The incarnation is not only salvific but revelatory. What among the many things God reveals by becoming human is that daily living itself is holy, making the particularity of my life and your life dignified, significant, and sacred. By becoming human, by entering into history, God makes known the inestimable worth of this life and saves it from absurdity and us from meaningless meandering. If Jesus’ life is revelatory, then our lives are as well, the seemingly insignificant happenings over the course of one’s life in addition to the occasional lump-in-the-throat-moments that punctuate and bless our days.

God saves not by rescuing a lost cosmos or by making sacred that which has turned profane. In Jesus, God saves humans by waking us to reality as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be ~ graced and one. In Jesus, God awakens us to the sacramentality of all matter, all life forms ~ human and other-than-human, earth-bound and cosmic. In Jesus, God “makes all things new” not for us but to us, renewing for us the original vision humankind lost by ignorance, presumption, ingratitude, and callousness so that now we can learn to see things as they are in God.

In her poem, “O Taste and See,” Denise Levertov invites us to see in this way:

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imaginations tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.*

Concerning the recovery of this contemplative way of seeing, the thirteenth century mystic, Mechtilde of Magdeburg, wrote: “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew that I saw all things in God and God in all things.” It is not the cosmos that is lost but we who are “lost in the cosmos.”** It is not the cosmos that is alienated from God but we who are exiled from the creator, estranged from creation, and disconnected from one another. Living in the orchard, we starve. We bite, savor, chew, and swallow nothing, because we pluck nothing, oblivious or indifferent to “all that lives to the imagination’s tongue.” The universe groans in travail for the fullness of redemption not because God deserted creation but because creatures abandoned God by taking for granted, exploiting, or desecrating that which was intended to be beheld, revered, and received as sacrament.

We are the alienated, exiled not only from nature, others, and God, but also from ourselves and from the inviolable truths concealed therein. Admittedly, it is the mystery of divine love and an integral part of Christian teaching that God comes to save us from ourselves (if we doubt our need of “salvation” however we understand that term ~ being made whole, rescued, enlivened, reconciled with all, and/or made one with God forever ~ we only need to watch the evening news or read the newspaper). That being said, the Advent/Christmas cycle reminds us each year of the enduring truth that in Jesus God became human not only because we are in need of salvation but because God deems us worth saving. That is cause for existential awe, indescribable gratitude, and radical humility. It is also cause for waking to and enacting the inherent goodness (godness) that is divinely planted within us as human beings. By becoming human God impresses upon us both the depth of God’s lavish love and the intrinsic nobility of human persons.

As the loving, generous, and creative source of our being, it is indigenous to God’s heart to want to be one with us in love forever. Is this not the reason for the season? Jesus is not a heavy-handed divine pronouncement that humans are colossal screw ups destined for depravity. Jesus is the compassionate living reminder of the extravagance of God’s love, of what it means to be human, and that our lives are destined for God. Jesus bodies forth into this world through God’s graciousness and Mary’s “Fiat” and reveals not only what God is like but also what it means to be human and how to be human. The surprise is that we love and become one with God in the same way that God loves and becomes one with us ~ by becoming human. Perhaps this is the hidden invitation of this season of new life, new possibility, new hope.

Perhaps what we awaken to in the newborn in the feeding box in the stable in Bethlehem is not so different from what we awaken to from utterly inhumane incidents like the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that evoke an onslaught of compassionate action and goodwill, namely, to become more not less human. To practice regularly in small and not so small ways being more humane toward oneself, being more humane toward one another, and being more humane toward God’s creation. How divine that would be.

Pax Christi,
Dan

*Selected Poems, Denise Levertov
** Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy.