Understanding Incarnation

CONTENTS:

• Incarnation as Worldview—video by Tobie Tondi, SHCJ

• Who Do You Say I Am?—video by Tobie Tondi, SHCJ

• Christmas Meditation 2022—video by Mary Ann Buckley, SHCJ

• Watch This Space—video interview with 8 SHCJ

• Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold by Diarmuid O’Murchu—book review by Terri MacKenzie, SHCJ

• Big Incarnation—”How Do We Practice Embodying God in Our Lives”—video & excerpts from a talk by Matthew Wright in the light of Teilhard de Chardin’s writings

• Deep Incarnation by Denis Edwards—some highlights from the theology of Karl Rahner & Elizabeth Johnson on the connection between Incarnation & creation

• Theology & Earth—audio recording of speech by Elizabeth Johnson launching a new initiative by Fordham University to advance the study of our relationship with Earth

• Ukrainian theologian Ligita Ryliškytė probes the justice of the suffering of Christ in her new book, Why the Cross?

• “An Unimaginable Intimacy” from Only Wonder Comprehends—author John Garvey explores Incarnation from the perspective that our minds are incapable of taking it all in

• “Who Are You for Us, Jesu Kristi?”—excerpts from Theology Brewed in an African Pot by Nigerian theologian, A.E. Orobator, SJ

• “What Mickey Mouse Teaches Us about Christmas” by Eric Clayton, Jesuit Conference of Canada & the USA

INCARNATION: A New Evolutionary Threshold

By Diarmuid O’Murchu

A Book Review by Terri MacKenzie, SHCJ

RE-SOURCE #1 — February 2 – May 27, 2023

Many SHCJ and Associates have appreciated books by Diarmuid O’Murchu, priest, social psychologist, and prolific author. Given our current focus on Incarnation, I was eager to read his Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold, Orbis Books, 2017, (218 pages plus an extensive Bibliography and Index).

O’Murchu’s main purpose here is “to reclaim and expand our understanding of Incarnation.” (p.149) He writes for “mature adults … [and those] intellectually curious and seeking a forum where their exploration of faith can become the subject of serious and reflective dialogue.” (p.4) He acknowledges that those who limit themselves to traditional beliefs and systems of masculine power might object.

O’Murchu speaks from his basic belief that “Incarnation names and celebrates the embodiment of God in the whole creation….” pre-dating Bethlehem by billions of years. Those who already agree can still benefit from his exploration into the incarnational ramifications of evolution, the Great Spirit, anthropology, patriarchy and power, gender and sexuality, identity, sin and evil, suffering, Christmas and Resurrection, and adult education.

O’Murchu blames Aristotle and the Agricultural Revolution for the current masculine power systems. In contrast, he valorizes women in the first centuries of Church history, and he emphasizes the importance of our vocation to cooperate with the Great Spirit in striving to create “the companionship of empowerment” — his name for “the kingdom.”

Underlying each chapter is his conviction of the urgency of expanding our identities from isolated individuals to “a radically redefined sense of what it means to be human.” (p.71) “As Laudato Si’ reminds us, we are into a radical new appraisal of faith where the earth itself and its interdependent life-forms require us to embrace afresh … a profound rediscovery of our vocation as sacred earthlings in the very earth we inhabit.” (p. 77)

I feel the author achieved his aim to provide “animation and encouragement toward incarnational growth … in the context of the twenty-first century.” Given our current efforts to share and expand our understanding of Incarnation, our deepening awareness of our participation in a world in which God lives and acts, and the many documents calling us to action, I believe we can all profit from the information and inspiration contained in this book.

BIG INCARNATION

— “How do we practice embodying God in our Lives?”

by Matthew Wright

RE-SOURCE #1 — February 2 – May 27, 2023

Matthew Wright is priest-in-charge for St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock, NY, a writer, speaker, teacher and retreat leader in the Christian contemplative tradition. In this presentation he offers his “big” understanding of the mystery of Incarnation in the light of the writings of Teilhard de Chardin.

Here are some excerpts from Wright’s talk in 2022, and a link to a video of the whole presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J_0G8oBjyE&t=1823s (42 minutes)

“... what if we live inside the heart of God? What if creation is the manifestation of the heart of God? What if the world is the unfolding of the very heart of God which seeks to express itself here in the world of time...?”

“I want to explore incarnation in that sense – that the cosmos is the incarnation, the enfleshment and embodiment of God – the river system … the trees … the respiratory system …”

“This concept of incarnation —we’ve often made it very small, [as if] it’s just a weird oneoff that happened in Jesus, but the christian mystical tradition has always understood it as something much bigger than that …. it doesn’t end with Jesus, but is to go on unfolding, a process of divinization in which we are awakening to the indwelling God … we are to further God’s incarnation … ”

Wright attributes the inspiration for his vision of big incarnation to the beliefs and writings of Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin:

“To live in an evolutionary universe means to join in God’s work. The doctrine of the Incarnation gave [Teilhard de Chardin] the framework for his vision — the Word became flesh — a descending God entering into the heart of matter; not a one-time event but a vast, cosmic process initiated in the big bang and awakened to in Jesus. The awakening continues unfolding in the mystical body of Xt, the human family. The body of Christ is creation and we each have to contribute our part to incarnation – each of us a microcosm in which the incarnation is wrought.”

“We live in an incarnational, eucharistic cosmos where the self-giving of God is ongoing.”

God has chosen to need men & women in every age to reveal divine love, to make known the reality of the Incarnation.

by Denis Edwards

RE-SOURCE #1 —

February 22 – May 27, 2023

Australian theologian Denis Edwards (1943-2019) traces the development of the concept of “deep incarnation” by various contemporary theologians. By deep incarnation he means a way of making connections between incarnation and the whole of creation.

To whet your appetite to read more of this short and very readable book, I have selected some excerpts from the views of Karl Rahner and Elizabeth Johnson on incarnation in an evolutionary world. Mary Ann Buckley, SHCJ

“…. For Christ is true human being, true son of Adam, truly lived a human life in all its breadth and height and depth. And hence, everything, without confusion and without separation, is to enter into eternal life; there is to be not only a new heaven but a new earth. Nothing, unless it be eternally damned, can remain outside the blessing, the protection, the transfiguration of this divinization of the whole, which, beginning in Christ, aims at drawing everything that exists into the life of God…, precisely in order that it may thus have eternal validity conferred upon it. This is the reality of Christ, which constitutes Christianity, the incarnate life of God in our place and our time. (Karl Rahner, Mission and Grace: Essays in Pastoral Theology II, quoted in Deep Incarnation, p.85)

“Throughout his theological career, Rahner saw the need to understand the incarnation in fresh ways in light of the new picture of reality that was emerging from scientific cosmology and evolutionary biology. He points out that whereas traditional theology assumed a static world, we can now see that there have been massive transitions in the history of the universe, including the transitions from matter to the first forms of life on earth, and the transition from early forms of life to various species of homo, and to modern humans, with their extremely complex brains. This leads Rahner to ask:

How should we think about the incarnation in the light of an evolutionary view of the world in which we live?

yRahner makes two fundamental assumptions in responding to this question. The first is that humans belong in one inter-connected world, existing only in evolutionary and ecological interrelation with the biological and material world in which they evolve. The human spirit, with its unique consciousness and freedom, emerges only as radically related to matter. So Rahner speaks of biologically organized matter as “oriented in spirit.” Under the impulse of God’s creative Spirit, matter comes to transcend itself and becomes self-conscious spirit.

In Rahner’s view, the unity of the one universe, and the unity of matter and spirit, have direct significance for Christology. A radical unity of this kind supports the understanding that the incarnation involves a hypostatic union of the Logos, not just with the isolated humanity of Jesus, but with the matter of the universe as such, with the radical potentiality of the whole creation. Such a unity of the one world of matter, flesh, and consciousness shows, Rahner says, “why the total reality of the world is ipso facto touched to its very roots by the incarnation of the Logos precisely in virtue of the fact that matter must be conceived of fundamentally and from the outset as one. A second fundamental assumption for Rahner is that, whereas many theologians have seen the reason for the incarnation simply as the salvation of sinful humanity, he holds to the tradition associated with Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), but also with many others, that from the beginning God’s creation is directed to the incarnation. Irrespective of human sin, the divine intention in creating a world of creatures was always freely to give God’s self to creatures in the incarnation, and so to bring them to their fulfillment. God creates a world in order to give God’s self to creatures in the Word made flesh and in the Spirit poured out. Harvey Egan writes that the briefest summary of Rahner’s theology is “his creative appropriation of Scotus’ view that God creates in order to communicate self and that creation exists in order to be the recipient of God’s free gift of self.”

y“[Elizabeth Johnson] sees the incarnation as a new radical embodiment, in which the Wisdom/Word of God joins the material world to accomplish a new level of union between Creator and creature .... [S]he suggests that the incarnation brings salvation to all that is embraced by the Word made flesh. This has often been understood as referring particularly to all aspects of the humanity that are taken by the Word. Deep incarnation seeks to clarify a further extension of the impact of incarnation:

‘Deep incarnation extends this view to include all flesh. In the incarnation Jesus, the self-expressing Wisdom of God, conjoined the material conditions of all biological life forms (grasses and trees), and experienced the pain common to all sensitive creatures (sparrows and seals). The flesh assumed in Jesus connects with all humanity, all biological life, all soil, the whole matrix of the material universe down to its vey roots.’ (cf. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 196)

The incarnation not only weds Jesus to humanity but also reaches beyond humanity to all living creatures and to the cosmic dust of which all earth creatures are composed. In this way, Johnson says, matter and flesh become part of God’s own story forever. The incarnation is a cosmic event.”

(cf. Johnson, Ask the Beasts,197)

Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation. NY: Orbis Books, 2019, 5-6, 89-91

“THEOLOGY & THE EARTH: Human Beings in the Community of Creation”

RE-SOURCE #1 — February 2 – May 27, 2023

Elizabeth A. Johnson CSJ is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Theology at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York City, and a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, NY.

Johnson was the featured speaker at a special event to launch a new endowed fund at Fordham Univesity to advance the inter-disciplinary study of our relationship with earth; she spoke, along with two panelists, on March 21, 2023.

Here are some excerpts from her presentation and a link to the audio track of her whole talk https://vimeo.com/818886458?share=copy

“The time is now for the study of theology and earth .... We humans need to re-think our relationship with nature and all its creatures, change that we are masters of the universe to realize that we are siblings and kin to all creatures in a community of creation loved by God.”

1) the community of creation: “Evolution can explain how species came to be, but there’s more to it; the world is gift of a generous creator .... But creation is ongoing; the living God continuously creates.”

“We humans are an intrinsic part of the evolutionary network of this planet. Why is our blood red, like the blood of other mammals? Because of iron. There is but one biosphere, one community of life, of creation — everything is connected to everything else and we flourish and wither together.”

2) a powerful obstacle for grasping that we’re part of it: “The ‘hierarchy of being’ has been toxic for us. Greek philosophy saw the world composed of matter and spirit, with divinity as pure spirit, and philosophy used this schema to create the hierarchy of being. This model structures the world as a pyramid with humans at the pinnacle. Theology grew on this framework. Today feminist thinkers see the hierarchy as turned in on itself — men have more spirit than women so women by nature are subordinate to men. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans began explorations and saw themselves as having the right to exploit, assign to people of color souls of lesser qualities, closer to animals than to humans. Europeans thought they had the right to transport these people — [we have] racism and slavery to this day. How deeply the hierarchy has made its way into Christian thought and spirituality; unbridled exploitation of natural world can be traced to ongoing influence of the hierarchy of being.”

3) remedies to remove the obstacle: “We need to be converted to the earth as one, beloved community of creation .... All creatures are moving forward with us toward a common point of arrival which is God. [In Laudato Si’ we read that] God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we should feel the soil drying out into desert .... the loss of a species should strike us as if our own body is dying .... eternal life will be a shared experience of wonder in which each creature resplendently transfigured will take its place.”

NEW BOOK: by Ligita Ryliškytė

Why the Cross: Divine Friendship and the Power of Justice

RE-SOURCE — February 2 — May 27, 2023

Barbara Linen, SHCJ calls our attention to a new book written by Ligita Ryliškytė, SJE, who is a systematic theologian, a member of the Lithuanian Catholic community, Sisters of the Eucharistic Jesus, and a native of Lithuania. She earned her doctorate with distinction from Boston College.

Her book, Why the Cross: Divine Friendship and the Power of Justice was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023 as part of the series Current Issues in Theology. In it she probes the justice of the suffering and death of Christ. An e-book is forthcoming soon.

In the on-line article, “The Justice that Rolls Down Like Waters, Sr. Ryliškytė explains her book in terms of her country’s history and culture, her own personal experience, and insights from the theology of Bernard Lonergan

To read the whole article, click on the link: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2022/12/the-justice-that-rolls-down-like-waters/

Here are some excerpts from the article.

“Do we not still ask: Why did God, in God’s infinite wisdom and goodness, choose to allow Jesus to face the blinding darkness of Golgotha? And why does God save us, not from death, but through death, as Richard Bauckham once poignantly put it? In other words, Why the cross? What was fitting or “just” about God’s choice to save us in this way? Is there a value to the twilight that precedes the dawn?

These are the questions that animated my research and intellectual struggle while writing Why the Cross? Divine Friendship and the Power of Justice. In a nutshell, the book reconsiders the very notion of the justice of the cross. How is the justice of the cross just?”

“Hence, in a sense, this book can be seen as a fruit of a conscious, even if indirect, attempt to own my cultural heritage. Furthermore, it also has roots in my personal experience. It was an experience of growing up in an occupied country torn by Communist repressions.”

“However, I have also seen another kind of justice, a redemptive justice or the justice of the cross, as Lonergan calls it. This justice was about absorbing evil and transforming it into good. About persevering in love, gratitude, and wonder, no matter what. About choosing a difficult good. This kind of justice was operative when people rose to non-violently resist the Communist regime in the so-called Singing Revolution of the Baltic countries. We stood together and sang, even against the Russian tanks on January 13th, 1991.”

““These words, written when I began my project a few years ago, now cannot be read without reminding me of a deep sorrow for the current plight of the Ukrainian people. Their predicament reinforces the need to carefully discern between the abuse of power in the name of justice and the power of transformative justice, and to take responsibility for one’s actions in history.”

see “Images of Faith & Suffering” in FEASTS & SEASONS

Abbey of

Sant’ Antimo,, Castelnuovo del Abate, Italy

“An Unimaginable Intimacy” from Only Wonder Comprehends, by

John Garvey, 2018

The fullness of what Incarnation means is closed to us, and our minds are incapable of taking it all in. In Jesus an unknowable God (being unknowable is essential to what and who God is) is with us as brother, companion, fellow-sufferer, one who praises John the Baptist and tells a scribe he is close to the Kingdom, gives us saving stories, sits at the well with the Samaritan woman and even jokes with her ... This is a shocking level of intimacy that ends in a shameful death, a death not all noble by the standards of the ancient world.

I believe that this intimacy (and this upsetting of what we expect God and our salvation to be like) is so close to what it would take to bring our tragically wounded world close to God’s love, and what it can mean in our lives, that it makes more sense to me than any other story, much more than the notion that, as beautiful as the cosmos is, it is finally without any meaning other than the awe it inspires.

But what Incarnation means goes so deep that our first stumbling interpretations are crude. Matter itself matters here, not just its fleshy human dimension, but any created thing. We identify with sentient beings, being sentient ourselves, and if we are Christians, we believe that God in his compassion in some way suffers with us all – but God is also in some way intimate with silicon, with gravity itself, with dark matter. Dante’s love that moves the sun and the other stars is encountered in flesh: but how does it encounter water? It does, because water is.

In some way beyond our capacity to imagine it, what Jesus did on the Cross and in the Resurrection has to do with crystals and large gas planets. How do they come into the love and kenosis involved there? I have no clue, but that love and glory and God’s own joy participate in being at every level is basic to our faith. When I say the name of Jesus in prayer I am not only naming the one named after Joshua who saved us on the Cross by his death and Resurrection, but a universal event that transforms a universe in which flesh and matter itself mean death into a universe aimed at transformation and life, in which flesh and all forms of matter reflect only God’s love for all of creation, which is because he loves it. (August 12, 2011)

John Garvey was an Orthodox priest and, for 40 years, a columnist for Commonweal Magazine. After his death in 2015 his essays were published in the collection Only Wonder Comprehends.

“Who Are You for Us, Jesu Kristi?”— excerpts from Theology Brewed in an African Pot by A.E. Orobator, SJ, Orbis Books, 2008

RE-SOURCE #1 — February 2, 2023

Orobator, originally from Benin City, Nigeria, converted from his people’s animistic religious beliefs at the age of 16, and entered the Jesuit seminary at 19. He has been president of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar and provincial superior of the Eastern Africa Province of Jesuits; he is the author and editor of many books and a frequent lecturer.

Excerpts from chapter 6,

“I Said, ‘God Had a Son,’ but I did not say, ‘He Had a Wife!’ ”

“The name Jesu Kristi is relatively new in Africa. Africans did not call upon this name before the advent of the Christian missionaries. Nevertheless, Jesu Kristi has gained popularity on the lips of African Christians. In many parts of Africa, songs have been written, liturgies composed, and humorous stories told about Jesus in local languages. This popularity embodies a profound quest, namely, the quest for the true face of Jesus. I use the words “true face” deliberately. I wish to show that the Africans’ quest for “who Jesus is for us” cannot be satiated by simply adopting Christological formulas and models developed in foreign cultural contexts. Some people might object: “It doesn’t matter. Jesus transcends culture!” Not quite. Jesus subsumes culture! These are two different understandings.

How can we recast the alien and expatriate images of Jesus Christ in the mold of the rich and colorful African religious and cultural worldview in order to discover an authentic and meaningful African identity and personality of Jesus? This question is not academic; it represents an ongoing search for a Jesu Kristi who will be able to respond to questions posed by Africans themselves.

…. So far, the result of this quest, at least in the African theological circle, is a striking litany of Christological titles, models, and proposals, along with an extensive job description for the African Christ. We have, for example, the following models or proposals: ancestor, diviner, traditional healer, healer, chief, guest, warrior, life giver, family member, initiator, mediator, intermediary, friend, loved one, brother, elder brother, ideal brother, universal brother, photo-elder, kin, kinsman, chief priest, chief elder, ruler, king, leader, liberator, black messiah, and so on.

Why is Christology so important in Africa? According to Nigerian theologian Enyi B. Udoh, if there is a problem of faith in Africa, that problem derives from the way we understand or misunderstand Jesus Christ. In other words, it is a christological problem. And what is this problem?”

Perhaps you will want to read this book and post a review on RE-SOURCE

Also, click https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0040563918819916m?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.1 to read a review of another of Orobator’s books: Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist, by Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018