Hoc Est Corpus Meum: The First Principle of Making

add source or note = ###

There is a sentence the Church has been whispering over broken bread for two thousand years. For more than half that time, it was primarily said in latin. Hoc est corpus meum - This is my body###.

A Jewish rabbi, the night before his execution, picks up a loaf of bread and calls it himself. this is odd, when you think about it. The crowds that heard him say similar things months before in Capernaum walked away### in disgust. it was an odd thing to suggest that he be taken as bread to be eaten. And yet the Church has never stopped saying it. Every Sunday, in some quiet chapel or cathedral or converted living room, a priest lifts bread and repeats the words of christ: This is my body.

If you are an artist, a musician, a writer, a dancer, a maker or creative of any kind, I want to suggest that this sentence is a kind of first principle of creative work. Not a nice devotional thought. Not an accessory to your craft. The whole premise.

Here is why.

The God Who Took on Flesh

Long before Good Friday, the scandal had already happened: the infinite God, the One in whom all things hold together, became a small body that required a mother's milk. he became flesh. a body.

In Anglican tradition, we confess this every week. And was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man. The Creed does not say God visited a body, or inhabited a body, or used a body as a costume. It says God became one. Fully. Permanently. Eternally. The resurrected Christ did not shed his body; he ate fish with it. He invited Thomas to touch his wounds. And when he ascended, he took that body with him into the life of the Trinity.

This means something the Church has always struggled to fully absorb: God is not embarrassed by matter. Flesh is not a problem for God. Flesh is what God chose.

Why This Matters for the Creative

The artist who has absorbed the Incarnation stops apologizing for the body.

Most of us have inherited some version of the old Gnostic lie — that the real work is "spiritual" and the body is the annoying logistics department that keeps you from getting to it. Your back hurts. Your hand cramps. Your eyes blur after three hours at the screen. You sleep badly and wake up stiff. And the message you absorb from a hundred subtle places is that this is just friction — the cost of doing business, the tax the body levies on the soul's real work.

But if the Word became flesh, then the body is not the tax. The body is the premise.

When a painter moves a brush, it is not a soul operating a meat puppet. It is a human being — a unified, embodied person — making. When a writer types, her shoulders and wrists and breath are not peripheral to the sentence; they are the sentence's conditions. When a musician sings, the song is not a disembodied idea merely routed through a throat. The throat is the song's body.

The Incarnation tells us that this is not a compromise. This is the dignity of making.

What Changes When You Believe It

If hoc est corpus meum is the first principle of your creative life, a few things quietly re-organize themselves…

…You stop treating the body as a nuisance to be overcome or prison to escape. You start treating it as the field in which the work will happen — which means you tend it. Not as vanity, not as self-optimization, but as stewardship and true self-care. A painter who cannot lift her arm above her shoulder is not a painter with a small inconvenience; she is a painter whose work is being quietly strangled. do not get me wrong here - there is beauty in embodiment that involves injury, fragility, and breaking down. a dancer who limps into practice is showing up. embodied, still, and perhaps noticing finality in her ligaments, tendons, and fascial integrity. the integrated creative takes notice of the changes in her physical condition and shows up anyway. as she embodies her practice from a holistic paradigm - her limp becomes an offering.

…You stop separating "studio time" from "sleep" and "meals" and "walks" and “church” or “prayer”. The old Hebrew anthropology does not split you into compartments. You are one person. Everything you do with your body is formation for everything else you do with your life. The writer who will not walk, will not eat, will not sleep, is not disciplining lazy flesh so the spirit can fly — he is starving the only instrument he has.

…And you stop being surprised by the weight of making. Creative work is heavy because bodies are heavy. The copious hours in the chair and countless, accompanying, achy contortions of the body are never failure of spirit — they are the liturgy of the making.

—————

At Modus, we talk about the Whole Person because we mean it — and we mean it because someone meant it first, long before us, on a cross and in a garden and at a table where bread was broken.

the bodies of creatives are never nothing. they are the places where work will happen (or not).

friends, When you sit down to make the thing you are trying to make today - remember what the priest says over the bread. This is my body. Given for the world. a living sacrifice. Worth tending to.

That is where the work begins. in your body. with your body. not away from it.
i invite you into a quiet declaration of creativity today - hoc est corpus meum.