Advent 4/ The Mystery of the Incarnation of Love

 

Throughout this season of Advent certain things have been everpresent and close to the surface. Certainly the pandemics invade our lives every day still and yet Advent offers us the opportunity to dig down below the thin covering of fear and anxiety and grief and recover or reuncover the love and hope we knew and are to know. Advent is a bit of a recovery mission. The candles on the Advent wreath call us intentionally to hope and peace and joy and love. And by now just days before the Incarnation we might locate those gifts and life giving graces in our own bodies and souls in order to be more fully present at the manger, to witness the birth of Love Incarnate. 

We look, no gaze deeply, and then cause our eyes to bring what we perceive into view in our own lives. In Advent we pull back the veil which might mute or distort our own incarnations and remember, re-member, love. 

To do so requires us to embrace our vulnerability. It can be painful. Yet in this poem by Denise Levertov we might understand that the journey to the fuller appreciation of the Word made flesh is a gift which can only be born in and through our brokenness, where there are no fortifications of misunderstanding. 

The image of David Friedrich Caspar’s Winter Landscape presented also lives in my office. It speaks to me of broken, painful reverence and hope in trying circumstances. I feel joy when I look at it. I know something of love. Amazing grace really!

Lean into the Mystery of the Incarnation where Love abides.

Denise Levertov (1923–1997)

On the Mystery of the Incarnation 

It's when we face for a moment

the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know

the taint in our own selves, that awe

cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,

to no innocent form

but to this creature vainly sure

it and no other is god-like, God

(out of compassion for our ugly

failure to evolve) entrusts,

as guest, as brother,

the Word.