No, not your body image, or mine, but as in the FAQs, Jesus ‘transformed into a new body – the one becomes many, the many become one’, and we see these transformations /this transformation happening. But what does this transformed Jesus look like? Perhaps a little like this image from the American dance company Pilobolos – the dancers balanced around a central person, or the classic circus act of the clown on the bike which others then jump on board, as in this photo. That’s Jesus?! Well, Jesus transformed – the one becomes many, the many become one – and here’s how you might begin to make it, doing say these Frantic Assembly exercises, learning to depend on one another.

Such a workshop might be useful in helping us to create a body as an agent of learning to think mythically. Not in the sense of Joseph Campbell and the Hollywood script writers who continue to draw on his monomyth creation – focusing on the lone hero – nor in the sense of Jung’s archetypes and Jordan Peterson’s lectures and the ‘Wisdom Schools’ that proliferate, but it may be that this sort of workshop is a way of beginning to overcome what Karen Armstrong describes as the inability, or unwillingness, of an increasing number of people in Western societies to think mythically. (One consequence of this, according to Armstrong, is that ‘the biblical myths are experienced as alien.’) More simply it may be that there’s no mythic membrane left so that the spirit world is hard for us.

Wherever we turn these days there’s a need to discover different ways of being together – new collectivities – to counter our pervasive individualism. Take this example of a 2013 conversation between Andreas Roepstorff and the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Roepstorff suggests: ‘The we-mode is characterized by instances of sharing. It might be instances of sharing acts, of sharing language or food, because these transform the “I” and the “you” into some kind of we-ness.’ And Eliasson responds: ‘I like that—the we-mode. That is a good word to remember, we-mode. Also the other word, we-ness. It is nice to be in the cultural sector and claim to occupy the word we-ness before some commercial company exploits it. Let’s just sit for a second in the we-ness together. I am so excited about this idea that interdependence is something that you co-create … we also have to co-create our realities, our we-mode.’ And so on. It’s a little bit different to 4 Mysteries talk of the creation of a ‘he/we’ – here there’s no he – but you understand the point they’re making about how you and I might become a we.

This seeking to find new ways of belonging to one another is there in the gospels. John’s gospel has Mary at the foot of the cross. Why is she there asks Colm Toibin and he proceeds to answer his question by writing his play and subsequently his novella, ‘Testament of Mary’, about a mother traumatized by the loss of her son. What’s more difficult for him to imagine – naturalism tends to focus on the she/he – is that this trauma might be the beginning a new way of belonging to one another, a new family, gathered there at the foot of the cross and it’s the cross which gives birth to it. John’s gospel has been about the emergence of that new way of being family right the way through, but this ‘mythic dimension’, this creation of a new body – what 4 Mysteries calls a ‘he/we’ – is not something that Toibin’s moving, but more one dimensional imagining allows.

It’s what you get in this image of the Mexican voladores. The one goes to the top and the others slowly emanate from him. The bodies in motion, opening slowly from the centre, are still connected as they descend, so that, in 4 Mysteries terms, it combines both a sense of death and resurrection. And this emerging body is happening even before the death, before the family standing at the foot of the cross, at the earlier passover meal for instance. In Luke’s gospel, in the post resurrection Emmaus story where the fleeing followers recognize the stranger in the breaking of the bread, you get the mirror image of the passover meal. By eating and being eaten we are learning to create that body. As one writer said of the previous Piloblos image : ‘It is a communion of persons … it expresses each self in Christ, each having a part in this sacrament of mutual support.’

In Text we mention that on a cemetery fence someone once hung a sign saying, ‘Easter’s off this year, they found the body’. Of course, Easter is off if they haven’t found the body, because Easter is all about bodies and our finding them, only they’re living bodies. As we say elsewhere, ‘If there’s no body then we might say, quite literally, we’re gutless, but, still and all, a gutless wonder!’ Similarly, when Erik Ehn says, ‘theatre is all about our being together and seeing how we can give of ourselves’,  it’s a reminder that ‘theatre, like myth and sacrament, is communal to the core.’