Sabbath Devotional :: Helping Hands
How do you frame your covenants?
I can appreciate people finding meaning through the lens of dwelling in the house of the Lord, holding to the iron rod and following the covenant path, shepherding lost souls, or fighting the good fight.
As I have aged, I have found little so meaningful as understanding my covenants though the symbol of the Body of Christ.
Some years ago, my mind was awakened as I sat through the administration of the sacrament. I realized that my covenant to remember the body of the Son, was not only a promise to remember a weeping god, burdened with the weight of the human yoke and a body willingly broken for me, but also a promise to remember the Body of Christ — the children of the covenant, in common purpose, with an open invitation to all our human siblings.
Last week I burned my hand. . . like, really burned it. It was one of those rare occasions (as of the last few years) that I have felt a need to put a little more effort into my appearance. As I was curling my hair, the iron slipped. In a split second my body responded. Hoping to protect my feet and legs, my hand grasped desperately to catch the iron. Only, by the time I had reacted, my hand firmly caught the end with heating element.
Are we ever as aware of our body as when it is damaged, in pain, or not working as it has previously? As I’ve nursed my hand this week — trying to protect it, as my body’s miraculous healing powers restore my flesh — I’ve considered the way the rest of the body tends to a wound and makes accommodations to lessen the impact and strain on that part that needs extra care.
I’ve also thought about the way my brain and hand worked in tandem, in the moment of the accident, to protect more helpless parts of my body. I’ve felt gratitude for the tools that are my hands, and that the damage wasn’t worse and didn’t involve the most utilized parts of my hand. I’ve felt appreciation for the strength of other parts of my body that can pick up the slack, and help the whole keep on keeping on.
How do we experience the world if not through our bodies? How do we understand and feel, sense, see, smell, taste or hear? If or when we work, digest, filter, breathe, bend or move, it is primarily with our bodies. We have some concept of existence without the body, however, much of that is based on faith, hope and conjecture. With our bodies playing a central role in our human experience, it is little wonder that epistles of Paul are full of the imagery of the Body of Christ.
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. (1 Cor. 12:12)
What is so personal, so intimate and universal? What do we understand more viscerally than tending to, caring for, and appreciating our own body and each of its attending members? Is there a more profound way to understand the meaning of Christ and what it means to be a member of that body?
We are often very casual about our use of the word member. We sometimes throw around the word as if we were simply talking about attending an after-school club or a book group.
“Are they a member?”
“They are a non-member.”
“We need to update your membership records.”
The word member comes from the Latin word membrum. It means limb.
C.S. Lewis lamented the loss of meaning of the word in an address at Oxford University on the subject of Membership:
At the outset we are hampered by a difficulty of language. The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the expression “members of a class.” It must be most emphatically stated that the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members , , , he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another. . . . A row of identically dressed and identically trained soldiers set side by side, or a number of citizens listed as voters in a constituency, are not members of anything in the Pauline sense. I am afraid that when we describe a man as “a member of the Church” we usually mean nothing Pauline: we mean only that he is a unit — that he is one more specimen of the same kind of thing as X and Y and Z.
How much more seriously do we take one another, how much more care, attention and gratitude do we bestow upon each person when we consider each individual a limb or an organ of our own body–the body that has taken upon it the name Christ?
The tasks of the Body of Christ are both urgent and aspirational. We are led to acknowledge both our helplessness and our helpfulness, the state of being in need and of being needed in return. We are both uniquely important to and nothing without the whole. We participate in unity through diversity.
I am grateful for this organization that takes the embodiment of the name of Christ so seriously. I am grateful for each of you. I marvel at this group of women who are willing to tend to not only their own, but each human . . . a group of women whose covenants inform their work and advocacy each day. I see you as you use your hands to lift the hands that hang down. May we continue to embrace our interconnectedness with that which is human as we grow in our intimacy with the divine.
We are all constantly teaching and learning, forgiving and being forgiven, representing Christ to man when we intercede, and man to Christ when others intercede for us.
-C.S. Lewis
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p.s. Because I aspire to be just like Kristine Haglund when I grow up. Here is an anthem to supplement my offering.
Open thou mine eyes and I shall see;
Incline my heart and I shall desire;
Order my steps and I shall walk
In the ways of thy commandments.
O Lord God, be thou to me a God
And beside thee let there be none else,
No other, naught else with thee.
Vouchsafe to me to worship thee and serve thee
According to thy commandments
In truth of spirit,
In reverence of body,
In blessings of lips,
In private and in public.
-John Rutter
Molly Cannon Hadfield is a moderator for the Facebook discussion group for Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
