact and all my good intentions, all my efforts at compassion and love, can rapidly shape-shift into judgment and its clown car of companions.

I bet you’re familiar.

As we journey together through time and space,
As you break through my shell and I fly in the face of your bias and we, together, build something better,
As we each squint in our own vulnerable way to find traces of the universe in one another and in the thistles,
May we know that we are not alone, that our individual self is not enough, that our collective Being is where we shine.
May we feel the weight of responsibility, the call from the depths, the visceral need to take care of our singular slice, to participate.
May we reach with the tendrils of love from one corner of the universe to the other, from one atom to the next, fathoms.

We are the spiritual collective.
We are the body of the Christ.
If we can’t take what’s before us and make it better (say, into banana bread, or a kind word), the whole works just clatters to the ground.

Time to love louder.