A Blessed Bestowal to the Barely Beautiful

(Trust me, eventually this post is going to be about Advent.)

Time, even in modernistic, progress-obsessed American culture, is basically cyclical. Clocks, for the most part, are round. Days, weeks, months, years are cycles within cycles within cycles. Whether you’re living by some pagan calendar or not, we’re caught up in these cycles and we demark the degrees of those circles in different ways based on what we value. We can mark it based on our political values (Labor Day, Fourth of July, etc), our economic values (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc), or our philanthropic values (Black history month, AIDs awareness week, etc). And though many Evangelicals might not be familiar with it, there is a corresponding calendar for the Christian life. A peculiar, not very practical, calendar for religious life.

But really this cyclical ordering of our life means we are lent towards the religious way of living anyways. We have routines that are oriented towards the recurrence of the good things and events and experiences we are primarily concerned with. Hygiene is good, so we set out time to shower and brush our teeth. Having money to buy things and services is good, so we have jobs and we work them with a religious commitment. Loving and being loved by people for whom we have affection is good, so we remember their birthdays (Happy up-coming Birthday Mom. I’ll call you on Thursday, I promise) and other important anniversaries. Even Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, those fervently (nay, religiously) anti-religion folks, are engaged in all kinds of religious behavior. They love stuff, so they wrap themselves in the cycles, the patterns that call out in hope of that stuff’s recurrence.

I’m trying to really lean into Advent this year because I’m going to live by some kind of religious, cycloid calendar no matter what. So, I figure it’s a good idea to try to get accustomed to the one that is concerned with the (re)occurrence of the good-est good thing there was, is and ever could be: that God, who’s goodness I appreciate in every good thing, would become a mere man (and yet still God… mind fuck, I know), and submit Himself to the least-good things the world has to offer. Then, with so much love and grace and patience and generosity, He would turn and redeem those least-good things from the filthy, dirty, awful bottom up. He doesn’t obliterate them. He doesn’t triumph by destruction. He triumphs by re-demption. Re-birth.

Everything is new. Again. The religious cycle is itself turned over.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Jon,” you say, “but what the hell does Advent have to do with that?”
I’m gonna let Mari answer that one:

“Though Advent leans, aches, aspires toward Christmas, Christmas will not be the be-all-end-all of our year's suffering and fear.

However, Advent will open the doors of hope, and Christmas will charge in, with bells on. Christmas renews our faith that Christ was born, Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

Even though Advent technically prepares us for Christmas, it really prepares us for Easter, when Jesus ascends to heaven and assures us his enduring peace. The Christmas story begins in a place called Bethlehem, Bet Lechem, which translates to "House of Bread." And the Christmas story ends during Easter, when Jesus breaks bread for us, then his body.”

I’ll add that Jesus gets born and wrapped in rags in some desert cave full of sheep-shit, and then is buried in some desert cave, wrapped in rags. Its the story of any lowly, refugee life. But then the story starts over. And the world is never the same again. All those lowly things get re-interpreted. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the mourning…

You know. All that religious crazy-talk.

I really do love God, except clumsily and only in a treading-water kind of way. Sometimes I pretend I don't or that I don't want to. And that's pretty too-bad. But I have hope I’m not stuck like this. And I guess that’s why I’m making Advent out to be such a big deal this year. I can’t do much to be more than the barely-not-a-villain that I am, but I can make myself available for a tiny, personal miracle: healthy, blessed, all-the-way humanness. I can wait expectantly to be “Born Again.” Created anew.

(Re)-Incarnation, you might call it.

The gift that keeps on giving, right?

On the Eve of the Feast of the Incarnation

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.

Incarnation Disclosed

Paintings of Jesus are often painful to look at. Either painfully idealized or obviously ethnocentric, they betray all of our own projections and reveal very little of the truth of who this God-become-man could have been and continues to be.

Lately, my faith stumbles over the Incarnation. A human being who is at once God... it has seemed ludicrous in the extreme. My belief in such a thing embarrassed me.



In searching for the above painting, called "The Contemplator" by Kramskoy, that Dostoevsky mentions in "The Brothers Karamazov," I stumbled upon this painting of Christ in the wilderness.



He is bathed in light, but he willing hunches into His own shadow. His beard is dirty and maybe a little matted. His bare feet touch the earth He created unceremoniously. His hands are clenched so tightly his tendons stand out. His eyes are elsewhere, with a hint of lament. Still, His forehead seems creased with resolution

This is a powerful aspect of Jesus glimpsed through art. It is the concordance of discordance in Christ. It is precisely His Godly humanity. It enlivens my faith in Incarnation, at least for as long as my fickle heart can grasp its Truth.

Godspeed.