Incarnation was always there, ever since the Big Bang took place 13.7 billion years ago. It seemingly took until 2,000 years ago for humanity to be ready to understand it.
RICHARD ROHR OFM
In the first 1,200 years of Christianity, the most prominent feast was Easter, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Around 1200, Francis of Assisi entered the scene, and
he felt we didn’t need to wait for God to love
us through the cross and resurrection. He believed God loved us from the very beginning and showed this love by becoming incarnate in Jesus. He popularised what we take for granted today, the great Christian feast of Christmas. But Christmas only started being popular in the 13th century.
The main point I want to make is the switch in theological emphasis that took place. The Franciscans realised that if God had become flesh and taken on materiality, physicality, and humanity, then the problem
of our unworthiness was solved from the very beginning! God ‘saved’ us by becoming one of us!
Franciscans fasted a lot in those days, as many Christians did, and Francis went so wild over Christmas that he said, ‘On Christmas Day, I want even the walls to eat meat!’ He said that every tree should be decorated with lights to show its true nature. That’s what Christians around the world still do eight hundred years later.
The Birth of Christ in Us Is What Matters
Anglican mystic and author Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) shares her perspective on the importance of Jesus’ incarnation and this season in the church’s life: Beholding His Glory is only half our job. In our souls too the mysteries must be brought forth; we are not really Christians
till that has been done. ‘The Eternal Birth,’ says Meister Eckhart, ‘must take place in you.’ And another mystic says human nature is like a stable inhabited by the ox of passion and the ass of prejudice; animals which take up a lot of room and which I suppose most of us are feeding on the quiet. And it is there between them, pushing them out, that Christ must be born and in their very manger He must be laid—and they will
be the first to fall on their knees before Him. Sometimes Christians seem far nearer to those animals than to Christ in His simple poverty, self-abandoned to God.
The DNA of Creation
The first coming of ‘the Christ’ is in creation itself. The Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266‒1308) wrote that ‘God first wills Christ as his supreme work.’ Creation could not have been empty of Christ for billions of years. In other words, God’s ‘first idea’ and priority was to make the Godself both visible and shareable. The word used in the Bible for this idea was Logos (from Greek philosophy), which I would translate as the ‘Blueprint’ or Primordial Pattern for reality. The whole of creation is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the ‘child of God’-not only Jesus. There are no exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creation must in some way carry the divine DNA of the Creator.
Giving Birth to Christ
Modeling the entire divine pattern of incarnation, Mary had to trust littleness or, better said, bigness becoming littleness! Mary could trustingly carry Jesus, because she knew how to receive spiritual gifts-in fact, the spiritual gift. She offers a profound image of how generativity and fruitfulness break into this world. We have much to learn from her.
First, we learn that we can’t manage, maneuver, or manipulate spiritual energy. It
is a matter of letting go and receiving what is given freely. It is the gradual emptying of our attachment to our small ‘separate’ self so that there is room for new conception and new birth. There must be some displacement before there can be any new ‘replacement’! Mary is the archetype of such self-displacement and surrender.
There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement, or preparedness in Mary, only humble trust and surrender. She gives us all, therefore, a bottomless hope in our own little state. If we ourselves try to ‘manage’ God or manufacture our own worthiness by any performance principle whatsoever, we will never give birth to the Christ, but only more of ourselves.
Whenever the material and the spiritual coincide, there is the Christ. Jesus fully accepted that human-divine identity and walked it into history. Henceforth, the Christ ‘comes again’ whenever we are able to see the spiritual and the material coexisting, in any moment, in any event, and in any person. All matter reveals Spirit, and Spirit needs matter to ‘show itself’! What I like to call the ‘Forever Coming of Christ’ happens whenever and wherever we allow
this to be utterly true for us. This is how God continually breaks into history.
Mary, Virginity, and Receiving the Gift
Why, from the earliest centuries, have Christian people been so excited about Mary? What’s happening in the depths of our soul when
we hear her story? Surely it must be about more than the miracle of the virgin birth. As Benedictine oblate, author, and poet Kathleen Norris shares, Mary’s ‘virginity’ has less to do with biology than with her stance towards God and life itself.
It’s in the monastic world that I find a broader and also more relevant grasp of what
it could mean to be virgin. Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, describes the true identity that he seeks in contemplative prayer as a ‘point vierge’ [virgin point] at the center of his being, ‘a point untouched [by sin and] by illusion, a point of pure truth . . . which belongs entirely to God. . . .’
If Jesus is the representative of the total givenness of God to creation, then perhaps Mary is the representative of humanity, showing us how the gift is received. And I believe that is why we love Mary. She’s a stand in for all of us. When we can say, like her, ‘Let it be,’ then we’re truly ready for Christmas.
The Trajectory of Incarnation
Christianity’s true and unique story line has always been incarnation. That means that
the spirit nature of reality (the spiritual, the immaterial, the formless) and the material nature of reality (the physical, that which we can see and touch) are one. They have always been one, ever since the Big Bang took place
13.7 billion years ago. The incarnation did not just happen when Jesus was born, although
that is when we became aware of the human incarnation of God in Jesus. It seemingly took until 2,000 years ago for humanity to be ready for what Martin Buber (1878‒1965) called an I/ Thou relationship with God. But matter and spirit have been one since ‘the beginning,’ ever since God decided to manifest himself/herself as creation.
John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) took
the intuition of Francis and made it into a philosophy. He said that Christ was not Plan B; God did not plan to remain absent until Adam and Eve ate that darn apple and Jesus had to come save us. Rather, Duns Scotus said that Christ was Plan A from the very beginning,
the very first idea in the mind of God, as it were (John 1: 1–4). God, the formless, eternal, and timeless One essentially said I am going to manifest who I am in what we now call physicality, materiality, or the universe.
The Symbols of Christmas
People often use the word ‘magical’ to describe their Christmas memories from childhood. I hope that was your experience. I have to confess that I am fortunate enough to have some rather ‘mystical’ Christmas memories, too. It was evening and all of my family was in the kitchen with the lights on. It was bright in there, but I was in the living room where it was dark with just the Christmas tree lit. I had the sense that the world was good, I was good, and I was part of the good world; and I just wanted to stay there. I remember feeling very special, very chosen, very beloved, and it was my secret. The family in the kitchen didn’t know what I was knowing. I have to laugh now to see how my ego was involved, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a true and holy experience. God meets us where we are, even as a five-year-old.
Howard Thurman (1900–1981), the Black theologian and mystic, also saw great power
in the symbol of Christmas. For Thurman, the ‘Mood of Christmas’ was not merely in the Christ Child, but in what Christmas is offering us across the entire sweep of creation and time. He writes: The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.
I pray that this Christmas, we are each gifted with some magical or mystical experience, reminding us that we are beloved, part of a good world, stirring with the ‘newness of life.’
∎
