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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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