The Bread, the Wine, the Wedding

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.”

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A humbling directive, and I’m compelled to listen, especially when I consider the enormity of the immeasurable star fields alongside the great wilderness of the human heart. In our individual and collective harms I see a spiraling pull from the externals of our personal lives into the core of life, a natural desire in people to love and be loved. And yet tragedy is love’s brother. In tragedy we can be completely undone. Our lives may enter an unforeseen and inscrutable darkness in which we are inconsolable even to the point of death. Yet in love, even in the gravity of our greatest losses, there is light. 

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In that light we see one another as more beautiful than before.

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When I consider the bread and wine, I think of John Berger’s elliptic lyric novel To the Wedding. The novel is not only tender but fierce, and here the body who bears unaccounted trauma becomes a nexus of multivalent fusion capable of complete healing, reconciliation, restoration, and atomically speaking, resurrection. The body is both female and male, one and many. In response to trauma, the body crosses Europe and arrives along the coast of Italy for the wedding feast. We follow Gino and his fiancée, Ninon. The AIDS crisis has reached its zenith and she is about to die, and yet they dance, thrive, love, and marry. Bread is plentiful, and wine flows.  

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Berger’s final note to an infinite love resides in the Anima Christi, the soul of Christ which in Latin takes the feminine form. At the end of the century, at the end of the age, Berger foresees blessing. Listen to his words, a Word of wedding celebration in the Divine mystery of bread and wine shot through the brief flame of Ninon’s life, the note of her last breath. Eucharist. In Greek, “thanksgiving.” A prologue to the everlasting:

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When she has her first attack of pneumonia and she is at home in bed after Gino has gone to market, she will pray to God: The world is wicked—how can anybody not see it?—the world is wicked. And Christ is the salvation of the world, her soul will say wordlessly, not was not will be, is. In a space larger than the universe, the space made by all of us with our eyes shut, all people living, all people who lived, all people who will live, there in the darkest hole, filling a space larger than the universe, he dies and saves.

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And nearer the end, after Gino becomes a form of bread and wine to her:

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She will try to comb her hair and each morning she will ask for her wristwatch to be put on, she will have a morphine drip and with her eyes closed her skin will feel his hand stroking away the fear and his hand will feel the warmth which is all that will remain like a kiss around the bones of her loved body.

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True to human and Divine expression, cruciform and elemental, the Divine body absorbs pain and emits light.

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True to human and Divine expression, cruciform and elemental, the Divine body absorbs pain and emits light. This is the Omega point of which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin speaks. Science and art unite not only in the ecology of creation but in the DNA of two who are now one as bride and groom. In atomic theory, the mystery of the heavens is also physical, and present in us, hydrogen being the most abundant element in the universe, commonly referred to as the essence of light itself. And God is light. And God is love. Hydrogen is essential to life; it fuels the sun, composes symphonic growth on earth, gives abundance, names the lily of the valley, and the bird of the air. Hydrogen is the element with the symbol H and the atomic number 1. Hydrogen is what powers the stars and comprises indispensable elements of our own DNA. Its most common isotope or form has one proton with one electron orbiting around it. A photon is a quantum of light (a discrete quantity of energy), created when a hydrogen atom absorbs energy/absorbs other photons, thus destroying those that are absorbed, and then emitting in turn, more photons. In numberless interactions throughout the universe a hydrogen atom absorbs another photon or two or three or more with the right energy to jump up to another energy level. After each of these “excitations” of the hydrogen atom, the electron could recede back down one or more steps, emitting photons along the way. If a photon with sufficiently large energy gets absorbed, this can even unbind an electron from its nucleus, a process called ionization. These crippled hydrogen atoms are no longer able to absorb or emit light. That is, until they manage to capture a free electron back into a bound energy level. When a hydrogen atom is crippled, it is only resurrected by this capturing process. In the atomic realm, this happens innumerable times per millisecond. In this sense, not just artistically but tangibly, the universe is both eternally dying and eternally resurrecting. As a poet, death awakens me, and life humbles me. Admittedly I have no real grasp of such mysteries. As Einstein said, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. God is subtle but not malicious. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—it is the source of all true art and science.”

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We are abandoned, but not only to loss, fear, and pain. We are also abandoned to pleasure, joy, and love. For me this fits with the nature of the destroying and resurrecting gone through in the substructures of the universe mirrored in our DNA.

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We are abandoned, but not only to loss, fear, and pain. We are also abandoned to pleasure, joy, and love.

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Who can say what truly gives us breath, what inspires?

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What or who carries us from holocaust and returns us to love?

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As a forgiveness and genocide researcher at Gonzaga University for nearly 30 years, the subatomic properties of the stellar expanse and their echo in our personal lives has taken on great import. My bloodline is both Czech and German, peoples who have both committed and received genocide. My family is originally from Starý Plzenec, about an hour from Prague, near the site of the Lidice Massacre. In the wake of atrocity, many believe God abandons us, and this has fueled my own questions regarding a relational God who desires deeper and more authentic intimacy, more humane relations, and more devotion to the healing at the Omega point of the universe, the ever unfolding and essential Divine milieu Teilhard de Chardin believed to be Christ. I want to closely consider human responsibility, not blaming God for distance or harm, but recognizing we so often embody distance ourselves, and that perhaps we turn away from intimacy, human or Divine, because it is too much for us to bear. I have to acknowledge I am often incapable or too wounded to bear the numinous. Too crippled of heart or damaged of soul. I am in need of resurrection.

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John Berger’s art considers the question of suffering and he journeys great distances to help us personally and as a community arrive at a table in the wilderness where we are given the grace to partake of the bread, the wine, and the wedding.

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I question, I doubt, but I also wonder. I ask God to heal my unbelief, and I hope in the deep vision of Dostoyevsky, a prefiguration of John Berger’s vision.

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“Beauty will save the world.

And nothing is more beautiful than Christ.”