Incarnate Experienced

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you all had a great and holy Christmas.

Even this late into January, it is still helpful for us to ponder on the subject of Christmas, not so much the day, but the event that the day marks, namely the incarnation of the Word into the person of Jesus Christ.

During Advent, in the week before Christmas, one prayer said in the Liturgy of the Hours read:

As we think and pray about your Son’s coming, help us to grasp its meaning in a way that is personal and profound.

Amidst the psalms and readings, it was this prayer that jumped out at me, for it reminded me of the extent to which I have, to date, been simply going “through the motions” in my spiritual life, and this included my prayers during Adventide. In the course of going through the motions, I missed the whole point of the great feast of Christmas and the incarnation.

Intellectually, I knew the significance of the incarnation, the taking on of flesh by the Word, an event and a point within history and also changes the very course of that very history. What I missed, though, was that this objective fact of the incarnation also had an important subjective dimension.

Often in reaction to the self-indulgence that has characterised much of the age, Christians tend to focus on the objective dimension of the faith, and this encompasses everything from theological truths, including the reality of the incarnation. Moreover, the tendency would be to think about the significance of these truths - including the concrete fact of the incarnation - for the world at large, or history in the abstract.

That prayer in Advent, however, prompted me to was also a reminder to not just think of the significance of the incarnation for “the world” and for “history”, but also of its significance for my own life and my own history.

For indeed, while the incarnation is indeed significant by virtue of it being a fact that maps itself out into the DNA of the world, the incarnation is also significant and achieves its goal of salvation when it is also mapped out and made incarnate at the level of one’s own experience.

What must the noted here is that, often in an understandable reaction to the self-indulgence implied by the term “subjective”, the focus on the objective has led to a dichotomy being made between the objective and subjective, and the world and our place in it.

What this misses is something identified by Romano Guardini in his very brief and excellent The Living God. In talking about the sheer facticity of the world, Guardini mentions that this objective fact of the world is a sign that points to another objective fact, namely the sight of God as the creator of that world. Furthermore, this sight of God was for Guardini not an abstract cursory glance at everything in creation, but a deep and intentional seeing of each and every creature. Guardini goes as far to say that the world is a sign not only of God’s sight, but of myself as the object of that sight.

In other words, the subjective dimension does not sit in diametric opposition to the objectivity of the Incarnation. Rather, the subjective is the whole point of the Incarnation, so that God may not be just a distant creating deity, but also one that can be experienced within the fibres of every being, including my own being.

This is borne out in Luigi Giussani in his Generating Traces in the History of the World, in which he speaks of the incarnation in these terms:

Christianity is the announcement that God became a man, born of a woman, in a fixed place and at a fixed time. The Mystery that lies at the root of all things decided to make Himself known to man. It is a fact that happened in history, the breaking into time and into space of an exceptional human Presence. God made Himself known by revealing Himself, by taking the initiative of becoming a factor in human experience, in an instant that was decisive for the whole life of the world. (3)

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