“With fear, faith, and love, draw near.” This was sung before receiving communion each Sunday at the Prophet Elias Greek Orthodox Church I would attend growing up. The church itself had its fair share of Orthodox Christian antics: creaky wooden pews, bearded men in robes, pungent smells of incense, stained glass windows, the whole bit. What gathered my attention most each week, however, were the beautiful mosaics—each with their own tone, gravitas, and story. The largest and most elaborate of them was the Panagia—literally, “All holy” in Greek—the Mother of God. Her mosaic encased the east altar of the church with a half-dome extending floor to ceiling. Her face was hardened with lines you would often see in all types of stoic religious iconography, but her gaze remained welcoming and calm. It was everything beyond her face though, that invited contemplation where minutes became seconds. Her background was a pleasant azure blue, the type you would see in telescopic astronomy photos that beset stars and galaxies. The blue became lighter toward the center and met hard against her velvet red shawl that spread across her arms, which were held wide as if she had just let go and surrendered or as if she was just about to embrace something—I can’t tell the difference yet. So it goes.
It was always admonished not to confuse these mosaics with art even though they often had a Mona-Lisa-like seriousness and the playfulness of light you would find in a Rembrandt masterpiece. They were tools, rather. They invited you to meditate long enough on them such that you could connect to something holier than what could be accessed in the autopilot of everyday living; merely looking at them was some type of prayer alone. As a confirmed skeptic, I always had my doubts seeing the Panagia each week and what her message meant, but as one who grew up religified, I always tried to use that tool as it was intended: to enter a new space. And often times, I did.
“With fear, faith, and love, draw near.” When shuffling in line toward the altar for communion, I had my attention on her. The half-dome coming alive, reaching out toward me slightly more with each inch forward. But, paradoxically, with every step closer, I recognized her less and less. She became a little less herself as the small bits of stone of the mosaic now became discernible—I was now seeing her infinitesimally small pieces rather than her whole. There would be a spot in line—weirdly, a spot that changed each week—where I would stand still and with the slightest lean backward, she was the fullness of herself and any notion of separation was an illusion. Yet, with the slightest lean forward, she was merely a sum of her parts and memories and would be nothing without them. And if you stood still, she becomes and unbecomes. The threshold where I recognized this each week taught me more about God than any other sermon I would attend or book I would read. It derailed any notion of human and spirit, physical and metaphysical, separation and wholeness—it extended the space I was in but not quite. It was some type of space and a half.
It wasn’t until medical school where I would feel something similar. Wednesdays, anatomy days, became my new Sundays. Approaching the altar of a cadaver was uncannily similar to church with all of its peculiar smells and sacrosanct rituals. While gloves and gowns replaced Sunday-best clothes, I would draw near with fear, faith, and love to a physical memory of a human that once was. And it became that much more divine when I learned about her outside of the objective organs, bones, and flesh. She was the youngest of the cadavers in the lab. 38 years old. A pharmacy technician. Metastatic breast cancer took her away, or took her home—I can’t tell the difference yet. So it goes.
Knowing her age and work at the time enlivened her dead flesh that much more, as if the shell needed more of a lively touch than it already paradoxically did. I thought her recently manicured nails, her fading tattoos, and her shaved head—I imagined to aid the transition to chemo—were plenty enough to make me cringe at the irreverence of accidentally ripping her splenic artery one day. I thought if you distance yourself—dehumanize the cadaver in your mind as just a mass of anatomy without the fullness of life that she once had—then you can become comfortable probing around what was actually a 38-year-old pharmacy technician with all of her worldly stories and pet peeves and favorite songs and dear memories and profound fears and favorite foods and wild dreams and obscure hobbies. Indeed, these spirit-filled aspects of her were gone now. “Her” cadaver was separate from her whole, becoming some type of half-space incomplete without her soul.
“With fear, faith, and love, draw near.” When I held a pulseless heart or breathless lungs, touched the areas of a brain that once yielded a personality, or counted numerous metastatic cancer nodules on ribs as if they were years taken from her, I recognized that I was learning more about an unnamed 38-year-old pharmacy technician than I ever would learn about myself. With each passing Wednesday, we would unearth a new organ system and learn that much more about her. Yet, we’d learn less about her, too, because each time we would dissect that much more away and forget about the wholeness we started with. She becomes and unbecomes, I thought. Every time I drew near, I entered a new space but not quite. Some type of space and a half.
