Flesh Obsession

The Corporeal Unreality of Catholicism's Body Symbolism

I attribute my obsession with the Body to the Catholic Church.

Sunday mornings of visceral sensuality. Between standing and kneeling, we sat on polished pews slick with supplicant arousal. I rubbed the wood with my little girl palms in a futile attempt to shine my skin with a lacquer sheen. I didn’t know then that lacquer comes from bugs.

Every window was stained with Sea and Sky because God abhorred the clarity of glass.

And then there was the Blood and the Body. Catholicism’s fascination with the physical, both Corporeally and Symbolically.

Corporeality is Not Reality - A nearly naked Jesus was inescapable to the eye. His whole body glazed in ceramic perspiration. Incense-infused sweat wafted from his ever open armpits, and we Turned our faces upward to catch the scent. He appeared ravaged and exhausted, likely from all the kissing and embracing of the Mary Magdalenes. 

A scrap of cloTh covered the reality of his murder. Terror urination and death erections. When crucified, you die from suffocation. The body descends so far below your shoulders that your breathing becomes hampered. Pain and fluid-loss don’t aid the body any either. 

Yet we were presented with images devoid of gore and realiTy. Jesus looked more like a runner after a marathon, not a man in the act of dying. His agony was lost on me as a child. I was all ecsTasy. Permanently fixated on licking the folds of frozen fabric draped on his slack, bony frame, and wanting to Taste the decades of dust that gathered there.

Symbol of Chew and Swallow - And then there was Transubstantiation. The sign of feasTing on Christ’s blood and body. This symbolism made me impatient to queue up behind the other starving congregants and extend my Tongue to the pudgy faced priest. If you place the wafer just right, it will glue to the roof of your mouth for later savoring. But when my enthusiasm switched sips to gulps, His body dissolved and Transformed in my Throat. Jesus was the first man I took into my mouth, the first man I swallowed.

Is Catholicism the reason why I fantasize about straddling a man’s neck and slow-fucking his Adam’s apple as he swallows?

In all this Corporeality we lost touch with Reality because Jesus wasn’t powdery white, and his curls weren’t loose. I was once a child who dreamed of being a lamb in Jesus’ lap, washing his feet with my Tender Tongue, and now I search for crosses to crucify my upbringing on.

As Church and State begin to get hammered together, I Try hard not to be prejudiced against Religions and the Religious. I am agnostic and walking the Uncanny Valley between Religion and Faith.