As I mentioned last night, I regularly read Suzanne Guthrie's website, Edge of Enclosure. She's an Anglican priest who is living with a community of nuns who seek to live sustainably, who seek to live spiritually and who seek to live with intention and integrity working with God to create a world of peace and justice with love. Suzanne wrote a poem for this day based on John's theology of the "Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us":
In the beginning a silent soundscape,
a procession of absolute stillness,
unfolding spheres of mystery
from veiled unknowable
to startling specific,
the Word descends
embeds,
gestates,
unfurls as
grace upon grace,
deep rooted love within love.
And so, heaven and earth unite
in the Word made flesh dwelling
among us. Not then, not now,
not once. But evermore.
The beauty of John's poetic telling of Christmas without angels, shepherds, Magi, and even Mary and Joseph is that it is cosmic in scope and traces back to the beginning when there was only God. This passage, one of my favourites, speaks to my mystically oriented heart. John affirms that the God's influenceÑGod's creative and loving impetusÑis impelled into time and space. God, unknowable and beyond mystery yet experienced in each person, each atom and knowable in the expression of love that we exchange, shares in the humility of our flesh, thus enabling us to share in the mystery of God's being. In other words, God is enfleshed in bodily form in life and the created form is imbued with God's being. We are at once divine and fleshy creatures. The divine spark of life is in each of usÑthe essence of GodÑand we live with all that it means to live, knowing joy and sorrow, knowing peace and fear, knowing hope and despair.
As Suzanne Guthrie said on her website, "The heartrending exquisiteness of the prologue (to John's Gospel) breaks Christmas open in beauteous, heavenly light." The power of Christmas for me has always been the mystical sense of God's presence in life that we affirm most clearly in the birth of Jesus and seek to affirm more positively in all of creation. Jesus came to dwell among us as a bodily form of God's love for all and as an invitation to live lives more fully, more lovingly, more sustainably, more from a sense of justice and hope.
Part of my own experience is that it is easy for me to see God's presence in my experiences in nature—even those where there is danger from predatory animals or from being close to lost. My challenge is to live this presence more fully and intentionally in community with others, here in the city where there is fear and disharmony, where there are different perspectives and understandings of politics and life. The challenge we all face, which Christmas asks each year, is how will we live the enfleshed Word of God, how will we, as our Purpose Statement says, embody the love of God. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us—and dwells still. But we, too, are flesh and blood people and Christmas invites us to live the fullness of God's love and being in our lives.
Or to put it poetically in the words of Gerard Manly Hopkins,
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is,
Since he was what I am.
Christmas blessings to you all!
Amen.
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