I was chatting with some friends this afternoon, when the subject of my “spider communion” came up. They requested that I post the text that I read. I’ll use that as an opportunity to plug the book that I quoted from: Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature, by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. This is a wonderful guide to what makes good literature and why good literature is worth pursuing. It made me want to read better books and more of them—if I could only find the time!

Anyway, Veith was citing a passage by Walter Wangerin as an example of a good use of words, but I was struck by the content of the passage. In it, Wangerin uses an analogy from nature…

Spiders, he tells us, have no stomachs. They inject their digestive juices into their prey.

Through tiny punctures she injects into a bounded fly digestive juices; inside his body his organs and nerves and tissues are bro­ken down, dissolved, and turned to warm soup. This soup she swills—even as the most of us swill souls of one another after having cooked them in various enzymes: guilt, humiliations, subjectivities, cruel love—there are a number of fine, acidic mixes. And some among us are so skilled with the hypodermic word that our dear ones continue to sit up and to smile, quite as though they were still alive. But the evidence of eating is in our own fatness.12

Most spiders lay their eggs and leave, but there is another species of spider. This one stays with her eggs:

By the hundreds she gathers her brood upon her back so that she seems a grotesque sort of lump, rumpled and swollen. But such is love: it makes the lover ugly.

And when the children emerge, she feeds them; her juices soften the meat to their diminutive snorkels. Yet even this care, peculiar among the spinsters, does not give her a name above all other names. Many mothers mother their children; that is not uncommon. Rather, it is the last supper which she reserves against necessity that astonishes the watcher and makes him wonder to see heaven in a tiny thing. . .

Sometimes food grows scarce, and no amount of netting can snare the fly that isn’t there. Sometimes tiny famine descends upon the mother and her spiderlings, and then they starve, and then they may die, if they do not eat.

But then, privately, she performs the deed unique among the living.

Into her own body this spinster releases the juices that digest. Freely they run through her abdomen while she holds so still, digesting not some other meat, but her own, breaking down the parts of her that kept her once alive, until her eyes are flat.

She dies.

She becomes the stomach for her children, and she herself the food.

And Jesus said to those who stood around him, “I am the bread of life. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Take—and eat.

This one was different from all the rest of us: cooked on a cross.