Toward the Ever-Deeper Incarnátio
O Lover,
In my own lifetime stunning advances in cosmology and astrophysics have given rise to the inter-related terms “deep space” and “deep time.” That adjective is employed in response to the hitherto unimaginable expansions of both the spatial and the temporal. This massive shift is ongoing, seemingly irrevocable, and increasingly impacting disciplines and jurisdictions long overlooked as unrelated. For example, numerous conversations are now taking place between the sciences and the religious traditions. May I, ever in Your presence, air how such an exchange has been unfolding within me?
First, I envision the characteristic of insurmountable scale, one more encompassing than gravity or light. That scale is like the aggregate of all finites including humans, the other fauna as well as flora, the inorganic and beyond. Included is everything from micro- to macro, quark to universe (multiverses?), all that is known and not known, even the unknowable. In short, a scale of all having being, a boundaryless we. Hold that quality of unexceedable extension for a moment.
Furthermore, I have been seeking to allow the impact of words from John 1:14—“the [Divine] Word (Lógos) became flesh [matter/energy, finites, creatures, beings]”—to be wed to the above all-encompassing scale, one bringing to mind the words of Anselm’s Ontological Argument: “than which none greater can be imagined.” (This post could as well have been grounded in the Colossians 1 text.)
This nexus of the Christ event and the above unexceedable scale gives rise to a rich plethora of questions as rhetorical as they are interrogative. What if the Christ—Incarnation-anchored, Resurrection-imprimatured—is actually the definitive, all-inclusive, unbounded, transformative and eternal schema of Reality Itself? What if the Cosmic Christ—creator of, yet rooted in, time and space—is the decisive glimpse into Your essential disposition toward, and relationship with, us finites, indeed all being? What if our fullest available concretion of what 13th C Beguine Hadewijch of Brabant called “Totality,” Creator and creation Oned, is the unbounded Lógos Enfleshed? What if, in the words of the Easter liturgy’s Exsúltet—“when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human,” the Télos of all having being was first concretized via a stable? What if Your Self-disclosure, materialized in David’s City, is the definitive glimpse, the harbinger, of what Your disposition toward finite creatures has always been and ever shall be? Rather than being dismissed as “unrealistic” or “dated,” “naive” or “superstitious,” might Your Christic Self-embeddedness be the defining clue regarding absolutely everything?
The above is my lame attempt to follow the finger toward which the Fourth Gospel’s Prologue (and Colossians 1) point. The implications of Your “Deep Christ” thus unfettered are a tsunami inundating all enumerations, but including the natural environment; the equal preciousness of persons and peoples; the inherent inter-relatedness of segments, disciplines, and explorations; the rejection of the sacred/secular distinction; the welcoming of Your transformative and deifying wholism in whatever religious traditions it is found.
Finally, the context for this post’s crying out to You, O Lover, is the ominous crisis—planetary, national, ecclesial, intrapersonal—today jeopardizing the green blade of hope for all concerned, this blogger not excepted. The christological reductions and domestications of the last two millennia—e.g., Jesus as teacher, moral model, ransom, propitiating sacrifice, sacrament—are today too small for the challenges of our frightening time. Only the Deep Christ, Your cosmic Self-disclosure witnessed to in the Jesus tradition’s earliest writings, is sufficient in the face of the deep crisis threatening Your beloved garden and all of its denizens.
I conclude, not atypically, with query: If in seeing “the Christ” we have indeed seen You (Jn 14:9), O Lover, how can we in our time of troubling depth-deprivation be sated with cautious miniaturizations? Other than opening ourselves wide to the inclusion of everything in Your enfleshing, Your “tabernacling” (Jn 1:14; Apoc 21:3), how do we resist the temptation to be fearful and to despair? In its largest sense, is not “the Christ” the Incarnational personification of Your Self-disclosure and Self-diffusion—eternal, transformative, deifying—in all You have wrought? What with our planetary community, indeed the entire creation itself (Rom 8:18-23), seemingly languishing in the limbo of a protracted Holy Saturday, how can we not want to be among those who hope for what Brian Robinette calls “Easter’s cosmicity”? O Lover, let it be!
