• Tag Archives incarnation

  • The Incarnation

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Snow.  And darkness.  So different from spring and the lengthening days of South America. The darkness and the snow both make me feel at home, rooted in the season that my genes tell me ought to be going on in December.

    Cold seems to have abated and I’ve been working on my nativity presentation.  Now I end with the depression era photograph by Dorothea Lange.  The mother and her children.  A universal and timeless theme.

    I’ve just created my first slide show, this one done in the presentation format of openoffice.doc because that’s the software I have on my laptop. (it’s free.)

    It gives me the ability to project full view images which I could not do in the .pdf format I used when I checked out the projector on Thursday.

    The whole nativity story, of course, comes into the Jesus narrative as an afterthought, a reflection that such an important guy must have had a special and memorable birth.  Not an unusual phenomena in history, but it does make the familiar stories and images very much in the realm of myth and archetype and not history.

    The big idea I take away from the nativity narratives is the incarnation.  God becomes human.  Especially in a monotheistic faith this is an extraordinary idea, mind blowing.  Seemingly impossible.  Debate over just how it was possible occupied the Christian church until the Chalcedonian council when competing ideas got sorted and the notion of Jesus as both fully human and fully God became dominant.

    In m own breakaway syncretism I put the notion of incarnation in synch with the Hindu namaste. The God in me bows to the God in you.  This way we don’t have to wrestle with the unusual task of fitting an omniscient and omnipresent being into a frail human vessel.  Instead, each of us is a splinter of the divinity, a chip off the old divine block.  We don’t have to pray upward and outward to reach the holy, rather we can go down and in, plumbing our depths, depths which have their roots in the sacred river.

    No matter how you understand it this holiseason represents and celebrates the divine human.  Sounds about right to me.  Lets go caroling.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • Missing Spirit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Wondered if I was missing something.  Turned on the radio to 99.5 and listened to Christmas music, classical variety.  As I just to wrote to my brother and sister, there is some residual Methodist wandering around in my head, recalling those nights in the church on John Street, candles winking out as congregants extinguished them, leaving the sanctuary in darkness, a voice, in this particular instance, a voice from the Metropolitan Opera, a hometown gal who’d made it big in the big city, singing out of that darkness, O Holy Night.  Still sends shivers up my spine.

    There is, too, a small boy waiting for Santa Claus and the luster of mid-day on objects below.  He misses the Christmas tree and the presents and the music.  And family.  Perhaps most of all family.

    These both are, however, voices from my past, valued and warmly received when they emerge, but no longer vital in my present, just as the music of the 60’s or the cars of the 50’s still recall a good time, an important time, but a time now gone by.

    I pressed the cd button and returned to the lectures on Big History, this time a review of the paleolithic, a historical era critical for our species, but often overlooked.  In this time we migrated first to the southern rim of Asia, then across the waters to Australia, and through Asia, across the land bridge to North America.  Each one of these migrations a test for our new specie’s capacity for collective learning, each one requiring a new set of skills, new tricks to wring energy and resources out of a new environment.  These were tests we passed and in that passing set the stage for our current dominance of the earth’s biosphere.

    Christmastime and the Christmas spirit no longer enfolds me as it once did, sweeping down after thanksgiving and placing me in the confusing mix of retail extravaganza and high religious celebration.  Now the Solstice carries some of that numinosity for me, but none of the commercial buzz.  I don’t miss the maw of gifts and money and credit, false gods if ever there were ones.  Quiet, calm, still.  Dark, meditative, inward.  That’s the reason for the season for me now.

    So, I’m glad for a place of peace as the Christmas machine churns anxiously all around me.  Still into the incarnation though.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Family Great Wheel Humanities Myth and Story 📎and tagged