"that is"

A verse caught my eye this morning: Revelation 13:6. The part that looked interesting was "to blaspheme His name and His tabernacle, that is, those who dwell(*) in heaven." (*) Or "who tabernacle" (as a verb). The "that is" isn't in the text, but is inferred from the grammar--in the Vaticanus/Sinaiticus versions. The KJV used a different Greek text that has an and there.

It's a trivial difference, and both readings make sense and neither changes anything about the thrust of the passage.

But the image of "those who dwell in heaven" is different between the two. With the "that is, those who dwell in heaven" reading, all those in heaven have the Spirit of God within them, and are also a kind of tabernacle and a kind of incarnation.

Catholic and Orthodox devotions refer to the Virgin Mary as the tabernacle--the place where God is/was staying. Some call her the first of the new tabernacles. Seems reasonable.

A prophet because he is a prophet

He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.

This reminds one of 1 Samuel 30:24: that the soldiers given unglamorous assignments should be rewarded like the headliners.

There's a lot in that little sentence. The world is made with friction and disintegrating forces, so that a thing once made is not made forever; it must be maintained and sometimes even remade.

Those of us who merely maintain the garden are co-creators of the garden with the ones who made it in the first place. We have the honor of participating in its creation, through its maintenance: two sides of a coin.

OK, I'm not a prophet (though one never knows), but if I welcome a prophet and put the word given him into action, I join with him in his work and share in his reward.

Even if I didn't think of it myself, if I help that "righteous man", encourage and honor him (or her--I can think of many), I participate in their righteous work.

We're one body in the church in Christ. When one part hurts, all do; when one is honored, all are.

Jesus' statement is apparently even broader than just that. After all, not all who "receive a righteous man" are members of that body. But perhaps verse 40 gives encouraging context: "He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me." If they receive His missionaries they receive Him, and even if they only receive a righteous man they are on the road to receiving Him.

But notice--the welcomer is not claiming equal honor with the prophet.

Specificity

I got to thinking about confessions this morning, recalling a little earlier mention of such things, when I ran across a post on Anecdotal Evidence about "kitch":

"This insulation of kitsch from experience," Kimball writes, "helps to explain its peculiar abstract quality: Kitsch is always ready to sacrifice the particular for the general, the specific for the universal, the concrete for the abstract."

...

"Instead of attempting to communicate individual beautiful, true, evil, human phenomena, kitsch strives to incarnate beauty, truth, evil, and humanity without loss. Art is more modest. It sees the universal in the particular, true, but it does not thereby dispense with the particular; its gaze remains focused on the particular because it realizes and accepts that, for man, the world speaks not abstractly or all at once but piecemeal, in fragments, through this tree, this landscape, this face, this web of relationships in which I find myself."

It's way easier to confess to the generic sin than the particular. The memory of a particular instance of (e.g.) rudeness still has the power to humiliate me in a way that no general admission that "I was rude to some people" can.

We don't live among Forms, but specific instances. Love is generic, yes, but it exists--is incarnated--in a particular smile, in setting out the needed item before the loved one needs it, the unseen works as well as the surprise cakes.

Likewise with the sins. Generic "Sin" afflicts us all, particular forms beset us differently, but what curses us most are the instances of it we put in our lives. Instances we don't like to think about; abstractions are easier.

Instances are life; abstractions are disembodied. Maybe angels have some kind of life of archetypes; not us.

Old writings

C.S. Lewis strongly recommended On the Incarnation of the Word by St. Athanasius. I finally got around to reading it. Yes, read it. It's short and the language is clean--it doesn't need lots of explanatory footnotes. He explains why the Incarnation is fitting and offers proofs for the divinity of Jesus.

I notice that he brings forward among the proofs of his case both the lives of Christians and miracles. I wonder what he'd refer to if he wrote today.

Lewis also recommended Boethius. Cheers for CCEL!

Grumpiness about lyrics

The song Crown Him With Many Crowns has a line that drives me nuts: "Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own." Um... What's the point of creating at all if everything comes out the same? Immortal, Invisible says "in all life thou livest, the true life of all," which seems much more fitting--there are many expressions of life or music with the same enlivening life and music in them all.

I can't complain too much--the rest is great and I've composed nothing comparable. But some lines catch me sideways: e.g. ""And now I am happy all the day!"

A lot of hymns are aspirational, not descriptive; I have to cut some slack.

"things too marvelous for me"

You can find plenty of ways of parsing out what a human is: body/mind/soul, body/soul/spirit, body/spirit, and so on. Set aside the materialist "body-only" as obviously wrong. The bottom line seems to me to be that there's something blended in a way we don't understand well. We can tell there are material and supermaterial/supernatural aspects, united into something different from either alone. We have no good words to describe this "everyday incarnation." It shouldn't surprise use that we have problems understanding the Great Incarnation. Or the Trinity.

But we try.

Incarnation is one of the deep mysteries of creation. I think one can even say it is one of the principles of creation

If that's true, there are clearly different levels of incarnation.

At one extreme take the simplest case: God creates a universe with certain rules and parameters and calls it good.

A human creator puts time and thought and purpose into the things he makes. In the care he gives those things you can see some love as well--"willing the good of another"--in this case in giving a thing existence and worth, which are good things.

If we assume that God's creating is like that in its own inimitable way, we see that God puts some of His wisdom and love (and glory, per Paul) into His creation. Since God is simple, these attributes are not different from Him, and so He in expressing Himself in creation is present in, and at some simple level united with, His creation.

That sounds almost pantheistic, but isn't--God is immeasurably beyond all creation, and only the faintest image of His glory is there, and this uniting is not as profound as other forms.

Imagine a sunset, and then imagine what you would have if God withdrew His attributes. Beauty and glory and purpose gone--no color or shape or significance (day to night). Wisdom and rule gone--no physical laws, just dark chaos. Existence gone--nothing, which we cannot even imagine, since an observer or imagine-er is something.

At the other extreme of incarnation we have Jesus--unimaginably God and Man and incarnate at every level.

In between, there's us. And angels, but I don't know enough about them to say anything useful--I have no idea what, if anything, corresponds to them as matter does to us.

We're part of creation, and exemplify the usual ordinary-creation aspects of God: beauty, wisdom, form and order, and so on.

However, we are also capable of knowing these things--a different and more profound manifestation of God's knowledge. We can know, with Him, that He is present and active in our actions.

We are incarnate spirit and matter, and each of these effects the other and to separate the two destroys us. We're shown in scripture that in the resurrection/restoration the body and spirit are remade together. This form of "amphibian" God called good. A body with a ghost, or an ethereal spirit trapped in matter, are things of horror stories--they're the wrong form, not a true incarnation.

We feel that when we work we leave something of ourselves in the work--and certainly some of our time and thought went into what we did, and from a perspective outside time they're still there, embedding part of us--at least our gifts--in the world. As God displays in His creation, in a smaller way we appear in ours.

There's another possible version of incarnation, which I feel even less qualified to explore--the Spirit of God living in us, in some kind of union with us. Perhaps Theosis?

In his steps

I watched a (to me) interesting 17-part documentary in which a couple of Coptic monks at St. Anthony's explained their life and the reasons for it--and the purpose of tradition. I found this episode ironic: they extoll the blessing of being able to put your feet where St. Anthony put his.

In a way this is the exact opposite of detaching yourself from attachments to the world. The highest things for them should be the mass and prayer, with nothing between them and God. That St. Anthony walked there is a mere accident in comparison.

But it's natural to sense a connection with other people through things. "This was my great-grandmother's lace." "My father gave me that knife." "My granddaughter made that card for me." "This is where Degas used to sit and paint." "Her icon is a window to Saint Magdalene."

I think it was meant to be that way; that we were meant to incarnate love through action in the world. Because God is love, that means that we have a role in making God immanent in His world, a role in creation. (This isn't "free-form" "love," of course.) Grandfather's gift is an incarnation of his love, and through him of God's love.

To aim for complete detachment in a cave seems wrong to me. It is ungrateful--unwilling to put love into and receive love from the world. We weren't put in a desert, after all, but a garden. But the other side, clinging to souvenirs rather than holding them lightly for God, is clearly wrong.

I, of course, tend to cling and detach exactly backwards from what I ought.

Jesus built a number of things, which I assume all wore out long ago. He also healed a large number of people, fed a lot of people, produced quite a lot of very good wine--all long gone, except from God's presence. What would you do if you could get one of the yokes Jesus made? See Justin Martyr From the fact that none seem to exist anymore, I guess people used them for what He made them for. I wonder which approach He would prefer.

Simplicity

Does the simplicity of God bear on the Incarnation?

Start with something easier.

In some ways a man is like a wave. The matter that makes up a man is ephemeral; it is constantly being replaced. A wave's energy and organization stay more or less the same, but on different matter all the time. In both cases it is the "form"(*) acting on matter that makes the thing. Without matter there is no wave. Without matter we have no body, and we have no evidence for human life without a body. Orthodox doctrine tells of a resurrection of the body--reconstituting with new matter. Ghosts I do not understand--the evidence is unclear, though they are pretty universally testified to. (including by my wife)

Cast-off matter is no longer carried along with the "wave" or "form". Though some may keep a lock of hair as a souvenir most of us don't care about such things. Waste of course we put behind us. The final state of the body we honor for the sake of the one whose it was.

The matter of the body affects the "form" of the man--it isn't a one-way "ghost in the machine" procession. The combination is what makes the man. But it is a combination--a man has parts--and not just the different parts of the body.

When Jesus became a man, He took this kind of nature also. So He had godhead, the "form" of a man, and the body united with that 'form.'

But if God has no "parts" (simplicity), then this union also presumably has no part or divisions. We can, and probably should, say that when Jesus emptied Himself and took the form of a bond-servant, He took up non-simplicity with that. That's fair.

But I'd like to puzzle this a little further. The perfect unity of godhead and human 'form' is Chalcedonian, which most Christians accept. But what about the matter? That is inseparable from the 'form' of a man, but is clearly also a distinct part. (Also--2 hands, 2 feet, etc) Unless this particular matter, united with the One who made and sustains all matter, is united with all matter everywhere, it is hard to see how to make this "partless" or "simple." That seems uncomfortably close to pantheism. Perhaps the doctrine of theosis shows an orthodox way.

Theosis is God bringing us into union with Him.

"because Christ united the human and divine natures in Jesus' person, it is now possible for someone to experience closer fellowship with God than Adam and Eve initially experienced in the Garden of Eden, and that people can become more like God than Adam and Eve were at that time. Some Eastern Christian theologians say that Jesus would have become incarnate for this reason alone, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned."

And, if this union involves the matter of our bodies, matter too might be drawn into that union, though obviously not in nearly as deep a way--and I suppose it involves everything else which can be purified to which we are connected as well.

The nature of the Eucharist seems to be related to this kind of simplicity--it is "one loaf" in every time and place, from Calvary to modern Japan. Certainly it is a form of union, and Jesus said it was His body and blood--matter again.

I really need to keep Psalm 131 in mind and remember the rule: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Albert Einstein

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(*) I am not using "form" in Plato's sense here, but in the sense of the combination of soul and mind and organizational rules for the matter of this body. It is unique to the individual.

Incarnating

The orthodox view is that I am a soul-and-body unity, not a soul-haunted body. A jargon-heavy explanation... Theologians call Jesus' incarnation a hypostatic union, which is just technical shorthand for a longer description that means something similar, except with God and man instead of soul and body.

What is involved in being an incarnation? That's a union of different natures--which isn't a very useful definition. Maybe something operational...

The actions of the body have a purpose that isn't determined by the body's environment and reactions. The body expresses some aspects of the soul--and makes that expression possible.

Clearly this expression can happen through actions. But can the body express purpose or meaning through inaction? Through "just being," or "just being" in a way that is apparently determined by the body's environment and reactions?

That sounds kind of Zen, doesn't it? "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.". Undoubtedly the body is having an effect on the soul, but it isn't obviously an expression of the soul through the body.

Despite a more amazing incarnation, Jesus had about 20 "dark years" about which we know nothing directly, though we can infer from his townsfolk's reactions that nothing dramatic happened. Of course, people can get used to pretty nearly anything, and a perfect carpenter who doesn't preach might be easy to get used to and ignore. Or maybe not--but their reaction tells me they weren't expecting anything unusual.

"Do little things with great love?" Maybe that's the answer to the "just being" question: doing the "reactive" ordinary thing consciously with love. Who sees the difference? Maybe just God.

Trying to be intentional about each action tends to pull my attention away from God, so I'm not persuaded that that is a useful exercise by itself.

If I have the Holy Spirit in me, what I do and am needs to somehow incarnate that. Pew-warming is probably not the most expressive way. Study ought to reshape my mind and heart, but somehow that still doesn't quite seem fully expressive either. Maybe the best approach is concentrating on doing one thing (with love) at a time, and letting everything else be reactive. Start small. As distractible as I am, that's hard enough.

Incarnation

I don't have the skill to do justice to Jesus' Incarnation, nor even to the distant echo of it that is my own.

I'll limit myself to the shoe and the bookcase and hope I can manage those and not ramble too much.

I'm facing three large bookcases--2 of them 6' x 6'. I built them back when money was a lot tighter, and they've made several moves with us. I spent quite a bit of time measuring and drilling freehand, and learning the hard way about decorative brackets (an invention of the devil), and realizing after a few years that I had to bite the bullet and unload and varnish them.

My time and effort went into them, and if my time and effort are part of my life there's something of my life there. Ever since I made them they've been part of the background and tools of my life, and of my children's lives, and of my wife's life (sometimes to her chagrin, for I was far from an expert carpenter). Although it isn't good to be overly attached to things of this world, when we use something it leaves a mark on our lives and we leave a mark on it.

A shoe is almost silly. There's this reflection of my foot sunk into the material. If another one of those accidents at 1st and Washington takes me out, there'll still be this ghost of me in the shoe. It isn't an important thing, but it illustrates.

When our time ends, I suspect we bring into eternity what we put our selves into. Keeping the home clean is an action and not a thing; that comes with us too. My body has some trivial little quirks that don't seem important--the remaining hair keeps growing and needs to be cut now and then. Care for those trivial things is part of my life anyway. So is digging in the garden, an easy job that leaves a useful mark on the world. (but what inertia I have to overcome to do it!) So, I'm afraid, is procrastinating--and an absence of action is a very strange thing to bring into eternity.

The things we do and care for don't last in this world. The board is erased and the next boy steps up to the chalk. But I was put here to invest myself in work and people, for God. One way and another I've done that; put myself into things and people. This seems almost like a kind of incarnation of me in the things around me. I wonder what that will look like from eternity.

Incarnation and texting

I suspect we were put here originally to make love and beauty incarnate and to subdue the wild world into a wild garden. We aren't here just to think about things, noble an activity as that is.(*)

Charles Williams said that in the end, all loves must be physical. Screwtape was content if the patient's love was limited to fantasy--it didn't matter how glorious love was if it never made any difference. I find that my reaction to hearing of someone's illness is to pray for them briefly, think about whether there's anything that should be done, and then move on to other things--but Jesus didn't say "I was sick and you thought about me."

There is something important about investing not just my attention but my body in my works. A text or email message is good, a phone call has more presence, but being there in person means I'm putting my whole self in service to meeting you. (Assuming my mind isn't elsewhere--I remember my school days...) A Facebook "friend" may be the best connection possible between people too far apart, but it is a flimsy wraith compared to flesh and blood conversation. Face to face it isn't just my spirit that is with you, but all of me.

Maybe texting and Twitter are two of the nine rings: they give the illusion of stretching your life to more and more people, but at the price of stretching you thinner and thinner.

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(*)Thinking of math is good, but putting pencil to paper to develop it is better.