Meditating on Christ’s body through the crucifix

By Phillip Garside
NOLA Catholic Parenting

There are a handful of popular devotions to Christ’s bodily features, including the Sacred Heart, the Five Wounds and the Holy Face. Each helps us relate to Christ as truly human in a particular way.

The devotions also help us remember the vulnerability assumed in the incarnation. Such devotions engender a relational stance to the incarnate word, human to human, which allows us to be swept up in the divine.

I gazed at many crucifixes this past Lent. For whatever reason, my eyes kept wandering to a certain physical feature of Christ on the cross. I noticed that most crucifixes seem to have a fairly prominent navel. My guess is that this is about as close as an artist really wants to get to the scandal of our savior being stripped during the Passion.

The navel is an intimate part of our bodies, but at the same time not wholly undisplayable. It emotively evokes the stripping, without actually having to portray the stripping. This evocation hits the vulnerability aspect of meditating on Christ’s physical body. At a basic level, the Five Wounds summon neurological physical pain. But, the navel is the psychospiritual pain of physical mockery. We all have our body issues. Since humanity’s fall, we all have those parts and pieces that we want to hide, just like the first parents did, and we are terrified that people will laugh at us if they are exposed.

As a parent, I’m more drawn to reflect on the natal significance of the navel. When we contemplate the Five Wounds we remember that Jesus keeps them, even in his glorified body, because the experience is inextricably part of who he is. Similarly, the navel is inextricably demonstrative of who we all are, how we are interconnected, how we rely on each other.

The passage from the uterus to life to glorification is a journey of dependence and vulnerability. The navel is the mark we all bear into the ex-uterine world of how dependent we were in utero. It is a sign of how our mother’s body sustained our own body. On the crucifix, the visible navel is an Icon of Mary’s pivotal role in salvation history. Before Christ became food for us, Mary became food for him.

That’s “pretty theology,” but what can such a connection mean for us? As we contemplate the navel of Christ on the cross, its message of interrelatedness expands from Christ to Mary, and outward from Mary to us. Mary signifies the Church.

As the perfect disciple, Mary is saved by Christ, yet she also brings Christ into this world by her assent and her discipleship. The way she relates to Christ is the ideal for the church and the individual disciple. Christ’s navel challenges us.

In my discipleship, how have I nourished Christ as his presence grows within me? By my body, how have I nourished the mystical body and left a mark on the Church?

As we move from the season of Lent to Easter, we can shift our focus from crucifix to images of the resurrection. Less so, but still occasionally, when the cloth is arranged just right, along with the Five Wounds we can get a glimpse of Christ’s navel on his glorified body.

Over Lent, we consider our part in putting the wounds there; in the Easter season, we can renew our sense of participation in Christ’s navel. By this balance, we can integrate our struggles and successes as foundational to who we are as disciples.

Phillip Garside and his spouse Rebecca co-created and maintain three children in the hopes of one day jettisoning them into the world and infecting it with their domestic church’s uniquely bizarre brand of Catholicism.He can be reached at [email protected].