Behold the body of Christ.

Our bodies are precious to us. To surrender them as Jesus does is breathtaking.

THIS YEAR I HAVE become a midwife of death. Like many of you reading this, I have joined the ranks of caregivers, a club nobody wants to join but many are drafted into, out of love or obligation. In the sandwich generation between dependent children and increasingly elderly parents, more of us Americans are finding our flaunted independence curtailed, sometimes suddenly, by the needs of those around us. Our health care system needs help; our experiment with the nuclear family has largely failed, its self-absorption and its smallness leaving us so vulnerable.

Across the generations, we find that we still need one another, and never so much as in a health crisis.

For me, the call to serve came by telephone: A friend and co-worker had had a brain hemorrhage, complicated by stroke and the discovery of a tumor. Half-paralyzed and unable to speak, without family or a designated representative, the hospital was looking for someone to take responsibility. Without thinking--a condition that sometimes stands in for courage--I signed the papers. A few exhausting months later, another phone call came: My older brother was suddenly gravely ill with cancer and not expected to live.

With that second call, any pretense of courage left me. I telegraphed my resignation to God, but the staccato prayer hung in the air unanswered. Love doesn't resign. Nor is Christianity a religion for people unwilling to participate in the mystery of suffering and dying.

This season we commemorate the institution of our Eucharist, where death becomes life and flesh becomes food. We enter Holy Week to encounter the human passion of God in Jesus. The story we tell revolves around the body of Christ.

What happens to Christ's body has implications for the whole of our lives, in this world and the world to come. We say these things as articles of faith. But more recently, I have found them true in practical, tangible ways. I am startled how useful religion has become to me, in the most un-abstract of all circumstances, the fading of our mortal bodies.

I have spent the last year of my life in meditation on the body of Christ. I don't mean that theologically--caregivers do not have much time for that. Caregivers don't even get to Mass every Sunday, or pray like they used to. But that doesn't mean God is absent or the Eucharist is missing. In some sense I have become a daily communicant, receiving the precious elements of Body and Blood in a new way. As a person attending the dying, I sense more deeply the value of life, the sacredness of it that we speak of as Catholics but don't always respect in one another. I've had my ear pressed to the essence of life with more rapt attention than I've ever acquired in years of praying. A sickroom shares with the sanctuary that same hushed feeling of being in the presence of something vast and worthy of reverence. And for once, I am aware that I am standing on holy ground.

Close contact with the gritty, visceral needs of the sick has made me more alert to our singular focus on Christ's body from Passion Sunday to Easter. This is anything but a sanitarily spiritual story. Entering the city, Jesus is hailed but soon scourged. He is anointed with perfume, honored by a woman who (perhaps unconsciously, but nonetheless prophetically) also prepares his body for burial. He sweats blood and cries real tears of agony while prostrate in the garden. Manhandled by a mob, he is subject to beatings and spittle, then shamed by nakedness, nailed through flesh and bone, tormented by thirst, and finally suffocated by his own weight on the cross. Even in death, his body is torn by a lance then hurriedly cast into a stranger's tomb before the Sabbath falls. No life was of greater value, and yet no flesh was ever treated with less regard.

And yet God chose to lift up that denigrated body to glory not seen since the world began. The glorified body of Jesus was so extraordinary as to be unrecognizable to those who knew him best. And the flesh and blood of Christ was not only resurrected from death but became the source of life for all who believe. Now glory awaits us all. Death, no longer an end, has become a doorway to more and greater life.

A long-ago story? Not when you spend an hour with the weakened body of Christ on a shower chair, washing limbs left lifeless from stroke, patting dry skin as fragile as tissue paper, parting hair newly grown since radiation, and watching a wan smile of satisfaction emerge from the sacrament of just being clean once more. What happens to the crucified body of Christ affects me deeply now. The sight of a cross can move me to tears, and not because I'm pious. As a midwife of death, I share something in common with those women huddled on the hill at Calvary. I, too, am hoping against all evidence, longing for the end of suffering, waiting for glory.

I've sat with the body of Christ weakened by thirst and confusion, waiting for painkillers that don't kill the pain. I've wept with Christ, wondering: "My God, my God, why have you forgotten the one you love?" I've noted each new sore and bloody new wound appear on a body that seems to have no limit to its capacity for fresh injury. I've watched Christ fall, a room's length from where I stood, his broken body helpless to find his balance, and I unable to catch him.

And, as anyone knows who is responsible for the care of another, the passion of the flesh is more than skin deep. There are the thousand indignities suffered by the newly dependent, the loss of volition itself being one of the greatest. The need to be helped with clothing and grooming. The humility of having your mouth wiped in front of others at a table. The frustration of mental confusion: no longer being able to operate the remote control, turn on a radio, tell time, or spell simple words. Forgetting what things are called; forgetting who people are. The deep humiliation of soiling the bed and being too ashamed to tell.

"Yet in all this, we are more than conquerors," as Saint Paul tells us. What, victory in a bowel movement gone awry? There is a kind of victory, a small miracle over mortality really, when love can take the sting out of dying. The sheet is withdrawn from the bed, the soiled body revealed--and a gentle joke softens and humanizes the atmosphere. Tenderness anoints a humiliated body. Respect, not shame, rules the hour.

One can look for the transfigurations happening all the time around us, not just in mountaintop experiences or on Easter Sunday, but in the rich transubstantiation of our dying into rising. Dying can become an ascension into a less fettered, more focused existence. Our participation in the dying of others can make us more care-full and more grateful. We can learn, most of all, that nothing happens on earth that can't be redeemed. Love redeems even the most desperate hour and draws it into the deep peace of Christ. I have seen it.

FROM PASSION SUNDAY TO EASTER SUNDAY, WE MAP THE curious trail from human glory to heavenly glory. We follow the body of Jesus from honor and anointing through violation and death and on to total vindication in Resurrection. In the course of this journey, in the eye of the storm itself, Jesus shares a remarkable meal with his friends. "Take it," he says. "This is my body."

I sit in awe of these words. I watch my friend and my brother simultaneously being taken by their cancers, death crouching in the bushes all the while, vigilant. I witness the energy of people I love being drained away, their productivity diminished, their worlds shrinking down to the size of a few rooms, a few hours of wakefulness a day. Bodies that only a short time ago bounded with life are marked now by a frightening stillness. Would they say, "Take my body," if they had any choice in the matter? Would I, even to save a world?

Our bodies--the seat of our self-understanding, our only real address--are precious to us. To surrender them in a few tight words as Jesus does is breathtaking. Yet death comes for all of us. Whether our lives are taken or given, they pass over just the same. Jesus gave his life freely even as it was taken by force. So the possibility exists for all of us to give up our lives even in the midst of cancer, even if death comes to us before we have a chance to say our prayers.

I sit with my loved ones in the shadow of the cross and know that I have the same opportunity to offer my life as they do, as Jesus did, for love's sake, giving to God what is God's. "Take it," I whisper timidly, less afraid today than most days. This is my body, my life, my time, my gift. For what it's worth, use me to make more life.

By ALICE CAMILLE, who has a master of divinity degree from the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, California. She is the author of God's Word Is Alive (Twenty-Third Publications, 1998) and Seven Last Words (ACTA Publications, 1998).