No one who knows me or has seen a photo of me would mistake me for a bodybuilder, but I have been thinking a great deal these days about my mission as a priest, and that of all priests, in just these terms. And the very idea of “body” has been at the forefront of my thoughts these days, with good reason.
You see, as I write this, I am sitting at my mother’s bedside as she rests peacefully. She has been admitted to hospice, and my brother and I brought her home after a short hospitalization and rehabilitation stay. The body that served her — that was her — for more than 92 years has reached the end of its ability to maintain itself in existence as a living organism. She is at home now, but by the time you read this, she may well be in a very different place, with her soul having departed from her body, albeit only to rest in anticipation of the Resurrection.
Usually, people think of priests as people who take care of souls, as if “soul” were something separate from and independent of “body.” This is a very limited way of looking at what we do, because in unique ways priests care for our bodies as well as our souls. We cannot conceive of human souls as independent of their bodies. Humans are psycho-physical beings, that is, beings made up of body and soul together. Physical death is the unnatural separation of the two. It exists in opposition to, and not according to, the plan of God at the beginning of creation. It is the consequence of original disobedience, of sin, of the fall of human nature from its divinely designed destiny: immortality of body and soul together.
Death is not something God intended; it is something God has overcome precisely by means of the human body of Jesus Christ, the body given to him by his Blessed Mother, Mary. Surrendering his body in his bloody death on the cross, God raised it to life again on the third day. Resurrection, then, is an event that happens to your body because of what happened to Jesus’ body.
The ministry and life of the priest are defined by the sacraments (or “mysteries”) that he serves in and for the Church, the People of God. For us Catholics, and especially Byzantine Catholics, the sacraments are far from symbolic gestures that communicate a meaning. They are physical actions that communicate life to body and soul — to our souls, indeed, but through and in and with our bodies. We call the holy Eucharist in particular the “medicine of immortality” that we receive “for the healing of soul and body together.” This involves actual eating, the physical act of receiving food into our bodies. Likewise, there is no digital baptism or virtual matrimony. And there cannot be sacramental confession by Zoom, either, because this mystery requires an intimate and unmediated encounter between two people, the penitent and the priest.
The Eucharist is God’s chosen means to nourish the whole person, to communicate God’s own life to us and to get our bodies ready for resurrection. So, in a very real sense, then, by enabling the Church to continue to receive the body of Christ, the priest is a kind of bodybuilder, offering divine nourishment from the Lord’s table to build up our individual bodies for everlasting life.
There is another dimension, too. As we receive the sacramental body of Christ, we, the Church assembled, become the body of Christ. In serving the Eucharist, the priest is building up the body that is the Church. Communion is never a private “me and Jesus” moment, but an encounter of the community of the Church with the community of the Holy Trinity by which we are divinized, becoming by grace what God is by nature, called to take on God’s own task of giving life to the world.
My mom is going where we all will go, where even God has gone in Jesus Christ. The body she now lives in is not able to take her there except by giving up its time in time and space. But because of the faith she lived, the faith that nourished and protected her all her life, I believe that this very body, which she and we have loved and cared for so much in this life, will be raised, glorified, perfected, made whole, and enabled to shine with the light of the love with which she loved us and we her, a love that is no less than the love that is God.