Incarnation: A Franciscan View
The Dance of Breath and Clay
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
The whole process of humans living, dying, and then living again is illustrated by Yahweh “breathing into clay,” which becomes “a living being” (Genesis 2:7) called Adam (“of the earth”). A drama is forever set in motion between breath and what appears to be mere clay (humus=human=adamah). Matter and spirit are forever bound together; divine and mortal forever interpenetrate and manifest one another. The Formless One forever takes on form as “Adam” (and, in Jesus, “the new Adam”), and then takes us back to the Formless One once again as each form painfully surrenders the small self that it has been for a while. “I am returning to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be,” says Jesus (John 14:3). The changing of forms is called resurrection, and the return is called ascension, although to us it just looks like death.
Buddhists are looking at the same mystery from a different angle when they say, “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,” and then all forms eventually return to formlessness (spirit or “emptiness”) once again. This is observable and needs no specific religious label as such. Christians call it the movement from incarnation to death to resurrection to ascension, but it is about all of us, and surely all of creation, coming forth as individuals and then going back into God, into the Ground of All Being. That cyclical wholeness should make us unafraid of all death and uniquely able to appreciate life. “God is not God of the dead, but of the living; to God all are alive,” as Jesus put it (Luke 20:38). We are just in different stages of that aliveness—one of which looks and feels like deadness.
As hidden as the True Self has been from the False Self, so also has the Risen Christ been hidden from most of history. Not surprisingly, we cannot see what we were not told to look for or told to expect. If we were told to look for the Christ, it was for some divine object outside ourselves instead of realizing that the divine object is also within us. This is the staggering change of perspective that the Gospel was meant to achieve. This realization is the heart of all religious transformation (transformare=to change form).
The Risen Christ represents the final perspective of every True Self: a human-divine self that is looking out at God from within—and yet knowing that it is God-in-you seeing God-who-is-also-beyond-you—and enjoying both yourself and God as good and as united.
Gateway to Silence:
The Christ is everywhere.
Reference:
Adapted from Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, pp. 81-83
