ADVENT WEEK 2: MY LIFE JOURNEY
GOD BURSTS INTO THE WORLD OR WAS IT MORE THAN THAT?
One of the hardest things for us humans to comprehend about the Incarnation is that God is inviting us to experience our time here on earth in a different way than we may now imagine. Our perception of “our” world are colored – oh so colored – by our human senses1 that provide only glimpses into the fullness of the reality that truly is. We tend to forget to consider what God intended our senses to be. Perhaps they also are hints of deeper realities such as the nature of God, ourselves and all around us. We often fail to grasp all but the simplest, most superficial ideas that sensory input offers us. How much does what we “sense” reveal about God simply in God making us able to observe what we observe through the senses? They are the sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch that introduce us to a Spirit world beyond the physical objects we perceive.
ADVENT: A TIME TO THINK OF THE INCARNATION THROUGH THE LENS OF AN ADULT FAITH
Many of our religious perceptions of Christmas and the Incarnation originate from what we grasped with the child’s mind of the very adult concepts someone(s) tried to teach us. How many books or articles about the Catholic meaning of Christmas and the Incarnation have you read in the past few years? Let’s engage in some adult reflection on the Incarnation, Jesus, the God-Man in our midst.
Ponder: How much deeper, richer, clearer are you understanding of the Incarnation: what it is, why it happened, what it means to you?
JESUS – HUMAN TO THE FULLEST
Psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that, while most people have the potential to reach full humanness, which Maslow called self-actualization, only a few, perhaps as few as 10%, achieve it. People seem to concentrate on their need for self-defense, food and safety rather than on developing their full humanness. Perhaps it is harder to figure out what being fully ourselves is or how to achieve it. Enter Jesus. But what do we know of Him and what His presence on earth signifies?
Ponder: How much time do you spend nurturing your personal growth into your own “full humanness” modeled on the growth you perceive as you get to know and love Jesus?
As we begin this new Liturgical Year, let us consider our personal life journey to the fullness that God, our Father, wants us to grow to be. Our faith, regardless of how feeble we may consider it to be, is bolstered by what God has breathed and is still breathing into us. Be open to that gentle stirring within you.
Ponder; Stretch your thinking and your imagination: We see the Incarnation as God entering into the world, as God taking on the form of a human being. While this is true, is expressing the Incarnation in that way limiting our perception of what happened in the Incarnation? Maybe God’s message in the Incarnation is also that “our” world is bigger than we think. Could it mean that, even though we and our world cannot contain God, God and God’s “universe” can and is permeating our world and us even as much as we are in us? Perhaps we were (are?) missing this and Jesus’ came to encourage us to change our perception of reality to include this.
OUR TIME; GOD’S TIMELESSNESS ACROSS GENERATIONS
From our perspective, God became man in the person of Jesus, thus entering into “our world.” But looking at it from God’s perspective, Jesus brought to us a realization that “our world” – the world we see colored by our time and space limitations – is immersed in and permeated by God’s timelessness and now-ness which stretches to eternity encompassing all generations, past, present and future. God’s “space” encompasses all the universes and more! God permeates, even more strongly put: God is the soul of all that makes up “our world.” God is not only to be found in the far off outer edges of time and space which we may think of as “heaven.” God is in the here and now of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Let us ponder this as we begin this new Liturgical Year.
- What does the Incarnation mean to you personally?
- How can you share more deeply your presence in the St. Michael community (or your own Church community) that gathers each weekend in God the Eternal Now.