Humanity and Nature through the Lens of Incarnation (part 3)

I sometimes try to figure out why do we bless things? I’m often called to bless water for holy water, to bless animals that might be sick and so on.

But you see this whole theology would say – everything is blessed already so why do we bless it? Do we make it more holy by blessing it? Do we add something to it? We don’t? In my mind, we don’t. We bless it maybe to draw attention – to draw out of it the healing, and the love and the mercy and the divinity that is already within everything,

So what is needed is for us to change to see things in the light of God’s loving presence from the beginning – to understand the astonishing of Incarnation or that sacramental vision. As I have said we sometimes call it the Catholic imagination. That is why we need the Church. Why we need the sacraments, why we need the bread and wine. That is why we need people to gather around he table – so that we can say these beautiful words with others. Because we forget. We are so distracted and we have that strange human stain within us that fights against what is loving so we need all the help we can get – by contemplation especially – our prayers, our sacraments, our Church, our Christianity.

For the Christian we need that to keep reminding us and revealing to us the truth of Creation, the truth of our birth, the truth of our own lives. You see there is a deadly condition called dualism within us. Dualism is a fragmentation of faith. It is a division of faith. You see it so easily in all our Churches and indeed quite significantly in our own Roman Catholic Church. It is a product of that sin – Redemption theology we looked at. It is a festering wound, I would say, in the body of Christian teaching. It is as if we belong to a lost Paradise – that that is the real meaning that we should all be living in Paradise. It denies the intrinsic value of Creation. It hasn’t much time for Incarnation. It doesn’t see all Creation as blessed. It insists that we are radically separated from God. It denies everything that we affirm with this course.

In the book – the Astonishing Secret – we have expanded that definition of dualism. It is a bit of a poison so, if you do want to know more about it, you will find it in that book.

So our Incarnational approach believes that it is that decisive moment of revelation – the Incarnation. Any distinction between sacred and profane has ended. God has revealed that experience, in the moment, in matter, in all that happens. It is in the now – our present – the sacrament of the now. We call it a sacrament because without our trying to live in that stillness – the now –  and stop ourselves thinking about the past and worrying about the future.

It is very difficult to experience God’s presence in the middle of bustle and rushing and so on – we try to do it. Most of our lives have to be lived in these conditions. But I think without a regular sort of experience each day for a few minutes of that kind of silence which protects our stillness which opens the door into God’s Presence for us, it is going to be difficult for us to find God in the hubbub and business of our daily lives.

So to sum this bit up, we could say there is no line down the middle any more between the sacred and the secular. We’ll say: sacred talk, ordinary talk; sacred music, ordinary music; water and holy water. There isn’t a hell of a division any more in this understanding of Creation and Incarnation. They are all the same. There is the religious Sunday, the mundane Monday; the Eucharist, the family meal – they are not ever meant to be over against each other. It is about seeing one and deepening the other – the Divine and the human and so on, and just remember again that Richard Rohr’s quote about “depth” – about going into the depth of things, the Sunday Eucharist, they are all there to open the door and windows into the depth of what we see. We see the ordinary but we see the extraordinary within the ordinary.

(Transcript from Episode 8 of An Asonishing Secret video course).