The Resurrection of the Body
Granny’s Body, Her Mind, and the Resurrection of the Dead
Yesterday was her hair appointment, so today Granny’s permed hair billows in a gray cloud of smoke above her head. Her skin ripples with rivulets and furrows, weathered by simple elements—wind, water, and time. As a child, I traced the blue ridges of veins on her hands and arms while I rocked in her lap. They were ancient and solid, like the mountains outside—old enough to have topography. Her body was as dependable as those mountains—heavy, steady, and timeless, changing slowly and only through natural forces. Her muted heartbeat matched the comforting rhythms of the room—the back-and-forth creak of the rocking chair, the tick and chime of the grandfather clock.
Later, these same hands would tuck quilts under and around my small legs and arms, teach me how to crumble butter into biscuit dough, and crochet blankets for her yet unborn great-grandchildren. Now, in the nursing home, I tuck a quilt under and around her small lap, her shivering frame, her stooped back. I rub my hands up and down her arms and back, trying to keep her warm. Her limbs are thin and unsteady, and the wheelchair strangely diminishes her. Yesterday, the nurses told my mom that she was ready to make a great escape, wheeling through the halls of the nursing home, slapping slumped patients on their shoulders, yelling, “Follow me!” Today, she won’t eat or answer questions. When she asks me who I am, I do not see the quick flash of recognition that is sometimes there. Is her lethargy a result of dementia or medication? The doctor says, “Her body is as healthy as a horse. It’s just her mind…” I wonder at the easy separation between the two, wondering what it means to have a mind at all, not just a brain. And isn’t the mind a part of the body? Or when we say “mind,” do we mean something more like “soul” than “brain”?
Granny closes her eyes tightly and rubs her head in concentration or pain, as if trying to unriddle the same questions. What does she have left to know?
She knows that her body is cold and wants warm coffee. She does not know the names of her children, grandchildren, or the days of the week. But she can look down and see her familiar hands and wrinkled sweater, blue to match her eyes. This amounts to knowledge for her now. When she travels the dark landscape of her mind, she finds few landmarks to orient her other than what her body tells her—what her knees say when she gets up, what her hands do. Her bodily habits ground her—brushing her teeth, putting on a shirt, eating.
When she was first diagnosed with dementia, they said, “This has probably been going on longer than you realize.” Early in the disease, when dementia sufferers typically remain in their own homes, their bodies remember for them: scoop the instant coffee in the mug, pour the boiling water over it, add a splash of milk. Eventually, even the body stops remembering its own habits. Before she went to the nursing home, my mom and aunt taped reminders around the house: “Today is August 28, 2014,” “Remember to take your medicine,” “You have two daughters,” “You have lived in this house for sixty years. This is where you belong.”
Sometimes when we talk about her husband, who died when I was five, she asks, “And what year did I die?” But then her body brings her back, suddenly, with a shiver she can’t shake, and she laughs at herself, patting her cheek.
Watching her now, I remember the body is not simply a house for the enduring, unchanging spirit. Like it or not, we are, in so many ways, our bodies. As the family witnesses her dementia progress, we see a familiar body say and do unfamiliar things. Well-meaning friends and family say, and we sometimes echo them, “She is just not herself anymore.” We tell ourselves this story to make sense of things, to find some comfort. But if she is not herself, then who do we love when we say we love her—an image of her at her best? Are we allowed to mourn the person who has left us while she sits in front of us? Who is the person in front of us, and where did the person we know go? These questions don’t have answers. We can thumb through books on dementia care and find these questions echoed but never answered. The truth I try to live into, eventually, is that she is in front of me. We love her by loving her body.
Creeds, Bodies, and the Resurrection
Two of the most ancient Christian creeds, born out of early baptismal covenants and Christological controversies, are the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Scholars debate how to date these creeds. While the Nicene Creed was adopted at the council of Nicea in 325, references to the Apostles’ Creed and its wording pop up in different places. Some argue that the Apostles’ Creed is the oldest of the two, its sparseness more primitive, a little more barebones than the flourishes of the Nicene. Both formed as the emerging church asked, Who is this Jesus, and how are we to respond to him? When a congregation recites a creed together, we throw a line into the past, hoping to catch something of our faith’s earliest understandings and articulations of who Jesus was. The creeds also hold us in the present, sinking an anchor into the rolling currents of time and change with their timeless confessions. And they aim us toward the long horizon of the future—the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Creeds are intellectual assent, we often think, a way of saying what we believe, even when we find it difficult to believe. But when we recite a creed together, with the gathered body, it becomes something else. Breath mingles and joins in the air between us as we exhale these shared words. Someone stumbles over a word here, another picks it up and carries it forward. Bold declarations support faint whispers; whispers calm anxious and brash declarations. Our words trip and rise with our breath. They embody what we try to name when we say, “I believe in the holy catholic Church.” When we recite a creed, we are a body, moving together.
The branch of the Christian tradition Granny called home did not give the creeds much merit. A sign reading “No Creed but Christ” hung over the doors of the church building Granny’s parents helped build and her husband helped renovate. The founders of the movement her church is a part of were disenchanted by the religious violence they witnessed in their lifetimes; they connected creeds with division, conflict, and ultimately violence. The only essential is Jesus, they argued. The rest is immaterial. I still resonate with the unifying heart of this sentiment, even as I recognize the beauty of the early creeds’ grappling articulation of who this Christ was. But as someone who walked into this same church building every Sunday and Wednesday under the banner of “No Creed but Christ,” I did not even know what a creed was until college.
The first time I said the Apostles’ Creed in the Presbyterian church I attended, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Part of me squirmed, while another part wanted to sink into the words, to let them anchor me in the tumult of my first year of college. I wasn’t shocked by most of it, as we read it together. Most of this was what I was expected to believe growing up, even if we stubbornly refused to recite it in creeds. But when we reached the final set of confessions, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting,” I shivered. The resurrection of the body. I was not used to talking about bodies and resurrection in the same breath. The resurrection of whose body? I wondered. Jesus’s? Mine? All of the above?
The Nicene Creed renders this theological hope as “the resurrection of the dead,” a more familiar phrase. But the Apostles’ Creed leaves us with no question about what kind of resurrection this is. It is not just about the soul. It is about the body. As I read this creed, for the first time in my life, I felt that God might be interested in something other than my soul.
Granny’s Belief in the Resurrection of the Body
Granny has never formally confessed to believing in “the resurrection of the body,” yet she inhabits a Christian faith that does. Right now, everything around her witnesses to the improbability of this belief. Granny’s wilting hands and closed eyes witness to the truth that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. But there are days like yesterday, when her eyes are open and bright, oscillating between mischief and confusion. This look tells a deeper story, like she is sure of a secret I could barely guess. If she were to try uttering it, it might sound something like this:
Shortly after Granny was diagnosed with dementia, she wanted to revisit the important places of her life, all within thirty miles of her house. My mom and I drove her around with her sister one summer afternoon. They told us the stories contained in the places we passed. They wanted to show us where their grandparents were buried, but Granny was having trouble remembering. Her sister prodded us in the right direction. Eventually, we pulled halfway up a stranger’s driveway, spotting the headstones near the top of a wooded bank. They were hidden and weathered, smoothed down to look like regular stones. They were easy to overlook.
“You’d think they might spruce it up a bit, even if they didn’t know who was buried there,” Granny observed.
“Well,” her sister replied, “even if we can’t see them now, we’ll be able to see them someday.”
“Why yes, when the Lord returns it sure will brighten up in there. Those graves’ll just open up and bodies’ll start hopping out left and right,” she said matter-of-factly, her hands gesturing like fireworks. While the image of bodies popping out of graves might unsettle most, Granny said it as a plain truth, akin to saying that it was sunny outside. As we drove home, I grinned at the image of bodies shooting out of graves.
The Resurrection of the Body and Hope
In his work On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius wonders at the paradox of the Word made flesh, marvels at God’s body in Jesus. “And this was the wonderful thing,” he writes, “that He was at once walking as man, and as the Word was quickening all things, and as the Son was dwelling with His Father. So that not even when the Virgin bore Him did He suffer any change, nor by being in the body was [His glory] dulled: but, on the contrary, He sanctified the body also.” By being in the body, He sanctified the body. Whose body? His body? Our bodies? All of the above.
Those of us who call western culture and Christianity home inherit a complicated view of the body. Our mouths confess the body’s blessedness, but we secretly feel ashamed of its needs and limitations. When we care for our own bodies, we slip into the language of control or regulation—monitoring our vitals, getting our bodies into an exercise regimen. Often, it’s easiest to simply dismiss our bodies. Our bodies are temples of God, we say, which is good. But behind this sentiment can lurk the belief that they are disposable; like any good temple, they are only important insofar as what they house. The real goods lie inside, in the soul.
But the Incarnation tells us what God does with bodies. God blesses them. I wonder again at the doctor’s neat separation of Granny’s mind and body: “Her body is healthy; it’s just her mind…” We want a body and mind that does not suffer change, whose link to God renders it changeless. This, Athanasius says, is Jesus. Is Jesus, God’s body walking in first-century Palestine, somehow sanctifying Granny’s faltering body and mind right now? “For this perishable body must put on imperishability,” writes the apostle Paul to the Corinthians, “and this mortal body must put on immortality.” If this is the process we must go through, it is not an easy one. But Granny has been practicing. As I drape and tuck quilts around her, I try to practice a similar hope: I imagine God wrapping her body in something new.
Granny and the Bush: A Vision of the Future
Two years before her life was whittled down to the shared square of her nursing home room, Granny sits on the back porch and makes plans. Her stiff legs limber and sway underneath the blue swing, painted to match the house, painted to match her eyes and her favorite color. Swinging makes her body weightless, lightening the heaviness of her mind as well. The swing groans each time we push forward and sighs when we release, marking time for us as we sit together. Groan, sigh; groan, sigh.
As we swing, Granny surveys the landscape of her backyard and tells me what she’s going to do. “I guess it’s about time to move this bush,” she says, pointing to a sweet shrub she calls a "bubby bush" that has grown tall in front of the porch. It’s been there a long time. I wonder if she remembers how my cousins and I used to pick the blossoms in early summer and rub them on our wrists and arms like perfume.
“It’s starting to block the view. I’ll get out here one of these days with a shovel and a bucket. Maybe move it over there by the shed.” She gestures toward an open area where a crabapple tree stood until a few years ago. I also wonder if she remembers that tree—if she remembers the clang and thud of the apples as they fell, ripe and lazy, on the roof above her bedroom. I wonder if she remembers planting the tree or remembers who did. She doesn’t say, and I don’t ask.
Minutes later, she comments, “This bush sure is blocking the view. Pretty soon you won’t be able to see past it. Guess I better get out there with a bucket and move it.” I nod my assent and ask her where she thinks she’ll move it.
As we have this same conversation over and over, I can’t figure out why it leaves me with more hope than despair. Maybe it’s the stubborn certainty of her assertion. Maybe moving the bush is more about the present than the future. Maybe her vision, unhinged from time and human probability, is truer than mine. Or maybe simply hearing it over and over again convinces me she’s right.
Part of me—the skeptic, the realist—wonders, “Does she really expect she’ll do this, or is she just daydreaming? Is this a way to console herself, as she nears the end of her life and mind?” These questions, of course, miss the point. I understand this the longer I sit with her and the more she speaks, not as someone trying to hide from reality, but as someone with a surer, more patient vision than my own. It’s the view of someone on the outskirts of time, stepping to the side of its linear trek. She lives between two places, two realities, two visions. As the past closes and latches like a door behind her, she is left standing on the edge of the present, peeking her head through an open doorway into whatever reality lies ahead. Her assurance of that reality comes through a long discipline of hope, held unconsciously most of her life, until now it is all she has left.
As I help her up from the swing, I see her bending down in the yard. It is years away from this moment. It is either the future or the past—does it really matter which? She packs dirt around the roots of a sweet shrub, mounding it around the base with careful, expert hands. She stands, her worn body rising from dust, limbering, stretching, planting, steady as the ridgeline on the horizon. The view ahead is clear.