Body Language —

By Jessica LaGrone (March/April 2025) — 

The first paying job I ever held was as a Health Aide in a doctor’s office that primarily treated patients and families who were unable to pay for medical care. I wasn’t qualified to do much in the way of real medicine, so one of my main jobs was to call patients in from the waiting room, to take their height and weight and blood pressure, and then to ask them a set of questions to obtain a medical history known as the anamnesis.

Most of us have been through this process so many times that we might be able to reconstruct the questions off the top of our heads:

• What brings you in today?

• How are you feeling?

• Where does it hurt?

• How long have you felt this way?

An anamnesis includes not only our immediate symptoms, but also our family medical history, allergies, questions about alcohol and drug usage and risk-associated behaviors. The result, recorded in a medical chart, sounds a little like a story, a little like a puzzle, a little like a problem to be solved.

But it’s also vitally important to remember that behind each anamnesis is a person, that the symptoms described are not disembodied, but belong to a living soul whose experience of that story feels very, very personal. Can you imagine anything more intimate than the things you experience happening within your own body?

Anamnesis is a Greek word that means “a calling to mind,” or “a remembrance.”

It’s a calling to remember — here specifically a remembrance or a recalling of the experience of one body. But it’s also the medical history going even farther back than that person’s own medical memory.

When I had the job of collecting an anamnesis from each patient I was not yet “in ministry,” but let me tell you that hearing the story of the body feels like holy work. It feels a little like being a priest: hearing confession and helping someone enter into healing.

Years later I found myself on one of those God-prescribed U-turns and began to realize that my calling was not medicine but ministry. One day I was sitting in a seminary class learning about the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion when the professor began recounting the historic names of the different parts of the eucharistic liturgy: Confession, Absolution, Sursum Corda, Sanctus, Anamnesis, Mysterion, Epiclesis.

I loved learning all of the mysterious-sounding words, but one of them in particular stood out to me. Anamnesis: The remembrance, reenactment, and participation in the history of the Body.

The very same word used by medical professionals to recount the medical history of our bodies was the word used at the Communion Table to recount the holy history of Christ, his ministry, death, and resurrection, which includes his actions and words of institution at the table in the Upper Room: “Take and eat, this is my body, which is given for you.”

I felt like pausing for a moment to send a quick message to my dad, who once told me I was throwing away an undergraduate degree in premedical biology to go into ministry. I thought about telling him: It turns out, they’re basically the same thing! (Aside from the earning potential, anyway.)

Just like an anamnesis in a medical chart follows the journey of a body, an anamnesis at the Table describes the journey of Christ’s body. A holy history of how Christ came to live and die and rise again for us. An anamnesis of love.

In a passage from the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul makes a shocking claim: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (I Corinthians 12:27).

I can’t imagine a way of addressing someone in any more intimate way than referring to them as one’s own body. Can you?

Nothing is more intimate for us than the experience of our bodies. Our bodies are responsible for all of our input and output to the world around us. They move at our slightest impulse. They provide contact with the world through our senses. Our bodies are both the way we receive input from the world around us, and the way we move outwardly to impact the world around us.

Here Christ is saying: That’s how closely I relate to you, those who believe in me, who follow me. You are my body. You are the way I long to physically and outwardly express my thoughts, my will, my impulses. When I long to touch the world, I touch it through you. When I pour out resources, I do it through you. When I want to share my joy and celebration at the good world I have made, I want to experience and express that through you, my body.

Back in the doctor’s office where I worked, our storeroom held shelves and shelves of medical charts containing the stories of each patient’s symptoms, subsequent diagnoses, and treatments. Some patients had charts so thick that we filled them and had to open up a second chart, and a third, and more, just to hold their story.

Imagine how thick a medical chart would be for a 100-year-old patient. What if a patient could be more than a millennium old? Two millennia old? How long would their story stretch?

Imagine, if you will, that patient’s anamnesis:

The patient is a 2000-year-old who presents with both acute pain and rampant disease, but also a remarkable capacity for healing and resilience. She has been through a multitude of cancers, amputations, and treatments, but also astonishing recoveries.

Her greatest scars include the Crusades, her silence during the Holocaust, her complicities to slavery and injustice and abuse. Some of these diseases are so disfiguring those closest to her would say she doesn’t even look like herself. 

She has been through many treatments, recoveries, and regenerations, often stirring from the point of near death. Sometimes it seems that she is in a coma, or on life support, but that’s usually when she is revived somewhere it is least expected.

Without her, our laws would have no foundation, our societies would lack moral guidance, purpose, and hope. Without her we would miss the depths of compassion brought through her works in hospitals and schools and missions. Through her diseases have been cured, orphans taken in and raised. Countless lonely people in her have found family and purpose and strength.

Because this body is always shifting and growing, it’s difficult to find ways to describe her physical anatomy. What exactly is her height, weight, mass? Is her temperature hot or cold or lukewarm? Is her heartbeat racing or slowed to a flat line?

It’s hard to say what should go in her chart under physical characteristics. Is she a tiny country church up on a hill or a mega-church auditorium? Is she shouting or meditating, dancing or repeating liturgy? Is she gathered under trees, in tents, in cathedrals or auditoriums, at schools or in homes? Is she in schism or in unity? Marching in protest or in bowing in deep contemplative silence?

When we try to picture her some of our feelings are warm and nostalgic, others are pockmarked with trauma or pain. “Church hurt” is a diagnosis repeated all too often these days.

Being part of a body can be both painful and healing. When a physical body has encountered an illness or pathogen, it develops antibodies that are specifically targeted, specifically shaped, to take down those challenges the next time it faces them. It’s the reason I won’t have chicken pox again — my body still carries the antibodies it made when I was nine.

One of the miraculous things about being a member of a body that has existed over 2000 years is that there is very little we can experience today that it hasn’t gone through in some way before. If we are paying attention to the incredible connectivity to the history of this body, we may find many of our diagnoses are not new at all. If we search our chart we may also find treatments there that help.

Scripture can inoculate us against individualism. The Psalms can give us a booster of lament and praise and anger and repentance and joy. Liturgy and history swirl within us, bringing nourishment and reminders that this is not the first time the church has faced challenges.

Church history carries in its bloodstream stories like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, who knew the Church during some of her darkest days of sickness. Surrounded by evidence of disease, he still worked to build a new kind of Church that stood on conviction, even when it meant losing his own life to save hers.

Perhaps when we encounter the dizzying effects of nationalism, or the painful symptoms of tyrants and conflicts and wars, pieces of the past will rush at us like white blood cells ready to fight again the very things that threatened before and threaten again.

In the last few years it seems like story after story has broken with news of leaders of the church inflicting harm on the body through misconduct and abuse.

Recently when one of these horrifying scandals broke, a preacher close to the events used his platform to offer those at the center of pain the metaphor from scripture of Lot’s wife, telling those facing a church torn apart by abuse not to turn back, not to dwell on the past, but to continue moving forward in faith.

Whatever his intentions, many heard it as a call not to reveal or process the wounds laid bare by the scandal that had broken only days before. Unfortunately, his message brought more pain to those already hurting.  It was heard as a call to silence the heartbroken rather than facing an honest and open counting of the cost, lest the Church be hurt by the stories that might be told.

If I learned anything in the patient intake room long ago, it’s that the telling of the story of pain is part of the healing. Until the body bears witness, tells its whole story of hurt and grief, there is no chance for true healing. That’s what an anamnesis is — to tell the story of the body so that help and healing and intervention can rush in to the areas that need it the most.

To tell the truth is the beginning of getting the help we need. But to hide a wound means risking that it will fester to the point of infection, dismemberment and ultimately loss. If we want to heal, we will tell the stories of the body, even those that make us flinch.

I sometimes talk to young people who have experienced so much pain as they’ve witnessed the flaws of the Church that it makes them want to withdraw into a little corner of the faith. They haven’t given up on Jesus, just the people with the keys to his house.

Sometimes they wonder if they could leave all the trappings behind and start over.  As one of them told me recently: “I don’t know if I can bear the Church, but I think I could do just Jesus and me and a few friends.”

“Well,” I said, “then you’ve just started the Church all over again!”

For those who want to authentically follow Jesus, amputation is not an option. We can’t do it alone. Christians need Christians. Churches need churches. Our medical history would urge us not to let the moments of struggle drive us away from the place that healing can happen. Amputation has never gone well for the limb.

There are no single-celled Christians. No healthy single-celled churches. Bodies need connective tissue to survive.

In Communion, the anamnesis, finds its climax in these words: “On the night he was betrayed and gave himself up for us, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and said: ‘This is my body, given for you.’”

The same night of deep pain and betrayal was the night when the blessing of the body was offered. This same story of crucifixion is followed by triumph of resurrection. Jesus knows how to sit with a body in pain and suffering. It’s his body after all — both suffering and mended, broken and blessed, all at one table

When my son and my daughter were small, they often had skinned knees and elbows, bruised foreheads and shins. Each night in the bathtub was an anamnesis in and of itself — recounting that day’s bumps and bruises, the most recent wounds of normal childhood play.

Sometimes there was some wound, scabbed over, that would change from night to night, almost as if by magic. “Look mommy,” they sometimes said: “Look! My skinned knee isn’t so bad, my bruise is going away. Why? What happened?”

Who tells a three-year-old about platelets and macrophages and hemoglobin? Who would explain to a preschooler the veritable processional of internal saints streaming to the site of their hurt to bring healing? I would. Because of my dual obsession with medicine and ministry, I did.

And each time we talked about their bodies’ remarkable ability to heal I would also tell them: “God made your body this way! Isn’t that cool? God made your body so that it knows how to heal itself from the inside out.” And sometimes I would even get choked up thinking about these precious bodies, and all the wounds to come, and how God would be there with them for every single one.

After a while, perhaps because I had explained it so often, they just stopped asking. They did what children do: instead of asking the questions, they began to narrate the answers themselves. They would point to a knee or elbow or scab, still hurting but better today than the day before and declare:

“Look mommy! God is healing me!”

May it be true of you and me. May it be true of the body itself. Amen.

Jessica LaGrone is the Dean of the Chapel at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Good News.