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Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 1:27

May 24, 2024

Vayyibəra’ elohim et-hadam bətsalmo.

“And God created man/adam in His image.”  This is only the second use of the specific verb bara, ‘to create’.  So far, after creating matter, it would seem, God has been making use of matter to make new creatures.  By a process of separation, He formed light and darkness, and by the process of ‘bringing forth’, the plants and animals sprang up.  But when it comes to creating man, God must both ‘make’ (1: 26, Hebrew na’aseh) man, but also ‘create’ Him in His image.  This indicates that man is a two-fold creature, matter and spirit.  Chapter 2 communicates the same truth in the two-fold process of forming man’s body from the earth, but breathing in, from God’s own breath, a spiritual nature besides.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 1:11

May 21, 2024

Way·yō·mer ’ĕ·lō·hîm, taḏ·šê hā·’ā·reṣ de·še, ‘ê·śeḇ maz·rî·a‘ ze·ra‘, ‘êṣ pə·rî ‘ō·śeh pə·rî lə·mî·nōw, ’ă·šer zar·‘ōw-ḇōw.

“And God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.’”  That God created plants ‘according to kind’ seems to militate against a strictly nominalist reading of creation.  Genus and species are ordained by God, not imposed on reality by minds.  We name them, yes, but the names allow us to abstract from the actual plants to the idea of the plant.  This allows us access to God’s providential arrangement of His creation.  Strict nominalists maintain that there are no ‘kinds’ of things.  This is contrary to the Biblical worldview.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 1:4

May 17, 2024

Vayyar’ elohim et-ha’or ki-tov vayyabddel elohim bein ha’or ubein hakhoshek.

“And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.”  Separation is an important concept in the Biblical view of the cosmos.  Distinction is for the sake of the whole, as light and darkness are both good in their created relationship to one another.  Separated but bound by their distinction, they create order, cosmos; mixed, they create confusion and chaos, at best dull grey.  We should be attentive to this reality throughout the Bible:  Israel is separated from the nations, but this is for the sake of the nations themselves.  Similarly within the Church, religious and clerics are separated from the laity, but not in judgment on the laity or because the laity are unimportant, but precisely because both are needed to recognize the beauty of the other.

Lord, help me to imitate You by separating my thoughts, dividing them between light and darkness.  May the Light Who enlightens every man rule over the day and over the night, and separate light and darkness upon the earth, that is, in my human nature.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 1:1

May 14, 2024

Bəre’shit bara elohim et hashamayim.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens.”  God is not said to have created ‘heavens’ but ‘the heavens,’ meaning the very heavens that we know, that we see today.  God did not create generic heavens from a pre-existing template, as we might infer if the author had written, “In the beginning, God created heavens.”  God was not bound to the “realization” of an idea independent of Himself.  The ideal and real are the same in God, because in creating the real, God created the ideal in the same action.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Finding in the Temple

May 10, 2024

The Presentation and Finding of Jesus in the Temple both foreshadow Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.  Here, after three days in which He is missing, He is found once more ‘in His Father’s house’.  As Christ grows in wisdom and power and transforms us from within, we often experience this as a loss of ourselves; we no longer quite know what to expect of ourselves, where we ought to turn, how we should act in certain situations.  This mystical dying and rising finds its meaning when we find ourselves in God’s house, either in the liturgy of the Church, or in fervent interior prayer.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Presentation

May 7, 2024

Inevitably, mission within the Church will require making an offering of ourselves to God.  The Virgin Mary presents the child Jesus in the Temple in order to fulfill the requirement of the Torah that each first-born son must be given to God.  This is a reminder that God spared the first-born of the Israelites, ransoming them from Pharaoh.  In Christ, then, the Church makes each of us an offering to God.  This is perhaps best experienced when the precepts of the Church prove difficult, when fasting or tithing or adhering to moral teachings gives us reasons to ‘go where we do not choose to go’.  This act of faith, the interior oblation of the will, is the ‘obedience and not sacrifice’ that is acceptable to God.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Nativity

May 3, 2024

Obviously, Christ’s birth corresponds in one clear way to baptism again; but in the images that I have offered so far, we see that a time comes when we are no longer nourished passively within the Church.  We must venture out into the world, still as children, perhaps, but with an eye toward mission.  As the Father sent Christ into the world, so does Christ send us.  This mission does not mean that we are separated from Christ, but it does mean fully accepting our responsibility for the Church, for spreading the faith and giving witness to God’s love.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Visitation

April 30, 2024

This is perhaps the easiest mystery to interpret ‘ethically’.  Meditations on the Visitation typically offer Mary as a model of selfless service to others in need, even when our own needs are real.  That surely makes for an edifying reflection.  In this series, however, I would like to go to a mystical level.  Where is Jesus Christ in the Visitation, and how do I recapitulate His life?

If we are always being nourished in the womb of Mother Church, do we consent to be carried along with her?  To be identified with her, not only in good works, but even when it seems to be at cost to ourselves?  When others, in the role of Elizabeth and John the Baptist, see us, do they point to us as examples of the Church’s gifts and nourishment?  Or do we merely give the impression of belonging to a voluntary organization, one that perhaps takes the man Jesus as a role model, but does not actually make Christ present?

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Annunciation

April 26, 2024

Mary, hearing the Word of God as spoken by Gabriel, said, “Yes,” and the result was the Incarnation of the Word within her.  We participate in this mystical reality when, in our baptisms, we say, “I believe.”  The life of Christ is conceived mystically in our hearts, and we are conceived in the womb of the Church.  Like the life of an unborn child, our spiritual life needs the nourishment of the Church’s sacraments and teaching, so that we will eventually grow to maturity in faith.  How does my life change when I truly and inwardly consent to the gift of faith?  How do my actions change when I recognize the presence of Christ within?

Incarnational Meditations on the Mysteries of the Rosary: Introduction

April 23, 2024

[Today I am embarking on what I hope will be a series of meditations on the mysteries of the rosary, from an ‘incarnational’ viewpoint.  This first post will serve as an introduction to the series.]

What do I mean by an ‘incarnational’ meditation?

In fact, I mean to communicate several interlocking ideas, with the intention of countering a root difficulty in modern spirituality, our struggle with the concept of communion.  We bristle—at some level, at least—at the notion of communion these days, whether it be with God or with the Church.  There are many reasons for this.  I suspect that a main problem is fear:  fear that communion will mean losing ourselves, opening ourselves to ‘inauthenticity’ or, worse, being used by those who would claim to desire communion with us but in fact seek to dominate, to stamp out the uniqueness that each of us possesses by divine grace.

What does this leave us with, spiritually speaking?  Well, there is a tendency to reduce Christian spirituality to a kind of ‘do-gooderism’, a series of ethical exhortations and practices and prayers.  The purpose of these things—when they really do take place—is for God to communicate (just enough?) grace to allow us to do some good in the world, or at least be assured that we are not completely depraved.

Now, good works are not to be disparaged, and Christians are obliged to practice them.  But we stumble when we notice that there are many persons in the world who achieve good works without being Christian.  So if Christianity consists in showing that we are nicer and kinder than others, we founder on the empirical reality that this is, alas, often enough not the case.  Here I should insert, in keeping with the overall goal of this proposed series of posts, that meditations on the mysteries of the rosary tend, in my experience, exactly toward an ethical model:  we imitate Christ or Mary in order to become ‘better people’.  This, in itself, has much to recommend it, but at some point this tack will, I believe, reveal its limitations in bringing us closer to the mystery of what it means to be Christian.  What, then, does actually separate us as Christians from others in the world?

The answer is baptism:  in baptism, we receive the very gift of God’s own life.  In this communion of the divine and human in our own hearts, we recapitulate the reality of the Incarnation of God’s Word in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and indeed all the mysteries of the Life of Christ.  We do not merely ‘imitate’, if we mean by this an effort (often conceived of as our own effort) to do things that we think Jesus would do.  Imitation, in modern parlance, has something of a bad name.  ‘Imitation’ wool or leather means ‘inauthentic’, a rip-off of something of superior quality.  But when St. Paul exhorts us to “become imitators of me, as I am of Christ” [1 Cor 11: 1], we might hear that we are two steps down on the ladder of sanctity even before we begin.  But Paul’s own imitation of Christ was so intense that he was able to become alter Christus, another Christ.  Let me allow St. Gregory of Nyssa to emphasize this point for me:

“[Paul imitated Christ] so brilliantly that he revealed his own Master in himself, his own soul being transformed [my emphasis] through his accurate imitation of his prototype, so that Paul no longer seemed to be living and speaking, but Christ Himself seemed to be living in him.  As this astute perceiver of particular goods says: ‘Do you seek a proof of the Christ who speaks in me?’ [2 Cor 13: 3] and: ‘It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me. [Gal. 2: 20]’”

—On Perfection, FOTC 58, trans. by Virginia Woods Callahan

What we have the privilege of being, already in this life, is the very Body of Christ alive and sanctifying the world.  To do this, good works are necessary, but we also must be ‘renewed in mind’, not that we might be the only persons in the world who do good, but that we “may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” [cf. Rom 12: 2]  Being renewed in mind requires meditation, training the mind to see reality in a way different than we do by the sloth of habit.  The Mysteries of the rosary have proven over many centuries to be a most efficacious means of meditation, especially for the laity.  But meditate we must, not only on what we ought to do to improve ourselves with God’s grace, but to come to the understanding of the hidden growth of Christ within us.  In living out the life of Christ in our imaginations, guided by the tutelage of His glorious Mother, the Virgin Mary, we attune ourselves to the quiet unfolding of grace in our lives, and are thus able to cooperate with grace more readily and gratefully.  We no longer carry out good works to justify ourselves or salve troubled consciences, but truly as co-operators with Jesus Christ, alive in our hearts and present to the world in our actions.

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