INCARNATIONAL LITURGY

All anthropocentric and certainly all anthropomorphic religions have strong concerns with human flesh, "embodiment." The sensory pleasures, pains and symbolisms of the body are at the heart of liturgies as well. This is a quick overview.

Ordeals are used among the Blackfeet and other warrior cultures as training for survival and hardship, to call out courage and demonstrate it to others. The most commonly known ceremony is the Sun Dance Lodge in which men are tethered to cords that are fastened at the high center of the lodge and the dance, pulling against them until they tear loose. There is evidently a contemporary covert version of this in which a circle of people set hooks in their backs and pull against each other. The idea is to mortify the flesh with pain, to kill the sin and weakness of the body, or possibly just to evoke the extremity of the experience for the sake of the strong hormones generated in the body or for psychological reasons.

Whipping is a more familiar mortification, sometimes a self-discipline. In museums there are displays of ritual whips used in antiquity by penitents. the practice is often depicted in movies like “The Seventh Seal.” In times of great fear and horror, as during the European plagues, groups would join together to do this. Fasting or thirsting are also methods of penance and self-testing, whether it is Christian lent or Blackfeet dream beds in the mountains where a young person waits for a vision.

During times of paralysis, boredom and trapped living, self-affliction can increase. Today people, particularly teenagers and particularly those feeling shame and/or guilt, sometimes use cutting with a razor to relieve their emotions. Tattooing can be a slightly displaced self-affliction that leaves a mark often dedicated to strong emotion: love, allegiance, self-definition. I once spoke to a small group on a Sunday morning and talked about cutting. I suggested off-hand that branding might be next. The teens in the group broke in to say that branding had already arrived among their peers. Some had moved on to amputation. One of my students on the Blackfeet reservation who had just received word that his mother had died, left the building and somehow managed to catch his finger in the heavy doors, cutting off the end. This is a traditional mourning gesture in his tribe, but he claimed to have no such intention or even knowledge of the practice.

All of these practices can be found in anthropological literature, along with distortions of the body: insertions, stretching, scarring, and genital surgeries. Those of us who read the National Geographic know about the ear lobes hanging in loops, the lips like platters, and the elongated necks. Feminists have made us aware of female circumcisions and activist males in the US have recently been objecting to the routine practice of removing foreskins. The meanings are very complex and emotional: ownership, belonging, sacrifice, submission and so on -- often mixed with theories of hygiene.

Even our ideas of what life beyond death might be like are connected to the concept of unbearable pain and unimaginable pleasure -- though we tend to describe both in terms of our earthly lives: pain as burning and pleasure as sex or food. At least this is the Abramic context. The Plains Indian context is more like dissociation, possibly like the dissociation of the body/mind under extreme duress. They speak of a shadowland, the Sand Hills, where one lives a faint gray version of life much the same as already known.

There is probably a biological substrate to all these practices and concepts. Animals trapped in leg-hold mechanisms are known to chew off their foot to escape. Animals trapped for long periods of time in too-small cages will begin to pull out their hair and gnaw sores into their flesh. Humans are not exempt from these self-harms.

In our times there has developed an attitude known as “extremophilia” -- the love of being out at the edge of risk: bungee jumping, erotic strangulation, high-speed car racing, Russian roulette, ice-climbing, risky sex, injected drugs. Partly the payoff is admiration from persons more guarded and partly, of course, the feeling of the bodily chemicals and the psychological triumph when things work out well.

“ALIVE!”

This example is about a nearly unsurvivable event and how religious understanding became a life-saving near-liturgical way of going outside normal behavior.

“On October 12, 1972, a Fairchild F-227 of the Uruguayan Air Force, chartered by an amateur rugby team, set off from Montevideo in Uruguay for Santiago in Chile.” (from the book entitled “Alive!” about the incident) So begins a story that is both terrible and inspiring. The airplane crashed very near the top of the Andes. Sixteen young men survived for 72 days and two of them eventually walked for ten days down out of the mountains. Their means of survival was cannibalism.

Not only did the youths survive well enough to recover good physical condition after their rescue, but also they managed to maintain sanity and morale while living jammed into the remains of an airplane fuselage with no amenities or even enough clothes to keep warm, since the tail section with all the luggage fell far from the rest of the plane. The source of their real strength was religious, in fact, what I’ve called “incarnational liturgy,” spontaneously arising from their Catholic culture. (Carne means meat.)

The first suggestion of cannibalism was when one of the boys, seeing how short the food supply was, threatened half-jokingly to fortify it with chunks out of the dead pilots, since they had made the mistake that caused the crash. This kind of ironic fierceness was characteristic of the boys. They were fighters, partly because of the South American macho tradition and partly because of their athletic training. Many were descendants of people displaced by WWII who had endured much hardship. Also, their minds were shaped by their schooling with Irish Christian Brothers until they were a remarkable and resilient mixture of matter-of-fact practicality and poetic confidence in other-worldliness. The boys were the cherished sons of large, conservative, closely-knit families. Rebellion and scorn were not directed at their parents, but at those who fell short of family standards. Many of the families were ranchers, so the boys were used to coping with emergencies and knew meat for what it was. Two boys were first year medical students who immediately turned their attention to the wounds imposed by the crash.

In a while several of the boys realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died. While the thought of cutting the flesh from those who had been their friends and relatives was deeply repugnant to them all, a lucid appreciation of their predicament led them to consider it.

“... Finally Canessa brought it out into the open. He argued forcefully that they were not going to be rescued: that they would have to escape themselves, but that nothing be done without food, and that the only food was human flesh. He used his knowledge of medicine to describe in his penetrating, high-pitched voice, how their bodies were using up their reserves. “Every time you move,” he said, “You use up part of your own body. Soon we shall be so weak that we won’t have the strength even to cut the meat that is lying there before our eyes.”

Canessa did not argue just from expediency. He insisted they had a moral duty to stay alive by any means at their disposal. . . .

“It is meat,” he said. “That’s all it is. The souls have left their bodies and are in heaven with God. All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home.”

One of the deeply Christian elements that emerged was a sense of oblation: willingness to give their bodies to the others.

“I know,” Zerbino went on, “that if my dead body could help you to stay alive, then I’d certainly want you to use it. In fact, if I do die and you don’t eat me, then I’ll come back from wherever I am and give you a good kick in the ass.”

The first eating of meat was ritualistic. Canessa, the medical student, cut twenty slivers of meat from the buttocks of one corpse and laid them on the roof of the plane to dry. He invited the other boys to begin and when no one would, he prayed and then forced down the first piece as an example.

The boys wrote letters to their families and novias constantly and there was a testimonial feel to what they wrote. Even in such extremity the boys could say the equivalent of Prayers of Intercession for others. They felt part of a strong community. Some of the boys and an older married couple could not force themselves to take the flesh, in spite of progressing weakness and neediness.

Pedro Algorta was one of the two boys who had been dressed more scruffily at the airport than the others: as if to show that he despised their bourgeois values. . . . Algorta watched Canessa and Fito Strauch cutting the meat but said nothing until it came to the moment when he was offered a slice of flesh. He took it and swallowed it and then said, “It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that then we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.”

Exalted landscapes stretched away from the improvised camp, which soon became a foul and stinking charnel house since the boys had no strength to do more than a minimum of maintenance. At night the boys clasped each other tightly for warmth and reassurance, but in the day time they sprawled carelessly in the sun, half-blinded by the dazzling sweeps of snow. Every night Carlitoes Paez led Rosary.

After their rescue the young men’s decision to eat human flesh and their justification of it through the image of Communion was accepted, despite their fears. A Catholic curate arrived at the hospital where they were first taken, confirmed their wisdom in saving their lives, judged the cannibalism necessary and not sinful, and gave Holy Communion to those who wished it. Later the Roman Catholic church simply cautioned them that it was not a true “Communion” since the flesh was not in any sense the flesh of Christ. Thus the church maintained its dogmatic ownership of the concept.

Ironically, Algorta, the man who had the original insight connecting flesh and communion bread, was the one who refused the priest’s ministrations. Perhaps his intellectual irreverence, which allowed him the freedom to use religious metaphors unconventionally, also denied him the emotional directness of accepting comfort. Or perhaps he was arrogant or depressed or simply needed a different kind of religious ministration than formal Roman Catholic liturgy. Or perhaps he believed that the Christian communion was a people’s rite, not one to be dispensed by officials.

There was one question the priest could not answer for any of the boys. “Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made of it? “None,”replied Father Andres. “There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.”

This is a very extreme example and deliberately so, partly because it is an excellent antidote to the notion that worship must be “pretty” or “aesthetic” and partly because it is an example of such strong emotional chiaroscuro that things normally taken for granted become more obvious. One rescuer could not accept any religious explanation. The skulls the boys had used as bowls were for him not at all bony chalices to hold melted snow water.