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Column Bruises are an incentive for pondering our frailty
By JEANNETTE BATZ
One minute I'm tiptoe on the cushion
of our wrought iron desk chair, peering into my husband's stash of
audiocassettes in hope of Neil Young acoustic. The next minute I'm on the
floor, breastbone smashed against the chair's iron knob, broken cassettes
strewn around me. Somehow the chair slid out from under me, gouging a long,
wicked gash into our recently refinished hardwood floor. Sobbing in self-pity,
I huddle in my husband's arms and wail how bad it hurts.
The initial tears mix pain and outrage. A minute later, they're a
wily inner-child effort to distract my never-careless husband from the damage.
Parental on cue, he dries my eyes and scolds me for not asking him to reach the
box. Now my attention shifts to my wounds: a curved red sort of rope burn
across my -- is that neck or chest, that place where women put their hand when
they're startled? The knob has scraped it raw, and around the angry scarlet
puddles a purplish bruise that reaches halfway down my left breast. The entire
side of my left thigh is swollen and goosebumped purple.
It's such a little chair, I think, and such a short distance to
the floor. However did I manage to hurt myself so badly?
By bedtime, I can't shift an inch without blood rushing some place
that hurts like hell. I lie there like Dracula in daytime, wondering what's
changed since the days of kissed-away skinned knees.
The next morning, as I gingerly dress for work, it occurs to me
that I look like I was raped or beaten. I carefully explain my clumsiness to my
coworkers, afraid they'll think Andrew is a wife-beater or I'm a
dominatrix.
Secretly I'm fascinated by my injuries. Every time I go to the
bathroom, I inspect the kaleidoscope of bruises that has coalesced to cover a
solid three-fourths of my thigh.
This fascination embarrasses me. I feel, in turns, like a wuss, a
diva and a masochist. And then I wonder: If it feels this violent to be
attacked by an iron chair, how would it feel to be deliberately beaten by
another human being? They say victims harden, withdraw, block the memories, and
until now I have always assumed it's a purely emotional defense. Now I decide
there must be a sensory component, too. Wounds are wide-awake; they feel a
breeze, a change in temperature, a silk shirttail grazing the skin. It's too
much awareness, too many abrupt interruptions and none of them pleasant.
It's easier to block emotion than sensation, though. A fresh wound
impels our attention, calling it back from any wanderings with twinges and
throbs. Focusing on our bodily damage, we heed less of the outside world; throw
less energy toward work and play; think less of others' needs. ("I'd give you a
backrub, honey, except with these bruises ..."). We sink -- at the risk of
sounding as dualistic as Augustine -- into heavy, demanding flesh.
The wallowing allows us to heal, and sometimes, with trivial
injuries such as mine, it can be a mental relief. After a few months of
strenuous, scattered mental effort, I'm plain delighted to catch a cold, think
only of the stuffiness of my nose, long only for a clear rush of air. As long
as the cold ends when I want it to and does not plague me with undue suffering,
it serves the purpose of reasserting my body's needs, reordering priorities I
have invariably allowed to slide toward abstraction.
But there's more than single-mindedness at play with these
bruises, I realize on Sunday. I kneel -- wincing -- to receive Communion, and
for the first time, as I chew the host, a macabre image comes to me: the
crunching of Christ's bones. Unhinged though that thought may seem, it floods
my imagination with the intensity of his physical suffering -- and the
fragility of the body he so graciously accepted. Who would do that? Who would
agree to become partial and broken instead of whole; who would choose pain over
peace? He almost didn't, I remind myself -- but then, at Gethsemane, he was
fully human, paralyzed by fear, desperate to be infused by a strength greater
than his own.
The human body's fragility, I decide, is the root of my
fascination with the bruises. It branches off into simple wonder that we make
it through most days safely, housed in such a frail container. Dread, that a
split second can discolor familiar flesh, change well-being to pain. And
gratitude, that this particular damage will heal, has already begun to repair
itself.
Catholicism carries the scars of a long history of bodily damage:
medieval priests flagellating themselves; nuns slipping iron spikes over their
thighs; mystics receiving, as though a gift, the stigmata. Today, except in
rare throwback groups such as Opus Dei, the mortification of the flesh is no
longer deemed necessary to elevate the spirit. We do not fast for hours, deny
ourselves essentials or whip our flesh into submission. We speak more about the
unity of body and spirit now, the integration of various aspects rather than
the subordination of the physical.
This gentler approach is fine with me: I have no desire to sever
matter from soul before it's time or to glorify suffering of any kind as the
high road to enlightenment. Too much of the spiritual rapture induced by pain
can be explained by the same burst of endorphins that kindles pleasure during
sadomasochistic acts. And yet -- in a time when tomatoes can be engineered into
ripeness, animals cloned from cells, diseased organs popped out and replaced
with computerized parts, dead bodies frozen in hope of earthly resurrection --
bruises aren't such a bad reminder that in the end we are fragile. At any
moment, our smoothed, numbed, dosed, dieted, tucked, lifted, pumped-up bodies
can be destroyed.
To become human, Christ had to become vulnerable, sensitive beyond
control to all kinds of pain. We've spent the centuries that followed that
courageous act avoiding our humanity whenever possible and trying to play God
instead.
Which may be why we're so shocked when we fall.
Jeannette Batz is a senior editor at The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis.
National Catholic Reporter, April 18,
1997
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