Justine is on mission in Senegal.

“Tanga na trop!” is one of the first things I learned to say in wolof: “It’s too hot!” I hear other people saying it too, as they pile—quite literally—into buses. During Mass, the church is so packed that we sit shoulder to shoulder. I can feel the sweat dripping down my back and front. It was during Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s that I realized that this discomfort, this suffering, this incarnation, is precisely what we are gathered to celebrate! My faith is not in a God distant and ethereal but in a God who became man. The physical reality is a manifestation of that incarnation: the hard wooden pews, the smell of incense and the smell of people, sand sticking to my knees when I kneel, the choir swaying and clapping, the Eucharist at the center of it all, Christ becoming flesh. 

Life here is certainly incarnate, not just in church, but everywhere. It is the body in all its wounds and scabs, in all its batik dresses and styled hair, in all the boisterous joy of the tam-tam drum.

This constant sweating, uncomfortable as it is, has given me a new way of looking at life. I am sometimes troubled by the fact that life can so easily be separated into a dozen little boxes: intellectual interests, spiritual life, work, friends. Where is the unity? How can I be a whole not just a sum of parts? The shared suffering of being almost unbearably hot has made me realize that a box into which everything of life belongs is the incarnation, “in the flesh.” I experience the reality of my life through my body – I cannot separate my thoughts or even my prayers from my body! It sounds simple but there is the unity I’ve been looking for.