Tuesday, December 24, 2019

In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the greatest feast was Easter with the high holy days of Holy Week leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. But in the 13th century, a new person entered the scene: Francis of Assisi felt we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. Francis intuited that the whole thing started with incarnate love, and he popularized what we now take for granted as Christmas, which for many became the greater Christian feast. The Franciscans popularized Christmas. Maybe their intuition was correct.

Francis realized that if God had become flesh—taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin; the problem was solved from the beginning. It makes sense that Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this earth, it’s good to be flesh, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of this. God loves matter and physicality.

With that insight, it’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas! (I do, too: my little house is filled with candles at Christmastime.) Francis believed that every tree should be decorated with lights to show their true status as God’s creations! And that’s exactly what we still do 800 years later.

Remember, when we speak of Advent or preparing for Christmas, we’re not just talking about waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened 2,000 years ago. In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born in the human soul and into history.

And believe me, we do have to make room, because right now there is no room in the inn for such a mystery. We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.

The early Eastern Church, which too few people in the United States and Western Europe are familiar with, made it very clear that the incarnation was a universal principle. Incarnation meant not just that God became Jesus; God said yes to the material universe. God said yes to physicality. Eastern Christianity understands the mystery of incarnation in the universal sense. So it is always Advent. God is forever coming into the world (see John 1:9).

We’re always waiting to see spirit revealing itself through matter. We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas. The gifts of incarnation just keep coming. Perhaps this is enlightenment.

Like Knows Like
Monday, December 23, 2019

The official Franciscan motto is Deus Meus et Omnia—“My God and all things.” Once you recognize the Christ as the universal truth of matter and spirit working together as one, then everything is holy and nothing is excluded. Once you surrender to this Christ mystery, this divine incarnation in your oh-so-ordinary self and body, you begin to see it every other ordinary place, too. The principle is this: “Like knows like.” As St. Bonaventure (1217–1274), the philosophical interpreter of St. Francis, wrote: Christ is “the one whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” [1]

Regrettably, the history of almost every religion begins with one massive misperception: a fatal distinction between the sacred and the profane. Low-level religions put all their emphasis on creating exclusive sacred places, sacred times, and sacred actions. While I fully appreciate how this distinction helps us “pay attention” to the sacred, it unfortunately leaves the majority of life “un-sacred,” which is categorically untrue.  

You don’t have to go to sacred places to pray or wait for holy days for good things to happen. You can pray always, and everything that happens is potentially sacred if you allow it to be. Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God. “This is the day God has made memorable, let us rejoice and be glad in it!” (Psalm 118:24). Your task is to find the good, the true, and the beautiful in everything, even and most especially the problematic. Trust me on this: The bad is never strong enough to counteract the good.

You can most easily learn this through some form of contemplative practice. In contemplation you learn to trust your Vital Center over all the passing snags and jerks of emotions and obsessive thinking. [2] Once you are anchored in such a strong and loving soul, which is also the Indwelling Spirit, you are no longer pulled to and fro with every passing feeling. You have achieved a peace that nothing else can give you and that no one can take from you (John 14:27).

Divine incarnation took the form of an Indwelling Presence in every human soul and surely all creatures in some way. Angels, animals, trees, water, and, yes, bread and wine seem to fully accept and enjoy their wondrous fate. Ironically, it is only our human freedom that gives us the ability to resist and deny our core identities by refusing to participate in the flow of life through games of negativity, exclusion, or unlove. We even do this to ourselves. If we read the Gospel texts carefully, we will see that the only people Jesus seems to “exclude” are the excluders themselves. Exclusion might be described as the core sin. Don’t waste any time rejecting, eliminating, or punishing anyone or anything else. We are all living en Christo, so everything belongs, including you. The only difference is the degree to which we surrender to this gift of gratuitous inclusion. The objective gift is called image (imago) and the subjective allowing is called likeness (similitudo). Together allowed and received, God’s image and likeness are our human holiness.

Living “en Christo”
Sunday, December 22, 2019

Incarnation, the synthesis of matter and spirit, should be the primary and compelling message of Christianity. Through the Christ (en Christo), the seeming gap between God and everything else has been overcome “from the beginning” (Ephesians 1:4, 9). Without some form of incarnation, God remains essentially separate from us and from all of creation. Without incarnation, it is not an enchanted universe but somehow an empty one.

God, who is Infinite Love, incarnates that love as the universe itself. This begins with the “Big Bang” nearly 13.8 billion years ago, which means our human notions of time are largely useless (see 2 Peter 3:8). Then, a mere 2,000 years ago, as Christians believe, God incarnated in personal form as Jesus of Nazareth. Matter and spirit have always been one, of course, ever since God decided to manifest God’s self in the first act of creation (Genesis 1:1-31), but it seems we could only meet this presence in personal form after much longing and desiring. Most indigenous religions also recognized the sacred and even personal nature of all reality, as did my father St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) who spoke of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon.” Incarnation was always hidden right beneath the surface of things.

Jesus came to reveal the dualism of the spiritual and so-called secular as untrue and incomplete. By his very existence, Jesus modeled for us that these two seemingly different worlds are and always have been one. We just couldn’t imagine it intellectually until God put them together in one body that we could see and touch and love (see Ephesians 2:11-20). In Christ “you also are being built into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). What an amazing realization that should shock and delight us!

You are the body of Christ; you are the incarnation, too. Augustine (354–430) said this already in the early fifth century. The sacrament, the bread, is only for the sake of the people, to transform the people, to let them know that they are what they eat. [1]

The final stage of incarnation is resurrection. This is no exceptional miracle only performed once in the body of Jesus. It is the final and fulfilled state of all divine embodiment. Now even physics suggests that matter itself is a manifestation of spirit, a vital force, or what many call consciousness. In fact, I would say that spirit or shared consciousness is the ultimate, substantial, and real thing.

But matter itself also seems to be eternal. It just keeps changing shapes and forms, as scientists, astrophysicists, and biblical writers tell us (Isaiah 65:17 and Revelation 21:1). In the Creed, Christians affirm that we believe in “the resurrection of the body,” not just the soul. The incarnation reveals that human bodies and all of creation are good and blessed and moving toward divine fulfillment (Romans 8:18-30). 

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