I can't wait to be a parent. I mean...I CAN wait, but I'm excited to be a parent. Knowing the reality of new life in such a concrete, intimate way would make the Incarnation explode off the page. I am frequently made speechless by the thought of God condescending to our world as "that guy, over there." As fully grown, jewish guy-over-there.
But God-as-infant is still so abstract. and God-as-infant loved in the way a mother and father love a baby? Mysterious and not in a good, awful religious way. God as a tiny little ball of tears and poop and need? Unfathomable in the truest sense.
Incidentally, I'm also excited to be married, to enter into the fullness of Christ's unity with the Church. If man and woman become "as one flesh," how much more does a Church-body become the body of Christ!?
It sounds so phony-pious, but I live to be struck by the beauty of Incarnation and (re)Incarnation. It makes the banality and the boredom and the pain fit into the world more gently.
- - - - -
I'm feeling, for the first time since I left home to go study, like I'm not at home at home. I've spent enough time in a different community with different concerns and different influences that I don't make so much sense here. I find myself standing around quietly while everyone else goes about their way of being in their world. When I do pipe in, its either to make a wise crack or to rant briefly about something I find particularly interesting. The latter gets blank stares or replies that show little understanding of what I'm driving at.
I've told people often that the reason people who engage in philosophy are fundamentally confused. When you get really good at argument, you find yourself arguing with yourself in such a way that every position is either equally valid or equally ludicrous. The staunch and the intense intellectual positions are put forward w/ such force because they cover...or, lets say, accommodate an underlying suspicion that they are completely baseless.
That fundamental confusion is an odd thing. It leads us, in our weaker moments (which are most of them) to want everyone to share our confusion. So, there is this impulse to dismantle the self-certainty of most people, which we take for thoughtlessness. Largely, because it is thoughtlessness, most of the time.
At root, we think "They sound so sure, but I know that if you lean on any position w/ a little intellect, it fucking crumbles. How dare they enjoy their false certainty!"
Its ugly when that impulse, already dubious, gets turned on ones home community. Its an un-enviable posture.
- - - - -
Behold, the glory of God become man, that we may know we are love and never be alone.
Merry Christmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment