In Praise of Contingency
[“The mystery of the Word’s descent is meant to ‘amaze’ the Soul into loss of self and perfect obedience to the Father’s will” (Bernard McGinn regarding Marguerite of Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls).]
[“(The) Christ is contingency” (Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss; Meditation of a Modern Believer, 2013).]
O Lover,
The predominancy of theories of atonement among most western Christians, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican or Protestant, leaves the theme of the Incarnation both neglected and reduced to a stopgap reaction to human brokenness. In this post I continue to explore in Your presence the primacy of Incarnation in Your entire dream for the cosmos.
Aided by a nudge from poet Christian Wiman, I focus this exploration on the theme of contingency. The term’s rich field of meaning had left me conflicted long before I was familiar with the actual word. Most basically, I might either not have been and/or may yet not be. That I was born into my faith community, culture, and family appeared totally arbitrary. I was neither self-generating nor philosophically necessary. I, together with all other cosmic constituents, had been “thrown” (geworfen) into being, in the language of Heidegger, irrespective of my agency or predilections. The word contingency fairly bristles with modifiers and synonyms: e.g., arbitrary, roulette, flux, fortuity, entropy, mutability, subject to chance, uncertainty in all respects. To be creature, whether a stone or a human person, is to be ligatured by finitude, bound by space and time. That there are no exceptions to this contingent condition may be the only absolute we of materiality possess.
The song of the community of Jesus, by contrast, celebrates You as infinite, eternal, beyond form, Creator of time and space, Depth of all that is. You, Reality Itself, are worshipped as Source sans source, Love without causation, Light devoid of “variableness or shifting shadow” (Jas 1:17). Rather than this being or that, You are Ground of Being, Being Itself, Abyss undergirding all that is. In short, there is no aspect of contingency which characterizes You who are Creator, not creature.
The previous two paragraphs set the stage for the Mystérium—stupefying, scandalous, oxymoronic—of Your Incarnation. Whether in Bethlehem You “descended” into the finitesphere in an unprecedented way or were then and there implanting Your imprimatur on what Eckhart calls the ebullítio (“boiling over”) at least as old as the cosmos, can be debated. In either case, however, the pinnacle of Your Story is Your comprehensive Self-ligature, Your submission to contingency including materialization, form, concretion, variableness, death, whatever! This Your act of solidarity was, and is, not selective; nor is it mere phenomenon passing as comprehensive identification as the early heresy of docetism (“appearing”) taught. No, in the Incarnation You are irrevocably embracing form, materiality, tethered agency, death, finitude in all respects. No shortcuts, no mere donning of a costume, no disguises, no deity incognito. As Wiman implies, in the Christ You Yourself, O Lover, are Self-disclosing as contingency!
So am I hopelessly impaled on the oxymoronic quality of Your kenotic embrace? Is Incarnation simply a paradox much too far? Au contraire! Given who You have shown Yourself to be, could I really settle for anything less? Am I not strangely comforted that Your Master Stroke Project, the Mystérium of the Pauline corpus, is shown to be commensurate with Your Divine Life? Given Your penchant for relationship, union and Love, how could it be otherwise? Yes, given who You have Self-disclosed Yourself to be, how could Your “tabernacling” (Jn 1:14; Apoc 21:3) amid contingency have been otherwise?
O Lover, how can I express my euphoria in the face of Your embrace of our contingency? Is not the habitat of Your “splendor” (Heb 1:3) precisely our contingency? How can I more fully absorb the ever-expanding impact of the Euangélion (“Good News”) that the core of Your kenotic Story is trustworthily and sufficiently embodied in our contingent milieu? How could it be that outside Your Christic Self-binding there is . . . nothing?
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
