Maurice Sendak who wrote Where the Wild Things Are used to receive truckloads of letters from kids about that book, but he said his favorite was from a mother. It went like this….Dear Mr. Sendak, my 6-year old son, wrote you a letter and you wrote back with a drawing of one of your wild things. When he received the drawing of the wild thing, he loved it so much he ate it. Sendak said that was one of the highest compliments he’d ever received. The boy didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. For me, that boy represents the wild carnal immediacy of experiential love.
I was reminded of this story in light of the Gospels this week. In John 6, we have Jesus feeding the five thousands, walking on water, crowds are pumped to see more miracles and then Jesus delivers the bread of life discourse and tells the crowd to eat his flesh and drink his blood. At the height of his popularity, Jesus goes off brand. Proclaiming this is how God abides in a person and a person abides in God. The radicality of ingesting God. What daring sacramental language. Even the Song of Songs doesn’t go so far as to say something about eating flesh and drinking blood. Yes, the pursuit in the Song of Songs is hotter, heavier, and with loads of heartache. The cyclical intimate desire, pursuit of and being pursued by God is all right there, but it begins with the sweetness of a kiss.
The carnal immediacy of eating flesh and drinking blood feels different, feels more obscene than sweet. And many desert Jesus after this filthy speech. The point that struck me this week is that John’s Gospel makes very little of Jesus feeding the 5000 and walking on water. I think because John’s Gospel juxtaposes desire and fascination met in externality, with abiding nourishment residing in interiority. Calling all, repulsing many, and few remain…for to say “Eat my flesh and drink my blood” rings out as a risky call to an abiding lifeforce via the messy path of experiential love.
So what we are about to do is consciously transition into the embodied landscape of interior silence, where the wild things are, lurking for our attention and to where the wild Christ is calling us to eat his flesh and drink blood. There are no bystanders here, just participants in this feral terrain. Where we seek to drop the mind into the heart and daresay into the stomach as well, for to take and eat, is not to think, theorize, or theologize Christ, it is to taste Christ and abide in a state of receptive digestion to nourish all of our being. We practice with great risk, for we are poetically yet viscerally eating and drinking Christ…to become Christ.
And it only seems appropriate to drop into the wanderings and musings of our daily lives with the words of Max from Where the Wild Things are, Let the Wild Rompus begin!
photo by Contemplify
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