Paying Attention To The Sky

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
John 1: 1-14

One of the most beautiful passages in the Bible and of all literature. It stirs the soul, awakens us to fully read the Psalmist that we are indeed “little less than the gods,” (Psalm 8:2-8) puts it:

Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

And yet we must never forget those who walk amongst us, the diabolists, who are hostile to these thoughts. I never forget Michael Novak’s cautioning words: “Gathering force over many years, one discovery has hit me with the force of a law: If you make mistakes about your own nature, you will make as many mistakes about God, and quite properly then, reject what your inquiries put before you. The god you fantasize will appear to you not very great, a delusion, a snare from which others ought to be freed. You will despise this god.” I have never read anything truer.

We, however, have Fr. Romano Guardini, who touches us with these reflections on the incarnation and his epiphany, provoked by a friend, “But Love does such things!”  “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee… ”

Origin And Ancestry: John’s View
John probes the mystery of God’s existence for Jesus’ origin. Revelation shows that the merely unitarian God found in post-Christian Judaism, in Islam, and throughout the modern consciousness does not exist. At the heart of the mystery which the church expresses in her teaching of the trinity of persons in the unity of life stands the God of Revelation. Here, John seeks the roots of Christ’s existence: in the second of the Most Holy Persons, the Word (Logos), in whom God the speaker, reveals the fullness of his being. Speaker and Spoken, however, incline toward each other and are one in the love of the Holy Spirit. The Second Countenance of God, here called Word, is also named Son, since he who speaks the Word is also known as Father. In the Lord’s farewell address, the Holy Spirit is given the promising names of Consoler, Sustainer, for he will see to it that the brothers and sisters in Christ are not left orphans by his death. Through the Holy Spirit the Redeemer came to us, straight from the heart of the Heavenly Father.

“Son of God became man” — not only descended to inhabit a human frame, but became man — literally; and in order that no doubt arise, (that, for example, it might never be asserted that Christ, despising the lowliness of the body, had united himself with only the essence of a holy soul or with an exalted spirit)

John specifies sharply: Christ “was made in flesh.” Only in flesh, not in the bare spirit, can destiny and history come into being. God descended to us in the person of the Savior, Redeemer, in order to have a destiny, to become history. Through the Incarnation, the founder of the new history stepped into our midst. With his coming, all that had been before fell into its historical place “before the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” anticipating or preparing for that hour; all that was to be, faced the fundamental choice between acceptance and rejection of the Incarnation.

He “dwelt among us,” “pitched his tent among us,” as one translation words it. “Tent” of the logos — what is this but Christ’s body: God’s holy pavilion among men, the original tabernacle of the Lord in our Midst, the “temple” Jesus meant when he said to the Pharisees: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). Somewhere in that eternal beginning and temporal life in the flesh lies the mystery of the Incarnation. St John presents it austerely, swinging its full metaphysical weight. Nothing here of the wealth of lovely characterization and intimate detail that make St Luke’s account bloom so richly. Everything is concentrated on the ultimate , all-powerful essential. Logos, flesh, step into the world; the eternal origin, the tangible earthly reality, the mystery of unity.

Revelation’s account of the Incarnation and the relation of God to the world is something fundamentally different (from human conceptions of God‘s existence). According to the Bible, God entered into time in a specific manner, acting on an autocratic decision made in complete freedom. The free, eternal God has no destiny which is a matter for mortals living in history. What is meant is that God entered into history, thus taking destiny upon himself.

However this journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory, this stride across the border into history, is something no human intellect can altogether grasp. The mind might even oppose the apparently fortuitous, human aspect of this interpretation with its own ‘purer’ idea of godliness; yet precisely here lies hidden the kernel of Christianity. Before such an unheard of thought the intellect bogs down. Once at this point a friend gave me a clue that helped my understanding more than any measure of bare reason. He said: “But love does such things!” Again and again these words have come to the rescue when the mind has stopped short at some intellectual impasse. Not that they explain anything to the intelligence; they arouse the heart, enabling it to feel its way into the secrecy of God. The mystery is not understood, but it does move nearer, and the danger of “scandal” disappears.

None of the great things in human life springs from the intellect; every one issues from the heart and its love. If even human love has its own reasoning, comprehensible only to the heart that is open to it, how much truer must this be of God’s love! When it is the depth and power of God that stirs, is there anything of which love is incapable? The glory of it is so overwhelming that to all who do not accept love as an absolute point of departure, its manifestations must seem the most senseless folly.

Towards Accepting the Incarnation: Jesus’ Self Realization
What we have just attempted to grasp in of the obscurity of divine action now presents itself to us in visible form (the journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory or into history) At first a child like any other, it cries, is hungry, sleeps, and yet “the Word…become flesh.” It cannot be said that God “inhabits” this infant, however gloriously; or that heaven has set its seal upon him, so that he must pursue it, suffer for it in a manner sublimely excelling all other contacts between God and man; this child is God in essence and in being.

If an inner protest should arise here, give it room. It is not good to suppress anything; if we try to , it only goes underground, becomes toxic, and reappears later in far more obnoxious form. Does anyone object to the whole idea of God-become-man? Is he willing to accept the Incarnation only as a profound and beautiful allegory, never as literal truth? If doubt can establish a foothold anywhere in our faith, it is here. Then we must be patient and reverent, approaching this central mystery of Christianity with calm, expectant, prayerful attention; one day its sense will be revealed to us. In the meantime let us remember the directive “But love does such things!”

The tenor of infant’s destiny is now fixed. What one is by birth determines the general theme of the life to follow; everything else is necessarily supplementary. Incident and environment are certainly influential — they sustain and burden, promote and destroy, effect and form. Nevertheless, it is the first step into existence with its heritage of blood and spirit that is decisive. Christian thinkers have spent much time and thought probing Jesus’ inner life, now from the psychological, now from the theological side, in an effort to discover what must have taken place there. But all psychology of Jesus shatters on the rock of what, essential, he is.

An analysis of Christ might be valid for the periphery or outmost surface of his being, but any significance or image it manages to construct is almost immediately consumed by the power of the center. As for theological analysis, however true in itself and fundamentally important to Christian thought, it is necessarily abstract. Hence, in order to advance at all in our faith, we are bound to call some concrete train of thought to our assistance. Let us try this one:

The young creature in the stall of Bethlehem was a human being with human brain and limbs and heart and soul. And it was God. Its life was to manifest the will of the Father: to proclaim the sacred tidings, to stir mankind with the power of God, to establish the Covenant, and shoulder the sin of the world, expiating it with love and leading mankind through the destruction of sacrifice and the victory of the Resurrection into the new existence of grace. In this accomplishment alone lay Jesus’ self-perfection: fulfillment of mission and personal fulfillment were one. The Resurrected himself points this out: “Did not the Christ have to suffer these things before entering into his glory?” (Luke 24:26).

It was as if Jesus’ self realization meant that his human being “took possession” of the divine being he had always intrinsically been. Jesus did not experience God; he was God. He never at any moment “became” God; he was God from the start. His life was the process by which this innate divinity came into its own. His task was to place divine reality and power squarely in the realm of his human consciousness and will; to reflect holy purity in his relation to all things, and to contain infinite love and divinity’s boundless plenitude in his heart of flesh and blood.

The Lord’s life might also be called a continuous penetration, infiltration of self, a hoisting of his being to ever higher levels of self-containment. For him self-conquest is seizure of his own superabundance. All external speech, struggle, action is simultaneously an unbroken advance of the man Jesus Christ into his own divinity. The thought is certainly inadequate. It does not pretend to be perfect theological argument but only a stimulus when we reflect on the frail child in the crib and all that stirs behind its small forehead.
Fr. Romano Guardini, “The Lord”