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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Sarah Teather, Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK

Good morning.

The continuous newsfeed of reminders of our mortality this year coincided with moving into the second half of my 40s. As lockdown barred any opportunity for wilder versions of a midlife crisis, I took up exercise with unwise enthusiasm.

Learning then about strains and stretches, limitations and moderation has been a strange new journey for me into inhabiting an embodied state of mind.

Bodies, with all their vulnerabilities, are hard to avoid paying attention to just now, whether it is the new social awkwardness around personal space, our chapped hands or that paranoia which follows a clearing of the throat.

There is no escaping that the trauma of this pandemic is physical – its devastation wrought on bodies: scarring, wounding, struggling to breathe. So too the wider story: indented lines on the faces of medics who tend the sick beneath PPE. The ache of the shielding denied human touch. The fatigue of those who convalesce. The scalding tears of those who grieve. The bruises of those who cannot escape. The hunger of those who can no longer afford to eat.

The Christian story is a story of God who became human, with the vulnerabilities of an enfleshed body. A God who washed the feet of those he loved, touched the limbs of the sick, took children in his arms, suffered wounds of nails and spear, and rose again in his physical body.

It is in our bodies that we live and move in Him. In our bodies that He can be met and seen.

Christ, you play in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not yours, pointing to the Father, through our features and our faces. Give us eyes to see what we are.

Amen.

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