Published in Foreshadow Magazine, July 8, 2025: https://www.foreshadowmagazine.com/magazine/sometimes-a-radiant-world
Illumination
If we are Christ’s body, we must accept all of the aches and pains, the sleepiness, the sloth, the injury, the activity that is part of any form of embodiment. Just as we do not yet live within our resurrected bodies, the embodied community is not free of the effects of living in this world. We do not live in radiance, but love can, occasionally, make us feel as if we do. Whispers of resurrection sound through our lives. Sunlight, glinting off of some moment, envelopes us in the face of Christ.
To love is to notice. To live in a loving community is to be aware of foibles and failures, and also to note small graces and beauty. We hear each other’s histories, capture small facts. Moments of our friends’ lives that we weren’t present for live within our memories. We know each other through stories, but also through the idiosyncratic gesture of a hand, the twitch of a mouth, the carefulness of a step. So much remains unknown. So much about even the people we love best remains a mystery. So much about ourselves.
We are both in the mosaic, one of its tesserae, and outside of it, observing it, studying every piece of glass. It is fragile, but set in mortar, hard to shatter, ready to last for centuries, if history allows it to. The body of Christ that we inhabit is even more durable. Not permanent, as nothing in this world is permanent, but, because its Christ’s body, ordained to last forever.
KPB Stevens 