A Jon Post

Months away from writing and from Casa Ahava have made me feel rusty at both. Bear with me as I ramble here and re-introduce body and soul to the practices, please.

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In November of last year my family made our once-every-2-or-3-year pilgrimage across the Atlantic Ocean to the North American continent in an attempt to connect and re-connect to those we love and who love us and our work here. Unsurprisingly, and in a familiar repetition of pilgrimages past, the weariness of time away from home seemed to be the order of the day and, though all the love and connection we could have hoped for was found in America, our tired feet still found their rest once the African red and brown soil of our home garden squeezed back between our toes after a rainfall in January.

It is good to be home.

Body and soul, it is good to be home.

Body and soul. I was raised in a faith tradition that made clear the distinction between those two things, the one more valuable and worthy of focus than the other. Before I was even aware of it, my work over these last 15 years started giving me reason to doubt any division between the two was as clean as I had believed all those early years.

When a 19-year-old Naldo comes back after two years to Casa Ahava with waves lymphoma washing through his chest and back like a tide of brackish water, body and soul are not so distinct. An entire boy is sick and frightened.

When a 60-year-old Aventina comes to Casa Ahava for the first time with a single change of clothes and a painful tumor pushing against her head, her eye, and her ear, it is not so clear that it is not pushing against her soul as well.

Three others are here at Casa Ahava too, body and soul, not so dual. We have plenty of space for more and I go to the hospital daily to see where shines the brightest suffering in need of communion and family. I’ve come to realize that to share the communion is to share the suffering and there is no wrongness in that. My own body and soul give testimony to the sharing of it all and whether the merging of the two fail or fly is not up to me anymore.

What I sang in my childhood in the hymn rings out now in the practice of communion with the soul and body breakages of my patients:

Lord, now indeed I find
Thy pow’r and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow

I am no doctor to body nor soul, and I have no special power to bring healing to a person. I may in fact be the leper and I may in fact have the heaviness of a heart of stone. I certainly may live with many of each here at Casa Ahava.
All to Him I owe. Body and soul. All to Him I owe.