The Divine in This and in Us
Friday, December 27, 2024
Father Richard identifies God’s presence with us—right here, right now—in an embodied way.
Most religious people I’ve met—from sincere laypeople to priests and nuns—still imagine God to be elsewhere. Before we can take the “now” seriously, we must shift from thinking of God as “out there” to also knowing God “in here.” In fact, here is the best access point! Only inner experience can bring healing to the human-divine split.
Transformation comes by realizing our union with God right here, right now—regardless of any performance or achievement on our part. That’s the core meaning of grace, and we have to know this for ourselves. No one can do this knowing for us. I could say as many times as I want that God is not elsewhere and heaven is not later, but until someone comes to personally and regularly experience that, they will not believe it.
Authentic Christianity overcame the “God-is-elsewhere” idea in at least two major and foundational ways. Through the incarnation, God in Jesus became flesh; God visibly moved in with the material world to help us overcome the illusion of separation (John 1:14). Secondly, God as Holy Spirit is precisely known as an indwelling and vitalizing presence. By itself, intellectual assent to these two truths does little. The incarnation and Indwelling Spirit are known only through participation and practice, as we actively draw upon such Infinite Sources. Think of it as a “use it or lose it” situation!
Good theology helps us know that we can fully trust the “now” because of the incarnation and the Spirit within us. I hope it doesn’t shock anyone to hear me say this: it’s like making love. We can’t be fully intimate with someone through vague, amorphous energy; we need close, concrete, particular connections. That’s how our human brains are wired.
Jesus teaches and is himself a message of now-ness, here-ness, concreteness, and this-ness. Virtually the only time Jesus talks about future time is when he tells us not to worry about it (see Matthew 6:25–34). Don’t worry about times and seasons, don’t worry about when God will return, don’t worry about tomorrow. Thinking about the future keeps us in our heads, far from presence—with God, with ourselves, and with each other. Jesus talks about the past in terms of forgiving it. Jesus tells us to hand the past over to the mercy and action of God. [1]
The full and participatory meaning of Christmas is that this one universal mystery of divine incarnation is also intended for us and continues in us! It is not just about trusting the truth of the body of Jesus, but trusting its extension through the ongoing Body of Christ—which is an even bigger act of faith, hope, and love and which alone has the power to change history, society, and all relationships. To only hold a mental belief in Jesus as the “Child of God” has little or no effect in the real world. [2]
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Skye Jethani
Dec 27, 2024
The Idol of Status: Choosing Humility
I first encountered the writings of Henri Nouwen as a college student in the mid-1990s. Up to that time, my vision of the Christian life had been deeply formed and influenced by American culture. This meant my faith was an odd amalgamation of the Bible and American values like individualism, consumerism, and entrepreneurialism. For this reason, I assumed God called every Christian to a life of ever-increasing influence and impact, and those Christians who achieved the most for God were to be most celebrated. That is how status was measured in the American Christian subculture.
Then the voice of a Dutch Roman Catholic priest entered my world and quietly began to dismantle those assumptions. Henri Nouwen was unlike any Christian leader I had encountered before. He was not dynamic in his speaking, evangelical in his theology, or entrepreneurial in his ministry like the mega-pastors that dominated the 1990s, and Nouwen spoke far more about intimacy with God than impacting the world for him.
Beyond his very unfamiliar way—at least to me—of framing the Christian life, I was inspired by Nouwen’s own story. Despite his focus on the inner life of the soul, Nouwen lived with deep insecurities and an insatiable need for approval—shortcomings he acknowledged and wrote about transparently. He struggled with depression and anxiety, and while his drive for significance landed him a professorship at Harvard University, the cost to his health nearly killed him. Nouwen was a paradox; a living contradiction—and therefore a Christian mentor I could relate with.
But what caught my imagination most was Nouwen’s decision to abandon his post at Harvard at the height of his success and influence. Rather than represent the way of Jesus at the very top of the ivory tower, he became a pastor and caregiver at L’Arche, a home for mentally disabled adults. By moving from Harvard to L’Arche, Nouwen willingly left everything the world esteems to be counted among those the world ignores. His life of downward mobility not only contradicted the popular American narrative of success, influence, and ever-increasing impact, it also confronted my immature assumption that God always calls us to more power and more influence, and never less. Nouwen both exposed and denounced my idol of status.
It’s appropriate to reflect on Henri Nouwen’s story this week because it so obviously parallels Jesus’ story. The incarnation is about downward mobility, of Jesus’ choice to exchange the glories of divinity for the obscurities of humanity, ultimately accepting the indignities of the cross. Like Nouwen, Christmas reminds us that God’s kingdom is more easily discovered among those at the bottom, and is often rejected by those at the top. And the incarnation confronts our American values of “more,” “greater,” and “bigger,” by reminding us that the way of Jesus is about the status we surrender not the status we achieve.
DAILY SCRIPTURE
WEEKLY PRAYER
Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
O Lord Jesus Christ, I long to live in your presence, to see your human form and to watch you walking on earth. I do not want to see you through the darkened glass of tradition, nor through the eyes of today’s values and prejudices. I want to see you as you were, as you are, and as you always will be. I want to see you as an offense to human pride, as a man of humility, walking amongst the lowliest of men, and yet as the savior and redeemer of the human race.
Amen.
