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This defies explaination. She defines the incarnation of Jesus as him coming for some sort of teaching about love and community. I define it as God taking on human flesh, so he may accomplish the forgiveness of our sins. The truth of God's Word is so far from this essay. Christ didn't come to teach us how to live out in community, Christ came because we are beggars in need of his grace.
Faith+Values forum: A Mary Christmas to all
A few years ago I experienced three miracles that changed the way I see Christmas.
Jaime Meyer
Last update: December 22, 2005 at 12:39 PM
Printer friendly E-mail this story
Faith + Values
Singing some of the unsung
A few years ago I experienced three miracles that changed the way I see Christmas.
First, I bought a pack of Christmas cards that showed what I thought was a typical manger scene with Mary holding a swaddled baby, surrounded by colorful animals. But when I got the box home I saw that the animals were not the usual farm animals I expected, but peacocks, giraffes, llamas, iguanas, butterflies, squid -- on and on. Surrounded by emissaries from every corner of creation, Mary embraces and protects her newly born incarnation of radical love for this world.
I was struck with a dizzying mystical thought: My task is to become Mary. To become open to that source of radical love for this world, to let it be planted in me, to carry it, and to give birth to it through my body, and to protect and nurture it and send it into the world. What would happen to me, and to my world, if the first lesson of living "The Way" were to incarnate in myself a radical love for all of creation -- not only the human world, but all of it?
The next day, I met a shaman from northern Norway, from the people who call themselves the Saami (whom the Scandinavians call the Lapps). He told me how the great white reindeer comes at the winter solstice, bearing the newly born sun between her antlers. She, too, is a mother of light and life. For the Saami, the Holy incarnates in the reindeer -- their primary source of food. In an act of radical love and sacrifice, God offers her entire self, every day, to the Saami, to become their muscles and blood and bones and thoughts. God incarnates in everybody -- in every body. The wolf, too, eats the reindeer, and so God incarnates in the wolf -- and in the bee, which drinks from the flower that springs from the soil, which is infused with the nutrients from the wolf's decaying body, which is made of reindeer meat, which is God incarnated. When I drip golden honey in my morning tea, I drink the Divine.
Then I met an Irish scholar who mentioned that the Gaelic word for Creator is Dúileamh (pronounced DOOL-yev), which means roughly "the force of love inside all of creation."
These three small miracles made me see the Christmas season like this: Winter is the least fecund time of the year -- the land bare, the sky gray, the days silent, the darkness deep.
And in this time of bareness, the Holy comes to remind us that creation is bound together by the force of love, and that we take that force into us, carry it, gestate it and birth it. Incarnation not only happened 2,000 years ago, it happens at every moment, and it happens in every body, and in uncountable variations. For me, this radical, impossible, naïve, idealistic notion has become the reason for the season.
Jaime Meyer is a writer and vice president of institutional advancement at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
This defies explaination. She defines the incarnation of Jesus as him coming for some sort of teaching about love and community. I define it as God taking on human flesh, so he may accomplish the forgiveness of our sins. The truth of God's Word is so far from this essay. Christ didn't come to teach us how to live out in community, Christ came because we are beggars in need of his grace.
Faith+Values forum: A Mary Christmas to all
A few years ago I experienced three miracles that changed the way I see Christmas.
Jaime Meyer
Last update: December 22, 2005 at 12:39 PM
Printer friendly E-mail this story
Faith + Values
Singing some of the unsung
A few years ago I experienced three miracles that changed the way I see Christmas.
First, I bought a pack of Christmas cards that showed what I thought was a typical manger scene with Mary holding a swaddled baby, surrounded by colorful animals. But when I got the box home I saw that the animals were not the usual farm animals I expected, but peacocks, giraffes, llamas, iguanas, butterflies, squid -- on and on. Surrounded by emissaries from every corner of creation, Mary embraces and protects her newly born incarnation of radical love for this world.
I was struck with a dizzying mystical thought: My task is to become Mary. To become open to that source of radical love for this world, to let it be planted in me, to carry it, and to give birth to it through my body, and to protect and nurture it and send it into the world. What would happen to me, and to my world, if the first lesson of living "The Way" were to incarnate in myself a radical love for all of creation -- not only the human world, but all of it?
The next day, I met a shaman from northern Norway, from the people who call themselves the Saami (whom the Scandinavians call the Lapps). He told me how the great white reindeer comes at the winter solstice, bearing the newly born sun between her antlers. She, too, is a mother of light and life. For the Saami, the Holy incarnates in the reindeer -- their primary source of food. In an act of radical love and sacrifice, God offers her entire self, every day, to the Saami, to become their muscles and blood and bones and thoughts. God incarnates in everybody -- in every body. The wolf, too, eats the reindeer, and so God incarnates in the wolf -- and in the bee, which drinks from the flower that springs from the soil, which is infused with the nutrients from the wolf's decaying body, which is made of reindeer meat, which is God incarnated. When I drip golden honey in my morning tea, I drink the Divine.
Then I met an Irish scholar who mentioned that the Gaelic word for Creator is Dúileamh (pronounced DOOL-yev), which means roughly "the force of love inside all of creation."
These three small miracles made me see the Christmas season like this: Winter is the least fecund time of the year -- the land bare, the sky gray, the days silent, the darkness deep.
And in this time of bareness, the Holy comes to remind us that creation is bound together by the force of love, and that we take that force into us, carry it, gestate it and birth it. Incarnation not only happened 2,000 years ago, it happens at every moment, and it happens in every body, and in uncountable variations. For me, this radical, impossible, naïve, idealistic notion has become the reason for the season.
Jaime Meyer is a writer and vice president of institutional advancement at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
posted by Stew at 10:00 PM
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