Incarnations

Even at the best of times, God language is a challenge.  How do we choose the images, the gender, the verbs, and descriptors that best convey who or what we believe God is?  All too often we end up making God over in our own image, rather than allow ourselves to be creatures made in the image and likeness of the Divine.  But how, how, does this 'image and likeness' relationship work?  In what way are we connected with God, and God with us?

My community has adopted this as our prayer: “That I may be as Christ to those I meet; that I may find Christ within them.” This, too, is a challenge to me.  How can I be "as Christ?"  How do I "find Christ?"  Do I imitate a first-century Jewish fisherman who could heal the sick and preach up a storm?  Do I look for something equally magnificent in everyone I meet?  No, that's just not it.

Slowly over many years and many meditations, I have come to believe that each and every one of us is God's attempt to incarnate in human form.  That all that I see and all that I am is God's self-revelation, however incompletely and imperfectly expressed.  In Jesus of Nazareth that self-revelation was perfected, and I suspect it was because he was uniquely able to set aside the kinds of distractions of ego and acquisition that prevent most of us from being better at revealing the Divine within.

That Divine Within resides at the very core of our being, it is our truest self.  It is not out there somewhere to be sought after or journeyed to.  God is never, ever elsewhere; God is never not completely here and now.

To be as Christ to those I meet is, then, another way of saying, "Find that Christ within yourself and connect with others from that place."  To find Christ within the other, then, is to say, "In every encounter, seek out the Divine who is incarnate in that form, in that person."  My divine incarnation will be imperfect, influenced by all the distractions and grievances that cloud one's perception every day.  Their divine incarnation will most likely be just as clouded - more or less - as mine, so it's easy to miss.  But it's there, calling me to be a better incarnation because I at least acknowledge its presence, even if I don't always find it.

Epiphany is the season of revelation, of increasing light and awareness.  What better to contemplate than greater awareness of ourselves as Incarnations of the Divine!