Incarnation as Embodied Wholeness and Belonging
When the wind rattles through naked trees, when the last leaves and apples have fallen, and when crisp air reaches its tendrils into the chest with each breath, a barrenness descends and the darkened earth stills. Approaching the longest night each year, a dear theological jewel captures my attention yet again, like every year. I’m speaking, of course, of the mystery of incarnation.
Those who follow the path of Christianity speak of the incarnation, which they yearn for in Advent and celebrate during Christmas. The incarnation I’m thinking of includes that one, but extends farther, wider, and deeper than the more narrow and traditional Christian notion, which has been neutered into something smaller and more controllable.
This larger gift of incarnation is not Christian alone, nor is it just about a single historic event or person. Incarnation is a universal mythic medicine, a cosmological probiotic that we could all use right about now. For incarnation to have any power, it must be as true now as it was 2000 years ago. It should also be as vital and real here in my personal context as it was in Bethlehem.
What is incarnation exactly? Perhaps we could say that on the most basic level, incarnation is a story of Love refusing to remain a mere idea, choosing to become embodied, not theoretical; lived, not imagined; present, not distant or historic; entangled in the web of life, not aloof somewhere in the clouds. Some surmise it began at the very, very beginning, when God created the universe not outside of God’s Self, but within God’s Self, while placing God’s DNA within each sub-atomic particle. Greek philosophy even had a school of thought that explored this concept, known as Logos philosophy.
This original incarnation is the basis for Meister Eckhart’s musing that “I’m not God, but I’m not other than God.” No part of me is outside of God. It is the grounding by which St. Paul could say that nothing can separate us from the love of God. It is the Presence that made David in the Old Testament reflect that there was no place he could go where God was not present (Psalm 139). In short, it is a message that reveals that separation is an illusion; it was never true to begin with. It’s a gospel that we need today now more than ever! Of course, this story seems not to have found enough traction in human history, as much of history has been an exploration into how many different ways we can separate, dehumanize, and ignore God’s fingerprints inherent in creation.
This was certainly true in first-century Palestine, a world characterized by dualistic separations. Bodies were ranked and categorized: clean or unclean, valuable or disposable, Roman citizen or colonized, free or enslaved, male or female. Power was centered in Rome, not distributed everywhere. Power was held over in dominance, not with in solidarity. The gods were generally set apart, each in their own temple and seen as living in higher realms, not readily available or close to the earth. Caste, gender, and religion decided with whom you could talk and share food, and who you had to avoid. It was all one big game of separation. Sound familiar?
Into this shattered fragmentation, an unexpected scandal of Emmanuel, “God with us,” shook the world. This gospel refused to participate in an aloof divinity or a world of division. Incarnation proclaimed that the Sacred could bleed, sweat and weep. It said the Sacred could be found among the poor, the foreigner, the religious outsider, the sick, and the ritually unclean. God was not just “up there” in heaven, or “over there” in a temple, but entangled right here in the midst of creation, participating, touchable, vulnerable, present.
God was in the dirt beneath our fingernails, in the mycelia connections between the trees, in the compost and dung heap. One early Christian non-canonical text quotes Jesus as saying, “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.” That was not a metaphor!
Thus, the incarnation simply ignored purity systems, subverting the control fantasies of every empire. It proclaimed that the way to life and to the Friend is available in every house of every neighborhood of every village of every nation, in every forest, swamp and ocean, on every mountain, in every valley. The very rocks can testify, and the heavens proclaim it in song.
Incarnation proclaimed the ubiquity of God, the utter accessibility of the Friend. It was revolutionary then, and remains revolutionary now.
This is a different kind of story.
Rather than avoiding pain or healing it from the outside, incarnation metabolizes suffering from within the web of life. If “sin” is to be understood as anything that separates us from each other, from ourselves, and from God, the antidote is not condemnation of sin. Condemnation only continues the story of separation, but rather the balm called for is our awakening into wholeness, into belovedness, into union. Incarnation is simply a special way to speak of “wholeness,” a way which brings and holds together spirit and matter, Creator and creation. It replaces the splits which create twoness, with oneness.
Taking incarnation seriously means refusing to revert to tired, old stories of God-is-here-but-not-there, or this-is-sacred and that-is-profane. Those narratives were precisely what the incarnation was revealing as bankrupt. Of course, a God this wild and free is not controllable, so it is no surprise that the Christian Empire has not been altogether comfortable with it. At some point, those in power turned back the clock, neutering the incarnation to be only about a time in the past, not the present; and about one particular person in Nazareth, not a universal reality.
There is nothing wrong with directing our gaze to a focal point, such as Jesus, in order to encounter God. In fact, it can be so helpful that most traditions have one or more focal points like this. But focus can easily become myopic, and if our habit of seeing God in one place eventually crowds out our ability to see God in every place, we just may have missed the forest for the trees. By limiting the story of incarnation, the church soon began peddling the same old stories and rituals that mediated presence in some places but not others, and all the old systems of control and separation followed.
Today, we live in a world that is not that different from the first century. Modernity has prioritized distance over intimacy, objectification over relationality, and mastery over mutuality.
We live in a world in which men are taught:
to be ashamed of their bodies
to suppress their emotions
to view their value primarily as what they produce economically
to remain cool and detached
not to be open or vulnerable
that power is for domination
The medicine of incarnation says to men:
your humanity is not a problem to be fixed
your body is to be celebrated
your heart is not a liability
your belonging is immutable
you will be more alive when you let yourself risk the thrill of relationship
you are not separate from God
you cannot ever be separate from God
Whatever your spiritual lineage, I hope that in this season the flames of sacred longing are fanned in each of us. May we look for and recognize the presence of the Friend everywhere we look. May we awaken to our own belovedness, to the incarnate presence of the Sacred within us, may we join in healing the pain of the world by metabolizing suffering, and may we join in loving the world in embodied, sensual, and joyful ways.
Fire and Grace to us all.