AND INSTEAD OF HAVING ME COMMITTED WILL COMMIT
THEMSELVES TO DIVING DEEPER INTO THE MYSTERY

MYSELF: I’d like to pick up where we left off. You were saying that the incarnation is not only the mystery of God-with-us but also the mystery of us being with God, and that our being with God is, in fact, the fitting or corresponding response to what we typically think of as the incarnation.

DAN: Yes.

MYSELF: You used two images, two metaphors to convey this: the incarnation as a dance that we are invited to join in and the call and response nature of the incarnation and the seasons of Advent/Christmas. I think you referred to this as our response hyphen ability. Is that right?

DAN: Yes. It’s such a seemingly simple point but often one overlooked, namely, that the spiritual life, the significant life, is always and necessarily the responsive life. This is true for all authentic spiritual paths, not just Christian. There is no spiritual life, no life of any kind, that is not consciously responsive. Another word that is similar is engaged. During the War in Vietnam Thich Nhat Hanh called Vietnamese monks to an engaged Buddhism. If we are not engaged Christians, we are not living the Christ-life. The Christ-life calls us to be involved, and this is rooted in our audacious belief that Jesus is the involvement of God in the human situation. The mystery of the incarnation we re-member ourselves to in a particular way each Advent, no less than the spiritual life or the Christ-life it informs, is anything but a static reality or something that merely happened once a long time ago. It’s asking something of us, from us.

MYSELF: It’s not merely existing. It’s what we do with our existence. You said yesterday, it’s an interaction, an invitation and reply. And that that is salvation. That dynamic call and response experience, 

DAN: Right. And it’s not a transaction either. It’s relational, not transactional. Its two primary movements are being receptive and being responsive which are perhaps the two fundamental postures or ways of being engaged in any serious and enlivening spirituality.

MYSELF: I don’t think during Advent and Christmas we tend to view the incarnation as being interactive or something that involves us in that way. We tend to think of Christmas, for example, or what we celebrate at Christmas, in terms of something God has done for us?  

DAN: I agree. But this diminishes the fullness of the mystery of incarnation and subsequently impoverishes our spiritual life. And as I was suggesting earlier, our understanding of what salvation is. In truth and practice, the mystery of the incarnation by which salvation is extended to us by God in Jesus is a participatory experience. It’s not a doctrine or a proposition to which we give our intellectual assent. It is, rather, the exchange of love that is unique to God as Trinity, as the Beloved Community that is extended to us and awaits our response. Our response is no more a given than is God’s generous gift. In the Divine-human exchange called salvation, humans have to participate otherwise there is no exchange. 

MYSELF: This is why you use the image of the dance for the spiritual life, correct.

DAN (nods, yes) It’s an ancient image of the Church. Though you’d never know it from American churches where the pew became common, but not really until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500’s..

MYSELF: You said the dance is our vocation.

DAN: Well, if someone calls you on the phone or hollers “I love you!” as they approach you running, a response seems in order, don’t you think? So, if we believe that the whenceness of our being is in some sense a “conscious” Who, then creation itself is an overture of the divine advent and the Creator deserves some response from us to complete the first round of the divine-human gestalt. So, yes, we’re called to dance and not be wall-flowers (which will terrify 6th graders).

I believe to respond is to begin the sacred drama of becoming human. And to be human involves participating in the divine life and the exchange of love we see happening in the Trinity as the Beloved Community. Not to respond, not to join in the dance, is to renege on our innate humanity and on who God has created and summoned us to be.

This intimate, dynamic, divine-human interaction is what I was emphasizing yesterday in order to shake us out of lazy, two-dimensional concepts of salvation. One of my go to quotes that I often use in talks is from my second favorite rabbi, Rabbi Heschel. He wrote, “The purpose of speech is to inform. The purpose of prayer is to partake.” This especially makes sense if we understand the daily living of our lives as our lived prayer. This is maybe why God didn’t send a memo or a tweet about the incarnation and instead did the full body thing. The reason this is so essential is because Jesus shows us what it means to be receptive and responsive. And we witness these actions as being embodied as is all authentic spirituality. 

MYSELF: So, to be human involves accepting and living into our full humanity by participating in the divine-human dance of love.

DAN: Mm hmm. And that’s a description of an incarnational spirituality. Let me say it this way. The mystery of the incarnation is meant to fire and fashion who we are and is through and through about the mystery and manner of love. Love is meant to evoke love. This is the inherent, God-infused, antiphonal nature of the spiritual life at the center of these hinged seasons of Advent and Christmas.

The corresponding reply to love—the good, true, and beautiful response to the incarnation of God’s extravagant love embodied in Jesus—is for us to incarnate love in the dailiness of our lives. That’s how we show that our thanks is genuine. It’s a response, not a payment on a debt.

MYSELF: And that’s our summons wherever we are living.

DAN: Uh huh. I like that you connected the word summons to the word living. One of my favorite lines from the gazillion lines that Thomas Merton penned is the simple sentence — it’s the first sentence, I think, in Chapter 10 in his book Thoughts in Solitude: He says, “The spiritual life is first of all a life.” He italicizes life. I remember the little “aha!” I had the first time I read that. It’s what I call the overlooked obvious. The spiritual life is first of all a life, by which he means it’s a life lived. Spirituality is not primarily thinking or believing. It’s a way of living. Merton says, “If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives.”[i] That’s the direct quote. Christian spirituality, more specifically, is a genuine and abundant way of living in the Spirit of Jesus who is the manifestation of divine love who calls us to incarnate love.

MYSELF: The substance and summation of living the Christ-life is to incarnate love.

DAN: That’s how I see it. Along with allowing ourselves to be loved, this is our chief practice and response-ability as Christ-ones. 

Again, maybe the connection between love and living which I see as being paramount, not to mention, dynamic and intimate, sounds to some ears so simple or obvious, or maybe too warm-fuzzy, that there is a tendency for many of us Christians to let slip the relationship between them.[ii]

In the first letter of John, the evangelist writes, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” There’s the mystery and message of Advent and Christmas in a nutshell. There’s the essence of the gospel in that one verse, the why of the incarnation: we are loved so that we might LIVE. And we live so that we might LOVE.

MYSELF: We are loved so that we might LIVE. And we live so that we might LOVE. That would be a good line to ponder during Advent and Christmas.

DAN: It would be—good food for thought and action, yes. 

The incarnation alone should prevent us from ever thinking there is anything quaint or ethereal or airy-fairy or “ice cream castles in the air” about the Christ-life. There’s no getting around it. It all points toward embodiment. Christians should know this because our tradition, and therefore our spirituality, is necessarily incarnational. But how many people in the pew, if you played word association, would respond incarnation if we first said Christmas? I think we’d have to wait awhile before we heard that response. What we prepare for during Advent and celebrate at Christmas should lead to an embodied spirituality.

(Reaching and opening a bible) Here. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, “When Christ came into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.’ Then I said, ‘Lo, I have come to do your will, O God.’”[iii] And the writer (flipping pages) of The Letter to the Romans says, “I urge you therefore, brothers [and sisters], by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.”[iv] So, in what ways are we being called today to put our bodies on the line —  our very lives?

Again, the incarnation wasn’t a matter of passing on information. It didn’t happen by hieroglyphics on a wall or by way of Morse code or email or tweet, asking us merely to tweet or text back. The mystery, power, and meaning of Advent and Christmas comes by way of a young peasant woman going through physical labor to bring forth an embodied truth. Glad tidings, sure. But an enfleshed one covered with blood and white vernix or green-black meconium. I suspect the fitting response invites more than a return tweet.

MYSELF: The bookend events of Jesus’ life begin and end with blood. Not quaint.

DAN: No, it’s not.

MYSELF: So then would you say the incarnation is a mystery or an event?

DAN: Both. It was an event. But it’s just that it’s so much more than an event. When we think of it only as an event, it reduces the seasons of Advent and Christmas to a sort of sentimental nostalgia about something that happened a long time ago that tangibly doesn’t seem to have much to do with us today.

But the point I’m making is the incarnation is not a seasonal reality confined to Advent and Christmas. It is not just an event any more than love or life are just events. An event has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If we only view the incarnation as a once-in-time event in history (which we call Christmas), then we diminish the radical truth and transformational power of it as mystery. A mystery isn’t something absent of meaning. It’s not something that doesn’t make sense to us until it does and then no longer is a mystery. It is something crammed full of meaning. It has a superfluousness of meaning. It never stops being a mystery. And that’s not something we try to figure out. It something we take our shoes off and enter.

MYSELF: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.”

DAN: Yes. “But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” Or her shoes.[v] If the incarnation doesn’t evoke at least a hint of awe, existential indebtedness, or gratitude, we should check our neck for a pulse.

This is the paradox of the incarnation. On the one hand, it is the enfleshment of divine love which makes it visible and real. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory.” But on the other hand, the making flesh of the mystery doesn’t erase the mystery like when a puzzle or riddle or problem is solved. It’s not that way with mystery. Especially when the mystery we are talking about is love. The incarnation of love.

If one person in a couple says, “I love you.” And the other responds, “I love you,” it doesn’t end there, because love evokes love and builds on love, increases love. That’s merely the first go round in the relationship that deepens in the ongoing mystery and messiness, mundanity and magic of love. Again, wherever and whenever there is love-in-action it invites a response. That’s the nature of love. And there is only love if enacted.

MYSELF: With mystery the question never goes away and isn’t supposed to go away.

DAN: That’s right. It spills over with an excess of meaning and implications. We are invited to dive into the deeper layers of its meaning again and again, not in a purely theoretical or intellectual philosophical sense, but in a deeply personal, self-implicating way. Because when we dare to enter into the mystery, the response it is asking from us, in one way or another, always means that we answer with our life. Christian spirituality, that is, living the Christ-life, is enacted theology. Event and mystery—the question is “How do I respond to the mystery? How do I put love into action?”  

. . . to be continued

 

[i] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p. 38.

[ii] There is a book of posthumously collected essays by Thomas Merton called Love and Living that center on the theme of the need for love in learning to live.

[iii] Hebrews 10: 5-7.

[iv] Romans 12: 1.

[v] These two lines come from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “Aurora Leigh.”