Saturday, December 2: Flesh, Blood, and Paradox

Saturday, December 2: Flesh, Blood, and Paradox

Forget the peaceful manger scene carefully arranged beneath the Christmas tree, or the tacky light up version in your neighbor’s yard.

Forget also Black Friday and all that comes after, the rush in malls everywhere, the money spent and made out of this season.

Think instead of the nine months of slow, unsteady, strange changes in a body. Think of the uterus, stretched to ten times its size before the baby is born. Think of the smelly, bloody mess, the careful washing, the small, sticky, wet body placed in the parents’ arms.

Think of the cord cut, that last permanent physical connection between mother and child.
Incarnation: God in the flesh, living among us, human and divine.

God was always alive in all of God’s creations. The virgin birth, the manger scene, everything that happened after, whether you understand these events as historical or mythical--these didn’t change the fact that God is in us, with us, has been for all time, will be for all time.

If this is true, and I believe it is, then Advent is about moving the Human-Divine story from a story about knowing and doing and obeying to a story about being in relationship. The first relationship--whole or broken, joyful or sorrowful--was the connection between the mother who birthed us (whether or not she raised us) and the baby who is literally cut away from her body at birth.

Healthy relationships always involve mystery and ambiguity, because everyone in relationship is growing and changing, separately and together, at every moment.

During Advent, we can learn how to hold paradoxes. Divine and Human. A Savior who came to return us to a truth that has existed since the Big Bang—that Light Is, that Light Unfolds.  The King born among barn animals, to a poor woman who was not married when her baby was conceived.  Mary and Joseph, learning to be present with the baby and one another and the unexpected story they are entering.

We can also learn to be in relationship by first focusing our attention to the sensations in our bodies. When do we feel ourselves drawn, pulled away, empty, full? What do these sensations mean? We can only get to know ourselves well enough to be in right relationship if we attend to our bodies, where all feelings, longings, and understandings begin.

So, how do we embrace both incarnation and birth with clarity and openness in a culture in which Christmas is a combination of consumerism and sentimentalism? I believe we can do so not by resisting, but instead by holding the mystery in our "wombs"--in other words, our centers-- consciously and with an open heart. Once we do this, we'll have no need to consume or to practice sentimentality, because we'll be connected to a larger, much more satisfying Wholeness.

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