In this season when we are invited in the Christian tradition to meditate on the meaning of incarnation, I find myself reflecting on the way in which divinity and humanity seem to exist in a kind of symbiosis, in a sort of mutual indwelling. I find myself coming to the realization that without God, there is no humanity but that also without humanity, there is no God. This, I think, is the deep truth to which the incarnational theology around Jesus ultimately leads us: that divinity and humanity are intertwined, interconnected. Two sides, perhaps, of the same coin.
In the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, the author writes, “No one has ever seen God”. He goes on to suggest that the incarnation in Jesus the Christ is what makes God known.
As I consider this, it seems to me quite true. No one has ever seen God, because God cannot be seen. Rather, God — the divine, the sacred, the transcendent — can only be experienced. And that experience is mediated to us through our own humanity. It is through our experience of being human that we come to know that dimension of experience which our tradition refers to as God. In other words, incarnation — enfleshment — en-human-ment (if I may be permitted to invent a word) is required for God to be known.
There are many implications to this — far more than I can tease out here. One of those implications is that because God can only be known through the medium of our own humanity, our experience of God is necessarily subjective. And this is a problem in religion. In the end, religion tends to utilize the subjective experience of the divine of one or a few individuals as the normative experience that everyone should have. As a result, the experiences of the followers of a particular religion are measured against this norm. Those experiences that fall within the norm are considered authentic, and those that fall outside the norm are suspect. Ultimately, if a particular group within the religion insists on maintaining the veracity of an experience or set of experiences that fall outside the norm of established orthodoxy, they will go off (or be sent off, if they survive) to start a new sect within that religion. And, inevitably, they will measure the experiences of those who wish to join their sect against what they have now established as the new norm. This is the mechanism that largely explains the existence, for example, of thousands of different groups within the Christian tradition, most of whom claim to be the most authentic or truthful version of Christianity.
The mystics of the Christian and every other tradition have long known that God is experienced through the medium of our humanity, and have been deeply aware of the subjectivity of that experience. This is why they have little time for dogma, and why they are able to deeply value their own experience of God while at the same time holding it lightly, in the sense of being careful not to use it as a platform for establishing a universal norm that might be held up as The Truth. It is an example from which we all should learn.
My experience of church life within the Christian tradition has been that people involved with churches tend to gather around sets of beliefs and/or sets of practices which can be deeply meaningful, but which don’t necessarily encourage them to explore their own experience of God. I think many people — perhaps most — think of an experience of God as something that would come to them from outside themselves, that would in some sense almost bypass their own humanity or override or overwhelm it in some way. I think most people don’t think about the human and the divine as occupying the same space, so to speak. It is easier, in many ways, to depend on some group or institution to tell you about God rather than to go into the murkier and far less certain waters of personal experience.
But I also suspect that this may have something to do with the reason why churches, on the whole, are dying. Because increasingly, people don’t find it attractive to be told about God, and be asked to sign onto a set of beliefs to which they have no personal connection. If God is, if there truly is a sacred and transcendent dimension of reality that gives rise to us and all that is, people want to experience that, to be introduced to how it is they may cultivate that experience. We live in an age where institutions of all kinds have lost a great deal of their credibility. People are less willing to trust experiences of individuals or groups as the established norm against which everything should be measured.
This loss of faith in institutions presents us with many challenges as a society. But where religious institutions are concerned, I tend to think that this presents an opportunity: to step away from the prioritizing of beliefs and doctrines in order to move toward creating communities of mutual exploration to learn from one another about the mystery of our own being. A mystery that contains within it the divinely human and the humanly divine.
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