“The Alchemy of Corpus Christi”

Once I completed this painting, I stared in awe, welling up with tears at the symbolism poured onto the canvas. When it came to writing this description for others to see though, I had such an internal resistance that kept my fingers from allowing me to type. The truth is, this painting represents my connection to God, in the most raw and intimate way. In my past, I’ve had that relationship marred because of people imposing what I ‘should’ believe. I know my truth now more than ever, and I feel more connected with the divine more than ever.

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” -The Alchemist

Other than Corpus Christi being a beach town and recommended by a mentor, I had no real reason to come here. Now that I’ve been here a week, I know I was meant to be in this town to go through this process…

This week has contained a breadcrumb of synchronicities, signs that stacked upon one another to lead me through a process of healing a gaping wound within myself: my relationship to Christ. At the age of 4, I began going to Christian school and powerfully felt my connection to Jesus as I studied the Bible everyday. I knew God and I took my relationship with him and serving the world very seriously. Between the ages of 17 and 18, something shifted for two main reasons. 1. To describe it briefly, I was “black sheeped” by the church community I’d been around my whole life and treated as an outcast for stepping into a path that didn’t meet their standards. 2. After that, I began questioning Christian hypocrisy and certain aspects of the Bible that I’d been told to ‘just believe’ because it was the “Word of God”. For 6 years, I’ve been on a journey: letting go of a Christian identity, finding God in nature, exploring different religions, recognizing that there are so many roads to the divine.

Even though I still felt connected to God in my own way, Christianity would trigger me to tears and I couldn’t quite understand why. I’d have friends and family share Bible verses with me leading to conversations saying that my way to God was not the right way and my version of spirituality was “detestable to the Lord”. So many layers of emotion would pass through my body leaving me paralyzed. I refused to go to church because I knew I’d be crawling out of my skin, something deep in my heart aching in agony. I could not bear to hear Christian songs, despite my brain having them memorized, because of the disconnect I felt. I was like a wounded dog, limping through life, unable to recognize how to address what was broken.

Then I arrived to Corpus Christi. The first night I had a re-triggering of this wound by someone who expressed their care for me by saying they couldn’t support the way I was living based off of what I shared online. There it was again, that painful feeling in my chest but inability to see why. As a proactive step to sit with these feelings, I spent the next day in nature (my communion with God) and read more of the book “The Yoga of Jesus”. This book began allowing me to disconnect Jesus from Christianity and instead understand the Christ consciousness that was possible for all human beings to experience. On a call that night with two dear friends, they reflected back to me multiple things:

-Corpus Christi meant ‘body of Christ’ in Latin.

-Pelicans, which I’d been seeing in abundance for the first time, had a spiritual myth of correlating to Christ’s sacrificial love.

-The Alchemist, a book I’d read twice before, was a powerful tool to build one’s ability to communicate with the divine in their own way.

I took these insights and ran with them. I dove into the history of Corpus Christi, which tied to the Eucharist or communion, and had been practiced long before the New Testament as a celebration of “humanity’s interdependence with nature”. I began listening to the Alchemist for the third time, which talked of the importance of one following their “personal legend”, or internal calling, to learn the lessons the divine had destined for them. I leaned into nature, spending many moments by the ocean, in parks, observing birds, insects, sunsets, and sunrises. I began a painting, incorporating the cup of communion, Christ consciousness streaming from above, and a pentacle with the four elements representing the divine in pure physical form.

On Sunday, after a phone call with my beloved talking about his insights from the church service he attended, I noticed a shift in my internal state. For the first time in a long time, I was openly curious to pursue the sermon on my own. As I painted, I decided to play the live recording of the message. Almost instantly I was brought to tears. Not because of the words being stated on the screen, but because I no longer felt the deep ache within my chest. I had an epiphany. When I was wounded by the Christians of my past, I correlated their actions directly to blaming God and Jesus. All this time since then, I’ve been connecting to the same divine voice, but labeling it with different words, as if they weren’t the same thing. In that moment, I recognized that the combination of everything that happened within the last week compounded to that moment. This is alchemy.

“This is why alchemy exists,” the boy said. “So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life… That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”-The Alchemist

I set out on this journey of the Pilgrimage to seek and embody Peace and Presence. I now feel a level of peace that I have never felt. My relationship with Christ is healed in a way I thought it never would. And for that, Corus Christi, TX will always have a special place in my heart.