The Macabre Beauty

I wasn’t prepared for the blisters on his forehead.

Our priest, walking the dusty pilgrimage roads of Italy beside us, wore loafers so worn they looked like they’d been passed down from saint to saint. No support. No tread. No concern for practicality. And when someone offered him sunscreen for his already-pink pate, he declined with a peaceful smile.

“It’s good,” he said.

By sunset, it had blistered.

There was no bravado in his suffering. No performance. Just a quiet, embodied surrender. He offered his body to the pilgrimage as others once offered theirs to fire, to stone, to the breaking of bread.

It undid me.

We walked 8 to 10 kilometres each day. Up hills. Through heat. Over cobblestones that had carried centuries of pilgrims before us.

And I—I who have carried the burden of being too heavy, too slow, too “unfit” for most of my life—felt every step. My back ached. My hips protested. My feet rebelled. I bore the pain with the resignation of someone used to hurting in private.

But something unexpected happened. The pain didn’t defeat me. It opened me.

With each step, something deeper than muscle memory stirred. Not shame. Not failure. But tenderness. A kind of love I didn’t know I could feel for this body—not in spite of its aches, but because of them. And I wondered: Could this body, even mine, be holy?

Years ago, when I first encountered Marion Woodman’s Jungian work, I wasn’t ready. Her insistence that the body is not simply a vehicle for spirit, but the very chalice in which transformation occurs—it both thrilled and terrified me.

Woodman knew something the mystics knew: that trauma, shame, addiction, and repression all root themselves in the body. That the spiritual bypass—the temptation to live in airy abstractions—ultimately starves the soul.

She wrote about the “addicted body,” the “anorexic soul,” the inner split that occurs when we elevate mind over matter, spirit over flesh. But she also wrote of healing—of what happens when we learn to stay in the body, to feel its ache and listen to its language.

She helped me begin the long journey back to embodiment. To understand that the body remembers what the mind forgets. That it holds not just pain but wisdom, grief and grace, instinct and ecstasy. That it, too, is psyche.

And on that pilgrimage path, aching and uncertain, I could almost hear her voice beside me: Stay with the pain. Let it teach you. Let it carry the meaning.

We don’t often talk about the strange and beautiful ways the Church honours the body—sometimes with reverence, sometimes with cruelty, often with contradiction.

Relics. Veils stained with holy sweat. The incorruptible hearts of saints. Skulls behind glass. These aren’t metaphors. They’re the Church’s quiet insistence that the body matters. That flesh, when given in love, leaves a sacred trace.

And then there’s mortification. The ancient discipline of denying the body, not to shame it, but to listen through it. To let the ache carve a hollow for grace.

To the modern mind, it’s barbaric. But as one who bears witness to suffering of many kinds—mental, physical, spiritual—I can’t dismiss it so easily. I know the difference between wounds that destroy and wounds that consecrate.

Can I come to peace with that?

Maybe not fully. But I’m learning to dwell in the question. When I looked at our priest’s forehead that day—shiny, angry, blistered—I saw more than a sunburn. I saw relic. I saw offering. I saw a quiet theology: not of perfection, but of presence. And I felt my own pain differently. I began to relate to my body differently.

I wasn’t trying to push through or transcend my body anymore. I was in it. Walking. Hurting. Praying. Something deep and ancient touched my heart in that hurting. For the first time, I didn’t feel I had to “fix” my body to make it holy. It was holy. Just as it was. Sore and slow. Soft and blistered. A site of encounter, not shame.

This is the scandal of Christianity: that God did not come as idea, or symbol, or law—but as flesh. Breakable, weeping, bleeding flesh.

We forget how radical that is. We want the transcendent without the tender. We want glory without guts. But real faith is made of guts. And sweat. And blood.

The relic. The wound. The bread and wine.

The blister on the priest’s forehead. Maybe this too is communion?

Maybe it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it isn’t meant to. But something in me is shifting. I’m no longer trying to choose between body and spirit, suffering and sanctity, reverence and rawness. I’m learning that the body isn’t an obstacle to God. It’s His dwelling place.

Even mine.

Even yours.