Last year I viewed a relic: the right hand of Saint Stephen, at his eponymous Basilica, in Budapest. It looked pretty good for a hand from 1038.
The scale of everything in Budapest is magisterial, particularly when it comes to domes, gates, length and breadth of streets, and distances.
The famous hand, though, is small. If we’re being honest, it’s barely identifiable. I’ve actually no idea if it’s really a hand, or really his hand, or whether it matters.
Relics are outside my experience. Corpses, skeletons, mummies, contents of old tombs, fossils, stained glass windows with various signs of death inscribed, I know about those. But the particularity of the relic - the psychology and theology of it, the physical power of it - is mysterious.
I assume it works the way mummies work. To mummify is to venerate is to bury is to bow before is to love. I assume the same primal love animates the worship of inanimate relics.
There were plenty of museumed mummies to be had in Budapest, too. Mummies of cats and crocodiles and snakes and (boring, usual) humans.
Standing over a mummy, or a relic, is moving. It’s almost heartbreaking the way we shepherd these pieces of dehydrated flesh forward through all of our ages. We pray over these bodies and absorb them, bodies we never could have known and yet find ourselves in. We imagine ourselves inside them and meet ourselves in their faces, reflecting our eyes through their eyes through glass cases. Even after thousands of years. Especially after thousands of years. It inspires tenderness and a protective regard for human frailty (which can be hard to come by and which, if cultivated broadly, would improve our lives here to an unimaginable degree).
Anyone who has viewed a freshly dead body knows: the person is gone. Whatever was ‘them’ has gone. The body is no longer recognisable. That’s what makes a dead body shocking. That’s what makes a dead body comforting. It is why we have wakes, open coffins, lyings-in. A dead body is anti-presence, anti-being. It is the anti-matter of the matter of the individual concerned.
It assures us that they - that we - are not all body.
It is the most compelling evidence of life after death I’ve ever encountered. Because, finally, where has the person gone, and how have they left so completely the body we thought was them?
At the same time, this meat, this piece of anti-being, this glorious indication that consciousness flows independently from body, continues to be real. It does not disappear, but becomes: ashes, earth, relic, mummy, bone, imprint. It remembers the person it once was to us constantly, allowing them to continue in a way we can comprehend. Not just in our memories, but as a material sign in the world. They remain here, transfigured, a traveler from beyond, even as they have so obviously left. In this way, they mediate our own transitions from past to future and into further, increasingly unknowable and increasingly frightening futures.
The relic promises eternity from both sides. It says: you will leave this body and you will travel elsewhere, and also, you will live here forever, as a body. It offers resurrection, no matter what. The preserved corpse allows us to flex between being and nonbeing and calms the fears inherent in both. Mummies and relics are like steps on the ladder up and down the columns of being and nonbeing, rungs for us to grasp with strong hands and pull ourselves up, or to step on with careful feet and balance as we descend.
I don’t know which part of us is our body, and which part is freed of body after death. Not being God, I don’t know how that works. Which part survives, if any? Perhaps we are layers of bodies, and death is more like shedding a snakeskin.
My stepdad told me, when he knew he was dying, not to worry because it was like changing clothes. He got that from his Hindu guru. But maybe it is how it is. Your body, in this world, is clothed in you, and you are clothed in it. It is skinned in you, and you are skinned in it. To die is to separate skins; one is lost, a resplendent new one is unearthed.
I do suspect there is a part of us that is only this body in this life on this earth. And when we die, that part is over. The skin you shed does not regenerate; it dries up, crumbles, becomes dirt. It is not you in full, but it is a lost part of you.
And that lost part is a particularly special and holy part. Because it is temporary. Because it will always, eternally, remain one with its environment, as a shed skin disintegrates into smaller and smaller translucent pieces until it becomes one with the sand. Because it is this very temporary part, condemned to dissolve, which allows us to partake in the gift of pleasure, the simplicity of sensual enjoyment that makes up most of the happiness of earthly life.
We are here - maybe not exclusively but certainly - to enjoy pleasure. That is what the body means for us. That is why we worship and preserve and follow it ‘unto ages of ages’ as your man Dostoevsky always repeats. (I don’t know if he would appreciate any of this, but up FD, anyway.)
For Christians (am I one? nobody nowhere knows this, anymore) - like, for example, the straightforwardly Christian Christians who unironically venerate the hand of Saint Stephen - God (and this is crucial) is embodied. God becomes Jesus, a person, a son of himself, a sun of himself, living and eating and walking and dirty and sweaty and crying and scared and laughing and getting pissed off and fucking (probably) and arguing and playing jokes and getting a bit drunk and lying in fields of new flowers beneath trees of edible buds, trying to convince everyone that this, just this, just this lying in the field, just this under the tree, just this buzz of pleasure, just this tide of laugh, just this fear of bleeding, just this fear of pain, just this sadness to be dissolving, just this thrill of dissolution, just this kiss on the mouth and this hot hand and this cloud of a sky on the skin of your bare chest is everything and there is nothing else to do. Lilies of the field, and that. You are here, on some level, only for simple enjoyment. (The relationship between experiencing pain and the capacity for simple enjoyment is for another post, or a thousand-page book.)
Looking at the hand of Saint Stephen, barely even recognisable as a hand but built up to orgasmic Hungarian scale as the hand of all hands, I wonder, if it was alive, how would it feel on my skin? Hot, like a real hand? Could it touch me like a real hand? Could it, in some dimension, feel me as I feel it? Would I feel it as a hand or as a relic, and what would be the difference? Would a touch like that change me? Would being touched by a relic, this relic, relic me?
What is a touch, anyway?
A kind of hotness that can’t die, a fire forever.
A kind of rebirth, a resurrection that keeps on happening.
A relinquishing of space, of tightness, of the hope found in aloneness.
It is not comfort. Comfort is stagnation, a false continuation of the past, a refusal to embrace the unknown. Touch goes far beyond comfort.
To be touched, to touch a body, is to throw yourself into the future, where your body already has arrived. It is jumping into a void with your eyes wide and arms outstretched to grasp your ladder which, made of a living hot hand, always awaits.
Wonderful! Makes me recall seeing the relics of St Therese of Lisieux in Ireland during her World Tour. The experience makes one stop and think deeply about life, living, miracles, dying and God.