‘The heavy bear who goes with me’

Corpus Christi 1996

Peter Steele SJ

How do you feel about bears? Black bears, I mean, and brown bears, and polar bears, and all the rest of them? There is a fair bit of good-will towards them around—think of Pooh Bear, and Paddington Bear, and Teddy Bear.

Some cultures have thought of bears as sacred: up in the sky there are figures known as the Greater Bear and the Lesser Bear. And one of the greatest theologians of this century, Swiss-born Hans Urs von Balthasar, appears to have been named after a bear.

How are bears connected with the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ? What I have in mind is a poem by the American Delmore Schwartz, a poem about the body, which begins 'The heavy bear who goes with me.'

As poets will, he is tilting in from a new angle on something familiar. No doubt it is true that the heavier the person, the heavier the bear; but light or heavy, our bodies are around all the time, 'going' with us: and light or heavy, we are likely to be in two minds about them.

When things go well, we are all for bodies. There they are, alert in their five senses, moving about when asked, fitting into the world's processes, able to fuel themselves at need, capable of reproducing themselves, the sources and instruments and occasions of much happiness.

When things go badly, we look at them darkly. If they are in pain, they clamour at us; if we are downcast, it is a tedious thing to have to drag them around; and they do, certainly, have a way of getting out of hand, so that our mirrors tell us sad stories, and our consciences turn in bad reports on them.

But for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness or in health, where would we be without them? The curious thing is that they give us both our privacy and our publickness, our internal life and our shared lives.

You can use your face to mask your feelings or to show them: you can use any amount of body-language to welcome people or to rebuff them. The body, in other words, is complex—not only as an organism with all its framework and juices and processes, but as a displayer and performer of meanings. If bodies are not the only show in town, there is certainly no show without them.

We celebrate today the embodied condition of Christ our Lord. This has what might be called three phases.

There is the Christmas embodiment—the small, still-wet body, come among us for a human life's duration, the body which is to end, wet once more, this time with sweat and blood, on a cross.

There is the liturgical or ceremonial embodiment, in which we share at this moment, where our Lord comes home to us once more via our own senses and the meanings we find through them—in the transformed bread and wine, which would have no meaning except as offered for our eating; in the blessed, life-filled words which we see on the page, and mouth for the saying, and hear in the air; and in the mortal bodies of our baptised sisters and brothers with whom we share these pews, this sacred space.

And there is the world on weekdays embodiment. Again and again in the gospels, our Lord insists in word and gesture that he is bonded with human beings—with their ventures, their sufferings, and their joys: he insists, in fact, that he is embodied in us. When we give a cup of water to some thirsty person, we give it to him; when we visit a sick or a trapped person, we visit him; when we rejoice at anything good whatever, we rejoice with him—we are, in fact, an expression of his rejoicing.

So, the feast of Corpus Christi looks back with wonder and gratitude at the incarnation, the embodiment, of God among us at a particular moment of human history. It looks around the chapel in which it may be celebrated at the embodied selves, limping or sprightly, old or new, to be found there, as all of us join to welcome Christ once more into our shared life. And it looks outwards at the wounded, yearning, process-filled body of the world.

As we take the bread and wine, the Body and the Blood, let us rejoice at what God has done, and take heart for what there is yet to do.