A random thought about the prayer of St. Francis occurred to me a few days ago that I wanted to share. He probably didn’t actually write the prayer, but lots of good stuff is pseudepigraphic, including large parts of scripture. This is what struck me:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Apparently, St. Francis or his ghostwriter had a counseling degree, because that bolded line is exactly what my therapist has been telling me for months. If we honestly try to understand another person, they are far more likely to try to understand us. We’ll also understand them better in the process, which is probably burying the lede—we may want them to understand how they are hurting us, but that felt need will likely fade once we understand why they are actually trying to say. Anyway, if it’s good enough for St. Francis, I’ll give it a try. Probably not random too.

This post isn’t ready for prime time. It’s not even half baked. It’s still fluid.

• I want to write about Advent because it’s coming.
• I want to write about Advent because it implies the incarnation, which is my all-time favorite doctrine.
• Incarnation is important because it is God the creator entering creation in order to be in community with us.
• Incarnation is the transcendent becoming immanent.

How can a transcendent, eternal God enter a temporal world that they created? What is incarnation? If we reject dualism, what does it mean that the divine spirit inhabits a material body? It’s not even a logical notion in light of contemporary science and theology. If incarnation makes no sense factually, at least as it was understood in the first centry, then what is scripture telling us? I’d say metaphor is a good first approximation.

I’m thinking of 1st century notions of life force, soul, and spirit vs. flesh or material. Greek notions weren’t as simple as a dualistic body and soul. Even then, the incarnation was described as the perfect melding of God & humanity—the hypostatic union, to be exact. There were two natures that were one nature, distinct and yet inseparable. Finding words to describe it is an exercise in oxymoron. It’s a bundle of paradoxes tied up in red Christmas ribbons.

I have no answers. I have lots of questions. It is a lifelong fascination. There will be more to come.

Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. (Rachel Held Evans: Searching for Sunday (2015), p. 38)

I find the cosmological argument for the existence of God convincing—I can’t conceive of a universe without a first cause. I can believe in the Trinity. I can believe in creation, so long as you give me longer than six days. I struggle with divine intervention in the world, not because I don’t believe God is capable but because of the problem of evil it raises. But resurrection . . . our resurrection. If you can swallow that, you can swallow all of it. I think I want it to be true—I mean, an eternity in heaven could be pretty nice—but it also scares the crap out of me. We’re finite beings, and we can only ever understand infinity as an abstract concept. An existence that transcends time is, well, transcendent. Beyond our understand and the nature of our being. Guaranteed to blow your mind.