Humanity and Nature through the Lens of Incarnation (part 1)

There is no person, event or experience too insignificant to be an experience of God. “Whatever touches the human heart,” wrote St. John Chrysostom, “touched the heart of God as well.”

Our personal experiences of the agonies and ecstasies of life, of terrible suffering or sublime joy, of the most ordinary and menial of moments – all, it is true, are the intimate embrace of a most devoted God and lover. This transformation begins with ourselves first as we discover and treasure the divine image within us.

If we are true to this vision, our lives will be turned upside down and, as we find our True Selves, we find God at the same time!

Hello – once again friends, it is great to be together. The last time we were looking at the humanity of Jesus – the key to Incarnation itself.

This time, our episode has to do with nature and humanity rough the lens of Incarnation. In fact, it does take up a lot of the thoughts and the images and the phrases that we have been using throughout the last 7 episodes.

There is a line in Les Misérables that seems to have caught the imagination of many people. The line is in a song at the end of the production – “To love another person is to see the face of God” It is almost Incarnation in a song – theology in a sentence if you like – and we will see it in the words of Pope Francis which we will be looking at in a moment. Again, a repetition that human love is God’s love incarnate. The Pope explicitly says that “every new friendship, every new breakthrough from a closed place, every real human experience is an actual sharing of God’s presence.”

It is very consoling. It is very wonderful. I hope we truly realise that and enrich our lives and our spirit. I remember what St. John Chrysostom says: “Whatever opens the human heart opens the heart of God as well.” That is how close the intimacy is. Something within us tells us that no matter where or how we worship – if at all – that true love and compassion will always be the most accurate, authentic, incarnate experience of God that we will ever have.

Whenever we encounter someone new or indeed any new experience we are learning something more about God. This has been weaving in and out of all the episodes – the newness of everything deepens our understanding of the beauty of God. It opens up spiritual horizons. That means that too often we stay stuck about what we learned when we were small and somehow as we grow up and into our teenage years our interests spread and our attention is taken along different paths, and our religious education, our spiritual education is frozen so to speak and unlike every other aspect of our lives it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t spread, it doesn’t deepen and Pope Francis is referring to that when he says to “taking us beyond our limited constructs.”

They will always be limited but there is a great depth and divinity to our hearts so the main theme of this episode could be summed up as – Incarnation means, and we have heard this before, that to be truly human is to be truly divine, and we repeat it because we need to hear it again and again because we have a doubt about it or we forget it or we don’t take it seriously enough.

Human love and forgiveness is Divine love and forgiveness incarnate. Incarnation is God living as us and we will just spend a moment during the last few sessions about that little word “as”.

It is that it is God’s desire and God’s wish to be known not in spite of us – not through us or in us even – but “as us”. We are carefully designed and fashioned as beautifully by our Mother/Father God that God’s wish is to be known “as us” – through us yes, but “as us”. We are not required to diminish completely but to grow into the whole life of God and in that way, in our purified humanity, for God to be able to delight in us as we are.

So, at both the personal level and at the universal level, our lives are turned upside down by the story, by the event of the enfleshing of God – opening up those spiritual horizons. It is a lovely word “horizons”, opening up, expanding the limits and the boundaries of our hearts and minds; horizons taking us beyond our limited knowledge.

(Transcript from Episode 8 of An Astonishing Secret video course)