Is that all it takes to rob a body of its inner light?
Something lives inside there. It needs no attire: not gouged, not whole, not absent.
It is as present on a Sunday morning as a Saturday night.
Unlike holiness, it stays in the world through seasons, and requires no sacrament.
Like the numbers of the dead, whose bodies held lives, favourite subjects, foods, loves, pets, remembered vacations. And then, because the body is fragile, they didnβt.
All it seems to take is a story, secondhand and God is gone from this world.