Bodies are not solids. They are, rather, extensively distributed instantiations of the forms of their substances. E.g., my body is distributed across vast empty spaces and times, that distinguish my foot from my heart and my eye at age 14 from my eye at age 50. All the particles participant in me partake my body, but they do so, not on account of proximity in time or space, but on account of formal similarity, and so of participation. Their spatiotemporal relations hang upon their formal agreements.

Local extensive proximity supervenes formality; is indeed a type thereof.

So the substantial Presence and action of Jesus in widely distributed eucharistic hosts is no big deal; no bigger, anyway (and, NB, no less), than the substantial presence and action of Kristor in widely distributed atoms of his body. So likewise the Body of Jesus as present and active in every member of his Church is no big deal. So likewise the integrity of the Mystical Body – which is, of course, the Church, the Body of Jesus – of all the Saints in Heaven and on Earth, is again no big deal (hey there, Zippy, and you too, Lawrence and Tom! (see you soon!)).

That’s it. That’s what makes this notion a Philosophical Skeleton Key. What follows is no more than a riff thereupon.

Most of the extensive volume specified by particular instances of my body is empty, and always has been. Most of that volume is not me. It is rather the extensive causal effect of me; the field of me, as it were. My extension then is not limited by any local absences of me. It goes the other way. I could be gone for quite a while, as physics measures whiles, and yet lo, there I would be again.

This is not unlike – no, rather, this is exactly like – the manifestation of triangularity wherever there is a triangle.

I am the substance of me. My bodily particulars – including my state of mind at time t or my mood at time t_n – are instances of that substance.

Each such particular of me is a hologram of me. It is me – is the form of me – in toto. The calcium atom from the sandwich I ate at lunch is now, as now integral to me, just me, and is in its own way a complete expression of me; so it just is me (in addition to what it is in itself, and to whatever it was prior to its encounter with my gut). This is how the calcium atom knows how to behave the way that such an atom would behave as a member of my body.

Excursus: It’s no good to explain the behavior of the calcium atom in me as the outwork of concentration gradients and completions of electron shells and so on, or anything of that sort; for (on physics), the calcium atom has no notion of such things, or indeed of anything at all.

It is not possible to operate orderly on ignorance; upon, i.e., lack of regular causal input. If the 6 ball does not somehow or other reckon that it has been hit by the cue ball, it cannot react to that impact, at all.

This is implicit in Newton, albeit unstated. His Laws quietly presuppose an ontological agreement of all things … to, what, exactly? An eternal ordinance, perhaps, as the forecondition of any being whatever?

Newton himself saw this clearly, of course. He was a theist (albeit, perhaps also a deist; the two positions do not quite exactly contradict each other). Indeed, he seems to have been something of a mystic. I know the type …  

Thus, while we can indeed notice that the calcium atom behaves the way that we would expect given our own knowledge of concentration gradients and the atomic nisus to complete electron shells, and so forth, we cannot (on physics) explain why the calcium atom behaves as it does, inasmuch as (on physics) it has and so is nothing in itself that could possibly reckon such things; or, and which is to say, be affected by them.

Your laws mean nothing to me if I don’t even know about them. There is then the question of whether or not I agree with them, as a matter of justice according to my own lights …  

Only as a substance in its own right could the calcium atom reckon the laws of physics (or anything at all), or then instantiate, and so, manifest them.

Excursus: The bottom line here is that there is an unfathomable mystery to causation. How does the 6 ball know that it has been hit by the cue ball, and furthermore, and much more problematically, how can it know how (according to the laws of physics) it should then respond to that input?

This explains biological homeostasis far from thermodynamic equilibrium. I.e., it explains life; for, if thermodynamics were the whole story, then, death being far more thermodynamically stable, and so, alluring to physical systems than life, there could (on physics) be no such thing as life.

The bottom line: the basic terms of physics cannot accurately denote what is basic really. Physics can be at most an abstraction and thus partiscience from the real. This is no critique of physics. On the contrary: ratiocination cannot but proceed upon just such same sorts of abstractions, and so cannot but arrive at the same sorts of more or less inadequate partiscience.

This is why we have the liturgy. Indeed, it is why we have the woods, the deserts, and the mountains. These are all prior to, and the material of, ratiocination.