This Is My Body, This Is My Blood

Lighting of candles at a seder meal.

I found the following on the blog Blue Eye Ennis. These are two poems written by two different women which point to the novelty of the idea that women are somehow incapable of uttering or representing the words "This is my Body, this is my blood." I think not.

On this Holy Thursday, I am reminded that it is quite impossible to have a Jewish Pass Over feast without women, and yet somehow our Catholic re enactment of this feast manages to do just that. Makes me wonder.

These are difficult times to be Catholic. The idea of betrayal is in the air. Scapegoating is again in play.

Tonight Pope Benedict will wash the feet of twelve male clerics in a symbolic gesture of service. The cynic in me thinks this is highly representational of the real decisions of white washing the acts of abusive clerics. And yet I remember betrayal was a major theme of this night, so it is fitting I guess that Benedict wash the feet of clerics.

I hope though, that sometime this weekend Benedict remembers that he himself is the product of his mother's body and blood. That he recognizes on a fundamental level the Church is the product of the body and blood of a woman and all the women who have followed. I hope that he can recognize the true place of women in Catholicism, just as is recognized in the seder meal, the part of humanity that lights the Light, and brought Salvation to the world.

Did The Woman Say

Frances Croake Frank

Did the woman say

When she held him for the first time
in the dark dank of a stable,

After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,

“This is my body, this is my blood?”

Did the woman say,

When she held him for the last time in the

dark rain on a hilltop,

After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,

“This is my body, this is my blood?

Well that she said it to him then,

For dry old men,

Brocaded robes belying barrenness,

Ordain that she not say it for him now.

Liturgy

Irene Zimmerman SSSF

All the way to Elizabeth

and in the months afterward

she wove him, pondering,

"this is my body, my blood!

"Beneath the watching eyes

of donkey, ox, and sheep

she rocked him crooning

"this is my body, my blood!"

In the search for her young lost boy

and the foreboding day of his leaving

she let him go , knowing

"This is my body, my blood!"

Under the blood smeared cross

she rocked his mangled bones,

re-membering him, moaning,

"This is my body, my blood!"

When darkness, stones , and tomb

bloomed to Easter morning,

She ran to him shouting,

"this is my body, my blood!"

And no one thought to tell her:

"Woman, it is not fitting

for you to say those words.

You don't resemble him."