Incarnation: Weekly Summary

Sunda y
I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
Instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine.
—Madeleine L’Engle

Wednesday
Where is this God being revealed? Not in the safe world, but at the edge, at the bottom, among those where we don’t want to find God, where we don’t look for God, where we don’t expect God.
—Richard Rohr

Thursday
We are sacramental to our core when we think that everything is holy. The holy not just found in the supernatural but in the Incarnational here and now.
—Gregory Boyle

Friday
God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”
—Rachel Held Evans

Listening on Christmas Eve

Mary said, “With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior. . . . He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” —Luke 1:46–47, 52, Common English Bible

The child growing inside of her [Mary] is an act of resistance, and there is nothing meek or mild in her declaration of soul force. . . . Like Mary, we feel the oppression of her people and the hope of the world in her body. But often we silence our body’s lament or expectation. —Jeannie Alexander, Keep Watch with Me

Episcopal priest Claire Brown provides this mindful body practice inspired by Mary:

Today we practice listening to that body wisdom and prophecy. Find a quiet, comfortable position. Close your eyes, and bring your attention to your breath. Notice the places where your body rests: on your chair, feet on the floor, hands in your lap. Let the rhythm of your breath lead your attention across your body, starting from your toes and feet to your legs and knees; your seat, belly, and back; your arms, hands, and fingers; your chest, shoulders, and neck; your face and head. Spend time noticing where pressure, tension, or relaxation are in your body without rushing past, judging, disciplining, and fixing. Let your body speak its Advent prayer. [2]

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

References:

[1] Claire Brown and Michael T. McRay, Keep Watch with Me: An Advent Reader for Peacemakers (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2019), 150.

Explore Further. . .

Read author and social worker Catherine de Hueck Doherty on “becoming icons of Christ.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Zoe Schaffer, Seedling (detail), 2022, Pennsylvania, photograph, Unsplash. Markus Ilg, Austria (detail), 2020, Austria, photograph, Unsplash. Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 11 (detail), 2022, New Mexico, photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

Mary’s Wholehearted Call

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) found inspiration in Mary’s courageous “yes” to God:

Perhaps it is because I am neck-deep in a season of motherhood and caretaking that I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment . . . yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.

I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God’s story. Yet I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation.

Evans honors the unique role that Mary, and women everywhere, play in humanity’s physical incarnation:

It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccupping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s
lap. . . .

God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”. . .

To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.

Reference:

Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu, Wholehearted Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2021), 3–5, 6.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Richard’s homily on Mary as our “Let it be!”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Story from Our Community:

A year ago, I felt caught between two loves. I lost my faith community after I married my husband who is of the Baha’i faith. My community couldn’t wrap their heads around my husband being part of our faith rhythms and services. I have spent a year grieving and making sense of this. I’m so grateful to CAC for encouraging me to trust my sense of Christ as universal. . . In this new concept of Christ, I am slowing beginning to see the life-giving Christ everywhere: in small details in the midst of grief; the frosty leaves on the way to work; deep personal commonalities and Christ-likeness in those I have previously considered as ‘other’ (including my now-husband!); and even the goodness of the community I felt hurt by. —Emily C.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Fullness of Our Humanity

Father Greg Boyle is the Founder of Homeboy Industries, which offers jobs, services, and dignity to former gang members. He has witnessed the healing that comes from having reverence for reality—which is where we bump into God.

We remember the sacred by our reverence. . . . This is the esteem we extend to the reality revealed to us. Jesus didn’t abandon his reality, he lived it. He ran away from nothing and sought some wise path through everything. He engaged in it all with acceptance. He had an eye out always for cherishing his reality. A homie, Leo, wrote me: “I’m going to trust God’s constancy of love to hover over my crazy ass. I’m fervent in my efforts to cultivate holy desires.” This is how we find this other kind of stride and joyful engagement in our cherished reality. The holy rests in every single thing. Yes, it hovers, over our crazy asses. . . .

I always liked that Saint Kateri Tekakwitha’s name “Tekakwitha” means “she who bumps into things.” What if holiness is a contact sport and we are meant to bump into things? This is what it means to embrace a contemplative, mystical way of seeing wholeness. It gives a window into complexity and keeps us from judging and scapegoating and demonizing. If we allow ourselves to “bump into things,” then we quit measuring. We cease to Bubble-Wrap ourselves against reality. We stop trying to “homeschool” our way through the world so that the world won’t touch us. Hard to embrace the world . . . if we are so protective and defensively shielded from it. A homie told me once, “It’s taken me all these years to see the real world. And once ya see it—there’s only God there.”

Boyle closes the gap between the secular and the sacred:

We don’t want to distance the secular but always bring it closer. It’s only then that ordinary things and moments become epiphanies of God’s presence. Some man said to me once, “I want to become more spiritual.” Yet God is inviting us to inhabit the fullness of our humanity. God holds out wholeness to us. Let’s not settle for just spiritual. We are sacramental to our core when we think that everything is holy. The holy not just found in the supernatural but in the Incarnational here and now. The truth is that sacraments are happening all the time if we have the eyes to see. . . .

The point of the Incarnation is that Jesus is one of us in the ordinary. Jesus is God’s declaration that the Infinite is present in it all. . . .

Our mystical “diving in” is at the heart of the Incarnation. Jesus ONLY referred to himself as the Son of Man, which means the Human One. It must be important. It shows up eighty-seven times in the Bible. “Never say it’s not God,” if it’s human, in the flesh, and ever-present.

Reference:

Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2021), 80, 81–82, 84, 85.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on this world as God’s hiding place.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Story from Our Community:

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Incarnation at the Edge

Winter Solstice

In this Christmas homily, Father Richard speaks of the surprising nature of Incarnation. We find God in all the places we don’t expect.

We see in the original Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth that there’s really nothing pretty about the first Christmas. The only way human beings can understand spiritual things is that they have to be presented in physical, material form. We can’t get it otherwise. We have to see it and we have to touch it. How God comes into the world would also seem to be very important, as if to say to us: this is where God is to be found. The great question has always been, “What is God? Who is God? Where is this God hiding?” because initially, God isn’t really obvious to most people. The mystery we celebrate at Christmas is saying that the divine has chosen its hiding place in the world, and it’s in all material things. And that all becomes summed up now in the body of Jesus.

Where is this God being revealed? Not in the safe world, but at the edge, at the bottom, among those where we don’t want to find God, where we don’t look for God, where we don’t expect God. The way we’ve created Christianity, it seems like it’s all about being nice, pretty, middle class, “normal” and under the law. Here we have in the Gospel stories Jesus, Mary, and Joseph being none of those things. It might just be telling us we should be looking elsewhere. [1]

Writer and organizer Kelley Nikondeha describes how the context of Jesus’ birth demonstrates God’s Incarnation amongst those who suffer and are oppressed:

The advent narratives demand we take the political and economic world of Roman Palestine seriously. The Gospel writers named the empires of Caesar and Herod not for dramatic effect; they didn’t mention a census or massacre for literary flourish. The Gospel writers used contextual markers to describe in concrete ways the turmoil of the times that hosted the first advent.

It is this very context that makes the advent narratives contemporary—whether in Israel-Palestine or lands beyond. Our troubled times, shaped by all manner of injustice, cause continued suffering, making the loud cries of lament and cries for peace timely, as they are answered by advent. . . .

The Incarnation positions Jesus among the most vulnerable people, the bereft and threatened of society. The first advent shows God wrestling with the struggles common to many the world over. And from this disadvantaged stance, Jesus lives out God’s peace agenda as a counter-testimony to Caesar’s peace.

This is the story of advent: we join Jesus as incarnations of God’s peace on this earth for however long it takes. God walks in deep solidarity with humanity, sharing in our sufferings and moments of hope. Amid our hardship, God is with us. Emmanuel remains the name on our lips in troubled times. [2]

References:

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Christmas Mass 2015: The Great Embodiment,” homily, December 25, 2015.

[2] Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 181, 182–183.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on discovering Divine Incarnation in the ordinary.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Story from Our Community:

These are some thoughts I’ve compiled whilst sitting and watching the sun come up over [a] majestic, pristine landscape: This intensive, all-pervading consciousness of the presence of the Creator. Tranquility, but at the same time a feeling of tension—what’s out there? What forces will affect this little community—animals, weather? This is how religion began. A burning need to fit it all together, this beautiful circle of life—the grasses, forbs, trees, geology/ geomorphology, weather, climate, insects, reptiles, amphibians, mammals. As a human, the need to name and classify. How does the astronomy and our place in the galaxy influence all this—phases of the moon, closeness of Earth to the Sun? Privilege of being in this spiritually stimulating place and having a small ability to perceive God in me through God in everything around—the people, too. —Charles D.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

God in the Galaxies and in Humanity

Best known for her works of fiction, author Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was a devoted Christian who perceived God’s presence in all things and circumstances. Here she invites readers to join her awe-filled observations:

I look at the stars and wonder. How old is the universe? . . . All we know is that once upon a time or, rather, once before time, Christ called everything into being in a great breath of creativity—waters, land, green growing things, birds and beasts, and finally human creatures—the beginning, the genesis, not in ordinary Earth days; the Bible makes it quite clear that God’s time is different from our time. A thousand years for us is no more than the blink of an eye to God. But in God’s good time the universe came into being, opening up from a tiny flower of nothingness to great clouds of hydrogen gas to swirling galaxies. In God’s good time came solar systems and planets and ultimately this planet on which I stand on this autumn evening as the Earth makes its graceful dance around the sun. It takes one Earth day, one Earth night, to make a full turn, part of the intricate pattern of the universe. And God called it good, very good.

A sky full of God’s children! Each galaxy, each star, each living creature, every particle and sub-atomic particle of creation, we are all children of the Maker. From a sub-atomic particle with a life span of a few seconds, to a galaxy with a life span of billions of years, to us human creatures somewhere in the middle in size and age, we are . . . children of God, made in God’s image.

L’Engle honors the unique role that Jesus as Christ plays in creation:

Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine.

Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the Maker of the universe or perhaps many universes, willingly and lovingly leaving all that power and coming to this poor, sin-filled planet to live with us for a few years to show us what we ought to be and could be. Christ came to us as Jesus of Nazareth, wholly human and wholly divine, to show us what it means to be made in God’s image. Jesus, as Paul reminds us, was the firstborn of many brethren [Romans 8:29].

I stand on the deck of my cottage, looking at a sky full of God’s children, knowing that I am one of many brethren, and sistren, too, and that Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Bathed in this love, I go into the cottage and to bed.

Reference:

Madeleine L’Engle, Bright Evening Star: Mysteries of the Incarnation (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1997), 9–11.

Explore Further. . .

Read about the story of the universe.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Story from Our Community:

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Second Incarnation Flows from the First

Father Richard writes of the Incarnation of Christ in the person of Jesus:

Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally outflowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world (see Romans 8:19–25). Ordinary matter is the hiding place for Spirit, and thus the very Body of God. Since the very beginning of time, God’s Spirit has been revealing its glory and goodness through the physical creation.

Christians believe that this universal Christ presence was later “born of a woman under the law” (Galatians 4:4) in a moment of chronological time. This is the great Christian leap of faith.

We daringly believe that God’s presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation. [1]

Jesus offered the world a living example of fully embodied Love that emerged out of our ordinary, limited life situations. For me, this is the real import of Paul’s statement that Jesus was “born of a woman under the law.” In Jesus, God became part of our small, homely world and entered into human limits and ordinariness—and remained anonymous and largely invisible for his first thirty years. Throughout his life, Jesus himself spent no time climbing, but a lot of time descending, “emptying himself and becoming as all humans are” (Philippians 2:7), “tempted in every way that we are” (Hebrews 4:15) and “living in the limitations of weakness” (Hebrews 5:2).

Jesus walked, enjoyed, and suffered the entire human journey, and he told us that we could and should do the same. His life exemplified the unfolding mystery in all of its stages—from a hidden, divine conception, to a regular adult life full of love and problems, punctuated by a few moments of transfiguration and enlightenment, and all leading to glorious ascension and final return. As Hebrews 4:15 states, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who was like us in every way, experienced every temptation, and never backtracked” (my translation). We do not need to be afraid of the depths and breadths of our own lives, of what this world offers us or asks of us. We are given permission to become intimate with our own experiences, learn from them, and allow ourselves to descend to the depth of things, even our mistakes, before we try too quickly to transcend it all in the name of some idealized purity or superiority. God hides in the depths and is not seen as long as we stay on the surface of anything—even the depths of our sins. [2]

References:

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 16, 14–15.

[2] Rohr, Universal Christ, 110–111.

Explore Further. . .

Read contemplative theologian Beatrice Bruteau on Incarnation.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Story from Our Community:

By reading Daily Meditations and listening to CAC podcasts, I’ve realized that God is much bigger than I was led to believe. In my life’s journey, I’ve been through many tragic experiences that have destroyed my sense of self, and have caused harm to others as well. Thankfully, though deep inner work, my true self is beginning to emerge. Going through this process is exciting and lonely at times. I cannot thank you enough for putting language to thoughts and feelings I have. This incredible journey has become so much richer now that I am learning my true identity in God: a true and loving person who shares that love with others and the natural world. —Shona C.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The First Incarnation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. —John 1:1, 3

Drawing on the wisdom of Franciscan theology, Richard Rohr views Incarnation as beginning first with the birth of the cosmos, long before the birth of Jesus:

What was God up to in those first moments of creation? Was God totally invisible before the universe began, or is there even such a thing as “before”? Why did God create at all? What was God’s purpose in creating? Is the universe itself eternal, or is the universe a creation in time as we know it—like Jesus himself?

Let’s admit that we will probably never know the “how” or even the “when” of creation. But the question that religion tries to answer is mostly the “why.” Is there any evidence for why God created the heavens and the earth? What was God up to? Was there any divine intention or goal, or do we even need a creator “God” to explain the universe?

Most of the perennial traditions have offered explanations, and they usually go something like this: Everything that exists in material form is the offspring of some Primal Source, which originally existed only as Spirit. This Infinite Primal Source somehow poured itself into finite, visible forms, creating everything from rocks to water, plants, organisms, animals, and human beings. This self-disclosure of whomever you call God into physical creation was the first Incarnation (the general term for any enfleshment of spirit), long before the personal, second Incarnation that Christians believe happened with Jesus.

When Christians hear the word “incarnation,” most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything. This, I believe, is why light is the subject of the first day of creation.

The Incarnation, then, is not only “God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader event, which is why John first describes God’s presence in the general word “flesh” (John 1:14). John is speaking of the ubiquitous Christ we continue to encounter in other human beings, a mountain, a blade of grass, or a starling.

“Christ” is a word for the Primordial Template (Logos or Word) through whom “all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him” (John 1:3). Seeing in this way has reframed, reenergized, and broadened my own religious belief, and I believe it could be Christianity’s unique contribution among the world religions.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 12–13.

Explore Further. . .

Read more from Richard on the cosmic, universal Christ.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: The Christ in everything: nature, Advent candles and Scriptures, God in the cells of our hands.

Story from Our Community:

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Incarnation: Weekly Summary

Incarnation

Saturday, December 26, 2020
Summary: Sunday, December 20—Friday, December 25, 2020

We do the Gospel no favor when we make Jesus, the Eternal Christ, into a perpetual baby, who asks little or no adult response from us. (Sunday)

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. (Monday)

Christianity believes that God and humanity truly coexist in the same body, in the same place! (Tuesday)

Sophia is the eros of God become one with all creation, the love of God that longs for incarnation from before the beginning. She is the co-creativity of God, always inviting, never compelling. —Christopher Pramuk (Wednesday)

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. —Howard Thurman (Thursday)

How might we experience the Christ born in us today, “utterly real . . . transformed . . . and radiant in His light”? (Friday)

Practice: Storydancing

I asked a theologian friend “What comes to your mind when I say the word ‘incarnation’?” Without hesitating, he responded, “Dance.” Dance is an art that allows all of our body to express itself beyond boundaries. Sacred dance, ritual dance, and many other forms of dance allow individuals and communities to experience the grace and joy of being incarnated into a body. You don’t have to be trained or even skillful to experience this; you simply have to be willing to move beyond your comfort zone. Today’s practice invites you to explore telling your story through movement. Trauma therapist Dr. Jamie Marich writes:

A dynamic practice can be simply challenging yourself to look deeply into your heart and tell your story to the dance floor, a process I’ve come to call storydancing. This can be the story of your whole life or the story of what you’re living through right now. . . . You may feel called to use this practice for the purpose of transformation and manifestation, allowing the dance to help create a new ending, or usher in a new chapter. . . .

Perhaps you’ve already explored dancing with your breath, your heart, your mind, your body, and your concept of spirit. Notice what’s happening within you. I now invite you to allow all the elements to work together and create your story.

Tell your story to the earth below you, the space around you.
Your space is your canvas, your body is the paintbrush. Allow your story to be
created in your space. The colors and the elements are being sent to you right now through your breath, through your spirit.
Paint your story, create your story, dance your story in this space!
You have options—it may feel organic to simply dance the story up to this present moment. If you believe that old story lines prevent you from experiencing the joy of the present moment, perhaps just notice those different story lines that pop up as you dance. Practice the challenge of noticing them, letting them go, and then returning to the present moment. If you feel inspired to move your story from this present moment and let the dance help you create a desired ending or a new, desired chapter in the journey, keep going with that process.

Dancing the element of story in personal practice is much like writing a journal, songwriting, or creating visual art. As many musicians and artists will tell you, we often create just for ourselves, for practice, for exploration, even if we never share the finished product. So, think about your dancing practice as a way to dance what you might normally write in your journal.

Reference:
Jamie Marich, PhD., Dancing Mindfulness: A Creative Path to Healing & Transformation (Skylights Paths Publishing: 2016), 114‒115, 117.

For Further Study:
Diarmuid Ó Murchú, Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold (Orbis Books: 2017).

Ronald Rolheiser and Richard Rohr, Adult Christianity and How to Get There (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2004), CD, MP3 download.

Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018).

Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), CD, MP3 download.

Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books: 2019).

Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics (Sounds True: 2019).

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Christ Born in Us

Incarnation

Christ Born in Us
Friday, December 25, 2020
Christmas Day

What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Symeon the New Theologian (949‒1022) was a Byzantine Christian monk and mystic revered to this day by Eastern Christians. Symeon believed humans had the capacity to experience God’s presence directly. He visualized this union happening within the “force field” of the Body of Christ. This cosmic embodiment is created both by God’s grace and our response.

Symeon’s “Hymn 15” from his collected Hymns of Divine Love beautifully names the divine union that God is forever inviting us toward. These mystical lines honestly say it all for me and move me to an embodied knowing, to a living force field wherein we will know mystical union on even the cellular level.

We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous?—Then
open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body

where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
we awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body. [1]

For many of us, our Christmas celebrations will be a little (or a lot) smaller, but I hope no less joyful. I invite you to contemplate the wonder of Symeon’s words. How might we experience the Christ born in us today, “utterly real . . . transformed . . . radiant in His light”?

References:
[1] Symeon the New Theologian, “Hymn 15,” from The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, ed. Stephen Mitchell (Harper Perennial: 1993), 38–39.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 219–220.

Epigraph: Symeon the New Theologian, “Hymn 1.”

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

The Symbols of Christmas

Incarnation

The Symbols of Christmas
Thursday, December 24, 2020
Christmas Eve

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. Two of my earliest God-experiences took place around Christmas time, the first when I was about five years old. 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.

The second experience happened when I was in first or second grade. I was in church and had gone up to look at the Nativity scene on Epiphany when the three kings and their camels finally arrived to see Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I remember feeling how lucky I was to live in this world where it all makes sense and it’s all good. It is all focused on the birth of this little baby.

Looking back, it’s no wonder that the incarnation became the heart of my understanding of the Gospel. In both those moments, at the Christmas tree and the Christmas crib, it was like I’d been taken over to another world, the world as it’s meant to be, where the foundation is love and God is in everything. It was like I saw the “real world” inside of which everybody is truly living, but they simply don’t know it!

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. [1]

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.”

References:
[1] Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations (Friends United Press: 1973, 1985), 3.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018), 17‒18.

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Incarnation: Weekly Summary

Mary’s Wholehearted Call

The Fullness of Our Humanity

Incarnation at the Edge

God in the Galaxies and in Humanity

The Second Incarnation Flows from the First

The First Incarnation

Incarnation: Weekly Summary

Incarnation

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Christ Born in Us

Incarnation

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

The Symbols of Christmas

Incarnation

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Category Archive

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Incarnation: Weekly Summary

Mary’s Wholehearted Call

The Fullness of Our Humanity

Incarnation at the Edge

God in the Galaxies and in Humanity

The Second Incarnation Flows from the First

The First Incarnation

Incarnation: Weekly Summary

Incarnation

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one, received not in essence but by participation. Just as if you lit a flame from a flame, it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Christ Born in Us

Incarnation

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one, received not in essence but by participation. Just as if you lit a flame from a flame, it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

The Symbols of Christmas

Incarnation

Image credit: The Virgin and Child with Archangels, Scenes from the Life of Christ, and Saints (detail), early 17th century (Early Gondarine), Tigray Kifle Håger, Ethiopia, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

Inspiration for this week’s banner image: What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one, received not in essence but by participation. Just as if you lit a flame from a flame, it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Category Archive

Join our email community

Sign-up to receive the Daily Meditations, featuring reflections on the wisdom and practices of the Christian contemplative tradition.

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian

Inspiration for this week’s banner image:
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as one,
received not in essence but by participation.
Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,
it is the whole flame you receive. —Symeon the New Theologian