Christ has no body but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours,
yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world,
yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours,
yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

–usually attributed to Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

In February, in a moment of quiet meditation, I walked the labyrinth during our church’s women’s retreat up in Healdsburg. I had these words in my head and was thinking about what it meant to be Christ’s hands and feet on this earth. I was thinking about the incarnation and embodiment, about what it means to have a body. And as I walked the path, I thought about how sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a body, I see a palimpsest of experiences layered onto an external frame, layers and layers imprinted on my skin by abuse and violence and the neglect that came after.

I see the hands that struck me and the body that kept forcing itself where it had no right to go. I see the other hands and the other bodies invited later out of loneliness and desire and a desperate need to overwrite the damage done, the bodies male and female whose presence defied the easy categorization of sin and virtue. I see the lines that marriage engraved on my body, lines that exude a love and respect I didn’t know existed. I see how hard I tried to nullify my body, first through food and neglect, later through exercise and discipline. And I see how after years of attempting to dominate and conquer it, I finally surrendered to my unborn child and let my body do what it would.

There is something almost too metaphorical about it, how love mirrored evil here and transversed the same routes, how pregnancy and childbirth ravaged my already-broken body, breaking it now out of love, not hate, and in sacrifice, not submission. My body, once marked by evil, came to be marked by love as I conceived, carried, and birthed a child. Marked by more trauma, yes, as I tore so significantly and it took so long to heal, as a traumatic pregnancy gave way to a traumatic birth, but also marked by love.

But love doesn’t erase hate, I don’t think. It added another layer to the palimpsest, so that now when I look in the mirror, I see all the things that came before, and I see a body that was a home to my daughter and is a home still. I see a body my daughter reaches for, arms she wants to be held by, legs she likes to hide behind, breasts that fed her and gave her comfort, a torso she climbs all over when we play jungle gym together on the living room floor. I see how my body is a place of safety to her, and although it is not yet that for me, it makes me hopeful that it one day could be. That the evil wrought on my body could one day fade to the briefest of lines, present but almost invisible between all the marks of love on my skin.

When I walked the labyrinth, I thought about what it means that Christ has no body now on earth but mine. I thought about the particulars of that statement–no body but mine. Mine. I thought about what it means that Jesus returned to his own brutalized body after his resurrection and offered his wounds as proof to his disciples. I thought about all those things, and then I thought about my own body, and I prayed. I walked and I prayed a prayer of grief and thanksgiving for all my body had suffered and all it had done, from the ways it was violated to ways it grew and nurtured my daughter, and for the role it plays in my own ongoing resurrection, scars and all.