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The faithful sit among us calculating calories against the elements of the Supper, their bodies wasting while the congregation sings of resurrection. This is not private affliction alone; it is the fruit of a culture that has taught the young to treat the flesh as raw material for the will, and a church that has largely surrendered the doctrine of the body to that same rebellion.
The actor behind the silence is the Technocratic Automaton, the modern spirit that severs soul from sinew and measures worth by visible thinness. Under its regime the household table becomes a battlefield, the mirror an altar, and the Lord's table an obstacle to be negotiated rather than received.
Yet the undivided Church has always confessed that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that the body is not an accessory to salvation but the very theater in which grace works. The Nicene Creed itself stakes the faith upon the resurrection of the body, not its escape or its reconstruction according to passing fashion.
Augustine saw the restless heart turn inward upon itself when it refuses the order of the Creator; the same restless turning now produces the eating disorder as a disordered liturgy of self-consumption. The Puritans understood that covenant households require ordered tables where provision and gratitude are learned together, not where appetite is pathologized or idolized.
When the church fails to bring the full weight of its creedal inheritance to bear upon these disorders, it leaves its members to the mercy of the age. Hospitality in such a moment is not sentiment but the restoration of embodied communion, the deliberate reclaiming of meals and fellowship as acts of obedience rather than neutral social gestures.
The faithful remnant must therefore recover the ancient conviction that care for the body is care for the soul's dwelling place, refusing both the gnostic flight from flesh and the modern cult of its endless modification. This recovery begins at the Lord's table, where the elements are received without calculation because the body has already been claimed by its true Lord.
Those who have been healed by such ordinary faithfulness now stand as living witnesses that the church alone possesses the resources to answer the crisis. The rest of the congregation must now do likewise, extending the same hospitality that once knit the early Christians into one body against the pagan contempt for matter.
The hour demands fathers and mothers, elders and deacons, who will name the disorder for what it is and call the sufferer back into the embodied life of the household and the parish. Anything less ratifies the Automaton's victory over the temple God has chosen to indwell.
