Love Divine
On the Mystery of the Incarnation
Almighty and everlasting God, who stooped to raise fallen humanity through the child-bearing of blessed Mary; grant that we, who have seen your glory revealed in our human nature and your love made perfect in our weakness, may daily be renewed in your image and conformed to the pattern of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
This prayer, which concludes the Alma Redemptoris Mater – the Marian Antiphon sung after Compline from Advent through the Feast of the Presentation (February 2) – has become one of my favorites. It beautifully expresses the Mystery of the Incarnation: God became human so that we may become divine. Actually, it is not so that we may become divine, but so that we may recognize our divine nature in our human nature – that these “two” are “one.”
The divine glory is revealed in human nature and love is perfected in our weakness. Love is made whole or complete as it engages with the constraints of finitude. There is something about the very brokenness of our world that provides the operating conditions in which love is perfected. The human realm that we occupy has a necessary function in the divine economy. Humans serve the equilibrium of the cosmos by distilling agape out of eros, bringing forth the subtler dimensions of love (forgiveness, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, justice) from the creative power of desire.
In this way, there is an aspect of the divine that is revealed in and through us. I say “us” and not only Jesus. Jesus, in his humanity, shows us our divinity; it is not his exclusively, but rather is something that we share with him. The image of the divine is renewed in us as we are conformed to the pattern of his life – the way of self-giving love. This love is a kind of catalyzing agent that metabolizes our human condition in such a way as to release the divine glory within it.
“Christianity” is nothing more or less than a method to foster this alchemical process. It is not so much a set of doctrines as it is a way of life – a set of practices that foster the transformation of eros into agape. Jesus did not come teaching a metaphysical system but rather offering the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection. He shows us what it looks life to manifest agape and so participate in eternal life. Jesus is alive and shows us how to be alive – in the perfection of a love that is generative, transcending life and death in a continuous flow from the abyss of the unmanifest divine source.
Seen in this light, previously enigmatic teachings of Jesus become less opaque. The teaching of The Beatitudes is not a masochistic embrace of suffering for its own sake, but rather an awakening to the conditions of existence as an opportunity to realize the subtler qualities of love in response to the reality of suffering. The admonition to lose your life in order to gain it is about letting go of our conditioned existence – and the “self” that is identified with it – to embrace the way of life that allows love to flow freely and discovers the self as neighbor and even the enemy. The free offering of healing, liberation from evil, and open table fellowship are manifestations of love in community. It is the birthing of a unitive consciousness that manifests compassion and wisdom.
The flow of love is eternal. We “die” into it and are “resurrected” into the life that really is life. It “exists” synchronically in the unmanifest divine, the divine abyss from which flows all creative power. It exists diachronically in the manifest divine – the Trinitarian exchange of love within the life of the Godhead in which Christ participates “from the beginning” – and in the life of individuals through whom the divine eros is perfected as agape (Christ incarnate in Jesus and in those who follow the way of love).
Our evolutionary imperative as a species is to share the Christ nature – to realize it, not only in the life of Jesus, but as the way of love common to all humanity and for which the cosmos came into being. This is the Christian ideal of divinization or apokatastasis – the reconciliation of all things in God. It is a process, not an event! The invitations to love are offered in each moment, with every choice we make, in the ordinary round of life. And so we pray that the divine image may be renewed in us daily, and that we may be conformed to the pattern of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
The dominant note in American theology has been the Puritan Calvinist emphasis on “total depravity.” — a misinterpretation of even Augustine’s teaching on sin. The renewal of imago dei theology in American spirituality goes back to Wm Ellery Channing, the unitarian who called himself a ‘catholic Christian,’ and to early Quakers.