A Deep Dive into the Anima Christi: Third Request

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.

Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O Good Jesus, hear me.
Within your wounds hide me.
Permit me not to be separated from you.
From the wicked foe, defend me.
At the hour of my death, call me
and bid me come to you
That with your saints I may praise you
For ever and ever. Amen.

The Song's Third Request: "Blood of Christ, Inebriate me."

Inigo holds deep within himself that his salvation from hell and for heaven has come at a great price. Predominant among the measures of love is the loss of blood and life itself. To the warrior, when a soldier stands in the breach for the sake of the one or the many, this is the greatest act of chivalry – the highest honor is accorded him.

To the knight, such acts elevate the even basest and bloody aspects of war, death, torture, and slaughter. The blood that was lost is not lost; but rather it is transformed for transmittal to the ages in the form of legend.

But to Inigo, the honor accorded His Lord goes far beyond the stuff of legend. The honor accorded his Lord is a golden arrow  from the bow of the Seraphim and it pierces his own heart as it pierces the heart of all of history, reason, purpose and any human understanding.

To Inigo, this is not just any brother; it is Inigo’s Lord who has gone through the breach and the gauntlet of canon fire. For Inigo, this Lord did so for him personally. It was as though this same Lord cried out from the high throne of the Cross while looking to his right in the throws of pain. In the warrior’s vision, the Christos gives a new face to the thief on a cross thereby; and suddenly that thief was now named Inigo de Loyola.

In that moment, despite his flagrant failures, sins, pride, desire for earthly honor, the warrior was given a certainty of salvation to actually steal heaven. Being so situated next to his Lord, Inigo looked also standing in the breach with his Lord, the Christos.  It was his personal salvation. He was not just among the faceless crowd. It was his to clasp -- as he would clasp any sword of salvation and join in the victory over evil, injustice, futility, darkness, untruth and despair.

The warrior contemplates the Lord he has consumed and knows his place. He thinks of his own wounds of battle, his own loss of blood and limb. He recalls that for all his own desire to die as a Captain in battle for la honra (Spanish honor). His imagination takes him to the moment his eyes reluctantly reopened and his body was twisted in pain following the great battle of Salamanca where he himself stood in the breach – but his reward of la honra was to be torn to shreds by a butcher of a physician as he was rendered a cripple for the rest of his life, useless in battle, and condemned to the mundane world of life away from the Royal Court of Spain.

The warrior gathered to himself that the Christos placed him in a new breach. This one challenged him to see that earthly honor was vain and temporary; and that the greater Lord and warrior had chosen him for a greater purpose – it would be a heavenly quest from a heavenly king. It is upon seeing the smoke of cannon fire in battle dissipate that the warrior reaches into his deepest darkness.  He has been snagged from the jaws of eternal death – an eternal world where no blood flows and in its stead, is the river of distilled evil, hatred, bitterness, hopelessness and despair.

The warrior has peered into the jaws of death and has seen no blood within – only pale sheathes of dead men’s bones coughing up the vile phlegm of pride and selfishness. He has seen that Death has nothing coursing through its veins. It’s pale bones are filled with marrow that is fruitless, barren, and vapid.

The the warrior raises his eyes to his Lord, the Christos knowing he has triumphed with the Lord, and death has no power when compared to living bones with a marrow forming new blood and new life – an eternal fount of righteousness, a spring of everlasting love.

The warrior knows that where blood flows through the heart of the Christos, it is revivified ten fold and a thousand fold. The blood of the Christos is as the finest wine, and so as the Christos commanded water to become wine, He commanded wine to become His blood. The Blood of Christ is the antigen and antivenin for those who have tasted the putrid salt laden water of sin. The blood of the Christos is made available for all to drink. “Unless you eat of the flesh of the son of man and drink of his blood, you shall not have life within you.” (john 6)

This is the blood that the warrior addresses when he says: “Blood of Christ, inebriate me.”

The warrior doesn’t just say, may I have some or just a sip. The warrior asks his Lord to make him drunk with His blood. He thinks of blood, not in any morbid sense; but, rather in the sense of the potency of the import of this substance to living things, to their progeny, to their families, to their culture, literature and history, in Spanish terms their herencia. The warrior thinks of becoming inebriated of this substance of substances; this life force more powerful than it is symbolic. The warrior looks to his Lord with no inhibition to ask for that which would make him completely ecstatic, becoming less himself and more the Christos, the Lord. The warrior’s supreme desire is to say like Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me,” and reconcile that this desire has been achieved by becoming inebriated with His blood.

The warrior would die a hundred deaths to achieve this one desire to be ecstatic, “beside himself.”  “Yes, Lord – inebriate me,” he pleads to the Christos within him after having partaken of Holy Communion.

The warrior takes from the chalice of Yeshua’s heart. He allows the fruit of the heavenly Vine which courses in himself to enter, fill the wounds and imperfections of his life and make a new hyssop branch to mark the lintels of other souls with the Blood of the Lamb allowing the “angel of death” to Passover. In the warrior’s inebriation is his salvation and his wholeness for this greater task at hand.

Perhaps Inigo thinks to himself in a giddy moment of the Child Christos upon the Seat of Elijah before the child’s own circumcision on the Octave of His birth. Not in drunken stupor, but rather in a moment of clairvoyance, the warrior becomes himself circumcised in that sacred and salvific moment upon that great seat. There would be a mixing of the blood that would then mark many lintels and Passovers of people in lands beyond the horizons far into the future.

For the warrior, Inigo, Christos is always filling the breach and even in moments of doubt and temptation, it is the circumcised Jesus who would suffer the pain of human existence to glorify that existence to its original intent and purpose.

The warrior is now ready to dance with his Lord.  This was the dance of the warrior and King, David, before the Ark of the Covenant in the hills of Judea. This was the dance of the Child Yeshua within the womb of Mary, pirouetting along with John the Baptist who likewise, danced within the womb of Elizabeth. And this was the dance of the heart of that same “herald of the wilderness” who announced: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” (John 1:29)

The warrior knows the place of his divine inebriation as a grace rather than the mundane result of excess and escapism. The warrior does not wish to escape from the world he lives within; he wants to better it with joy, dance, the certainty of grace and salvation, and the unconquerable presence of his Lord and Master, who washed him, cleansed him, circumcised him, and transfixed him with His blood.

The warrior asks for this in order to be reinforced as he walks out into a world of sober melancholy and delirium. He wants to give the world a sense that true “holiness” is a quest, exciting, heart rushing, and exhilarating. The warrior wants his drunkenness in the Lord to be pause for those around him to look, and say: “I’ll have what he is having,” or to say like the Samaritan woman at the well, “Give me some of that water that I may never be thirsty again.” (John 4:15)