Flesh and Blood

  For my birthday last April, a friend gave me a 1998 CD of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, recorded live as part of the VH1 Storytellers series. If you love old school country music, as I do, you’d love this album. Cash and Nelson take turns singing some of their greatest hits, blending the Man in Black’s resonant bass voice with the Red Headed Stranger’s distinctive nasal tenor, interspersed with warm sounds from Trigger, Willie’s legendary and weathered Martin guitar.
   Relatively speaking, I’m not as familiar with Johnny Cash’s music, so I’m hearing some of these hits for the first time. One particular song caught my attention recently: Flesh and Blood, a number one hit from 1970. Before singing it, Cash provides the back story; he wrote it after he and wife June spent a day at Tennessee’s Cedar Hill Lake; “one of those magic days…with the sun just right, the temperature just right, the breeze just right, and she was just right.”
   He sings, “Beside a singing mountain stream, where the willow grew; where the silver leaf of maple, sparkled in the morning dew. I braided twigs of willows, make a string of buckeye beads; but flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and you’re the one I need. Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and you’re the one I need.”
   As Cash’s lyrics rattled around my head, my thoughts turned to the second chapter of Genesis, to what is often termed the second creation story. Whereas Genesis chapter one presents creation as a crescendo toward the dramatic climax of man and woman made in the divine image, Genesis chapter two, while not contradictory to chapter one, takes a different approach. In this account, the man is created first, sans woman, and is placed in the garden to tend and cultivate it.
   In Genesis one, after each act of creation God sees that it is “good,” and, in fact, when God creates man and woman, he sees it as “very good.” But now, in chapter two, for the first time God sees something is not good, namely “for the man to be alone.” To remedy the man’s loneliness, God seeks to make a helper fit for him, and the Creator begins by fashioning animals and birds of the air from the ground. But upon bringing them to the man, who expresses his dominion by naming them, none proved to be a suitable helper for him. \
    Blessed John Paul II, whose reflections on Genesis are central to his Theology of the Body, describes this experience as original solitude, the man’s awareness that among the world’s creatures, he was utterly alone as a person, unable to find the unity for which he was made.
    Next, the Lord puts the man to sleep, removes a rib, fashions a woman and brings her to him. Note Adam’s response. Not a practical, “Finally, someone to help with the yard work. Grab a rake!” but an ecstatic and gratuitous verse: “At last, this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” He could have said, “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and you’re the one I need.”
    This second creation story, it is suggested, represents a more subjective account of how we experience the world; our interior yearning for communion that Johnny Cash expresses in his song, a “flesh and blood” hunger that is not satisfied merely by nature’s delights, but demands “flesh and blood.” It explains why a person, drawn to their beloved, experiences a kind of joy unprovoked by any other experience of life, the eros-love of attraction to the beautiful in another.  
   All sexual desire, in its most basic beginning, can be seen as an echo of the Adam’s ecstatic encounter in the garden, the desire one experiences to be united with another, expressed most properly in the bodily union of marriage, when the two become “one flesh.” It is this union that makes sense of our being made male and female in God’s image, reflecting in our fleshy unity of the unseen God who dwells as a communion of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
    Of course, this echo has been obscured by concupiscence, the effect of original sin that distorts pure eros-love, which seeks unity via self-giving, into lust, the self-seeking that is willing to use another to satisfy its pursuit of selfish pleasure Only Christ’s redeeming grace, embodied in through his “flesh and blood” gift on the cross can reorient us to the beauty of our origins, guiding us stumbling along the heart’s battlefield, as John Paul II called it, between love and lust. And all human desires this side of the veil point us to the Eucharistic table, which we approach with the knowledge that “flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and You’re the One I need.”