Richard Rohr describes the transformative power of an incarnational worldview:
I have concluded that there are four basic worldviews, though they might be expressed in many ways and are not necessarily separate.
Those who hold a material worldview believe that the outer, visible universe is the ultimate and “real” world. People of this worldview have given us science, engineering, medicine, and much of what we now call “civilization.” A material worldview tends to create highly consumer-oriented and competitive cultures, which are often preoccupied with scarcity, since material goods are always limited.
A spiritual worldview characterizes many forms of religion and some idealistic philosophies that recognize the primacy and finality of spirit, consciousness, the invisible world behind all manifestations. This worldview is partially good too, because it maintains the reality of the spiritual world, which many materialists deny. But the spiritual worldview, taken to extremes, has little concern for the earth, the neighbor, or justice, because it considers this world largely as an illusion.
Those holding what I call a priestly worldview are generally sophisticated, trained, and experienced people that feel their job is to help us put matter and Spirit together. The downside is that this view assumes that the two worlds are actually separate and need someone to bind them together again.
In contrast to these three is an incarnational worldview, in which matter and Spirit are understood to have never been separate. Matter and Spirit reveal and manifest each other. This view relies more on awakening than joining, more onseeing than obeying, more on growth in consciousness and love than on clergy, experts, morality, scriptures, or prescribed rituals.
In Christian history, we see an incarnational worldview most strongly in the early Eastern Fathers, Celtic spirituality, many mystics who combined prayer with intense social involvement, Franciscanism in general, many nature mystics, and contemporary eco-spirituality. Overall, a materialistic worldviewis held in the technocratic world and areas its adherents colonize; a spiritual worldview is held by the whole spectrum of heady and esoteric people; and a priestly worldview is found in almost all of organized religion.
An incarnational worldview grounds Christian holiness in objective and ontological reality instead of just moral behavior. This is its big benefit. Yet, this is the important leap that so many people have not yet made. Those who have can feel as holy in a hospital bed or a tavern as in a chapel. They can see Christ in the disfigured and broken as much as in the so-called perfect or attractive. They can love and forgive themselves and all imperfect things, because all carry the Imago Dei equally, even if not perfectly. Incarnational Christ Consciousness will normally move toward direct social, practical, and immediate implications. It is never an abstraction or a theory. It is not a mere pleasing ideology. If it is truly incarnational Christianity, then it is always “hands-on” religion and not solely esotericism, belief systems, or priestly mediation.
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from a sermon on Advent that showed up in my email…..
Advent – this Advent at least – begins in lament. Not sentimentalism. Not nostalgia. But also not despair. So if you are entering this season in which you normally find great solace feeling instead bewildered – you’re entering it in exactly the right way. This may not seem comforting, but it’s here that we learn real hope. Hope draws on the stories of God’s faithfulness in the past not in order to replicate the past but in order to remind us that God is trustworthy. God is no idol with the appearance of giving us what we want when and how we want it (while actually robbing us blind), God is living and active, moving over here and over there while remaining faithfully everywhere. The hope of Advent is not ‘I found God where I always find God.’ The hope is, rather, awaiting the coming of the God who appears in ways, and places, and faces we never thought to look. And this appearing may take time – but stay awake, because God comes when we least expect God to come. The stories of faith are indeed our stories, but not in the way we think. They are ours not for replication, but for reminder, and the reminder for hope. And what they remind us of is that though God hides, God never abandons. So don’t hold your back your tears, or even your screams. As Patricia E. De Jong writes,
“As a friend has said, this is not a season for passive waiting and watching. It is a season of wailing and weeping, of opening up our lives and our souls with active anticipation and renewed hope.”5
Especially this Advent. And the weeping and wailing are not the opposite of hope, friends, they are the gateway to it.
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