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59 In chapter 3 I will further explore this relational ontology and its intimate connection with nourishment. MAKING MEXICAN MOLLI 37 Moreover, from a Christian perspective one could make the conjecture that, because of Christ s flesh as non-indifference to flesh as such, this divine embrace (the Incarnation) allows us to envision a dimension of affectivity and affinity as being prior to sheer difference. Christ s flesh aligns itself with human flesh. In the flesh, Christ blends God s desires with the desires of humanity. Like molli, Christ s flesh dis- plays a dimension of a divine human mestizaje, and one which is pro- foundly encultured. He is born, grows up, experiences hunger and thirst, he loves and cries, becomes tired, suffers, and dies within the reality of human flesh and within a particular cultural symbolic world-view.60 God is not indifferent, but shares divinity within and at the core of the human flesh. From within, God continuously walks humanity s historical pathos and further transforms it into a present and future story of resurrection and deification. By virtue of Christ s incarnation, flesh is perpetually in flux; it is the in-betweenness of the divine human relationality. In this vision, humanity is invited to become co-creator of this human divine poiesis (a making that is also performing, a creative practice).61 The aesthetic dimension of the flesh brings about an ethical demand, for it depicts the beautiful as the good (that which is beloved and desired). It is all-inclusive. Yet the painful fact is that in human society (and Catholic and Christian social groups are not an exception to this reality) some bodies are rejected and cast out because their embodiment is depicted by those in power as imperfect and/or impure : black and brown bodies, female bodies, disabled bodies. and so on.62 In spite of this human rejection, Christ identifies with the excluded one (Matthew 25): the one who is desired, and embraced with love by God not rejected. Christ transforms a social cycle of violence, and reveals self and other as mutually constitutive by virtue of divine kenosis. Christ s 60 This analysis of the relationship between flesh and culture is inspired by Graham Ward s notion of culture, which articulates it as a symbolic world-view, embedded, reproduced and modified through specific social practices. Although Ward does not address here the particular issue of the relationship between flesh and culture, I believe that one does not exist in isolation from the other. Hence, the aspect of syncretism or mestizaje that they share, for both like molli are not monolithic, but polyphonic, hybrid, and fragmentary, always being composed and recomposed. Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, 5, 6. 61 I will say more about poiesis in the next chapter. 62 For a reflection on how in fact this violent politics of exclusion of the imperfect bodies echoes a colonial Christian missionary agenda, see Sharon Betcher, Monstrosities, Miracles, and Mission: Religion and the Politics of Disablement, in, Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera (eds.), Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004). I am grateful to Mayra Rivera, who generously gave me a copy of this book. 38 MAKING MEXICAN MOLLI reversal speaks of peace and reconciliation in a world of violence, exclusion, and destruction. The Catholic narrative proclaims that in Christ s in-fleshing the world reaches its climax and is enacted in the Eucharist wherein God becomes food and drink in and through materiality. As we shall explore in the next chapter, in eating this divine food, sensuality particularly the senses of touch and taste is intensified in a way that nothing mate- rial is surpassed. Catholic theology envisions the Eucharist as the body of Christ that, in its act of self-sharing offered up as alimentation, trans- forms the partakers into Christ s own body, and calls us to feed both physical and spiritual hungers. The Eucharist, like molli, is an alimentary hybrid, a complex interplay of multiple narratives.63 The eucharistic body (the hybrid of humanity and God, materiality and divinity) displays its own corporeality as a sharing of differences whereby difference is not eliminated but cele- brated: peoples of all races, classes, genders, and sexual orientations, the healthy and the sick all are united by the one and excessive divine per- petual love that nourishes body and soul.64 I said earlier that one drop of molli contains the entire world, for it brings together different nations, cultures, races, and so on. Likewise, the eucharistic body nourishes in its act of sharing and celebrating difference. The catholicity of the body celebrates a corporeal reality bringing together both the local and uni- versal bodies that coincide in the one body of Christ. Under this eucha- ristic construction, the alien other is no long rejected but included. Still more challenging, the other is alien no longer. In the Eucharist, self and other are not juxtaposed, nor do they collapse into one another, but difference is preserved in a stage of mutual constitution. That is the chal- lenge that the Eucharist presents particularly to those who belong to the Catholic church. I painfully realize that there is still much to learn in this. 63 See e.g. Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). Smith rightly argues that the Eucharist does not exist in its own purity, but it is rather a syncretism, a hybrid con- structed by many traditions and narratives (such as Jewish, Greco-Roman, and, later, patristic, medieval, and so forth). And I must add: the Eucharist continues to be reshaped
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