God's love, our bodies

I arrive early to set up for worship. I work in the dark, the sanctuary like a womb ready to birth us into the world, to form us into a body—into Christ’s life. The Presbyterian church from which we rent worship space assembles its chairs in rows facing the stage, directing the gaze of the congregants toward the altar and pulpit. Each week we move the chairs to form a semicircle. We prefer to look at each other during worship. Each person is a holy altar; every mouth proclaims God’s word. Our eyes flicker with the Spirit’s life.

“What is this place where we are meeting?” begins the hymn by Huub Oosterhuis, the first entry in our hymnal. “Only a house, the earth its floor.” I hum this song as I push chairs into new rows. “Yet it becomes a body that lives when we are gathered here.” The place is sacred because God has consecrated us as living signs of divine presence. In the last verse of the hymn, the worshipers become the sacrament of Christ’s body: “Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.”

The hymn resounds with Catherine of Siena’s theology of “the food of souls”—a spirituality in which, as she wrote in the 14th century, “our souls must always be eating and savoring the souls of our brothers and sisters. In no other food ought we ever to find pleasure.” Catherine uses the Italian word dilettare to describe our holy enjoyment, a word that means “pleasure” or “delight.” We delight in God’s sustaining grace in the pleasures of our fellowship, in our communion of souls. As the medieval historian Ann W. Astell explains, “Catherine stresses the reciprocal relationship, the Communion between those who eat and those who are eaten, their mutual neediness, and the permeability of the ‘I’ who lives for and by others.”