Jan
13
It’s Incarnation!
January 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment
When I was in graduate school and only just beginning the process of getting myself received into the Catholic Church, I met fairly regularly with Fr. Philip (John) Walsh, a priest of the parish of St. Thomas More in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to discuss matters of the faith. It was he who first suggested that I read Cardinal Newman, and he who officially received me into the Church. Fr. Walsh was one of those colorful characters who seemed to know everybody. He had served many years in Chicago before moving to North Carolina, and he was always telling stories about conversations he had had with the likes of Evelyn Waugh or Frank Lloyd Wright. One of my favorite stories involved Waugh. Fr. Walsh had a habit, when listening to somebody talking, of interjecting “Is that right?” in those places where the rest of us might just say “Oh?” or “Mm hmm.” After hearing this a number of times Waugh apparently answered him by saying “I don’t know whether it’s right, Father, I only know that it’s true.”
I was reminded of Fr. Walsh this evening because I spoke on the telephone for the first time to someone whom I’ve only known through blogging: Fr. Al Kimel of Pontifications. We got to talking about the liturgy, and how formative and important it can be for folks who convert to Catholicism from non-liturgical traditions. Our discussion put me in mind of another of Fr. Walsh’s habitual sayings. Whenever the discussion turned to things like liturgy, or works of mercy, or prayer for those in need, or really just about any manifestation of our calling to be Christlike, Fr. Walsh would get this glint in his eye, spread his hands wide, and say “It’s Incarnation!”
And indeed it is: the doctrine of the Incarnation is, I think, not just a peculiarly Christian doctrine (a scandal to the gentiles, if you know who I mean), but it is also, somehow, a Catholic doctrine. This is not to say that other Christian communities do not believe in the Incarnation, only that they do not live it in quite the same way that we do. The fact that God became flesh is true for all Christians but Catholics go out of their way to experience that fleshiness of God in the Godliness of flesh. This is a fact that is at the forefront of John Paul the Great’s magnificent Theology of the Body, of course, but it is also manifest in our liturgy, our sacraments, our sacramentals, our prayer life – - indeed literally everything we do. We are imagines Dei, as are all Christians, indeed, all humans, but we seem, in some way, much more attuned to that particular calling.
One of the most basic ways in which we experience the Incarnational aspect of our religion, I think, is in our communal life together. We are the body of Christ, and we are called to live as though we know that to be true. Reading blogs is all very well and good, but meeting bloggers is clearly a little better, because it is closer to the reality of what it means to be a community in an Incarnational sense. It is, somehow, more real. Plato’s Republic has a rather famous passage where Socrates describes people living in a cave, chained together and facing the wall of the cave. Behind them is a lower, man-made wall, and behind that wall a fire is burning. Between the wall and the fire there passes a parade of folks with puppets designed to look like such things as deer, trees, people, in short, anything that one might encounter in the world. But they are only puppets, and the people chained up on the other side of the wall can see only the shadows of these puppets on the wall of the cave. We are then asked to imagine one of these prisoners being set free. He turns around and sees the low wall, the puppets, and the fire, and finds them very strange. All of his beliefs about everything were formed on the basis of what he had seen in the shadows, but now he sees what caused the shadows and things are rather different. So he investigates. He learns about the puppets, the fire, and wall, but then he sees a way out of the cave. He follows the passage and find himself outside the cave, where there are real trees, real deer, real things, all illuminated not by a mere fire but by the sun itself. He finds all of this overwhelming at first, but he comes to realize that this ultimate reality is infinitely more important than either the shadows or the puppets back in the cave, precisely because it is reality and not mere representation.
In one sense, our liturgical life, our prayer life, in short, everything we do and experience here on this earthly pilgrimage, is more like life inside the cave than out (we live in what C. S. Lewis called the Shadowlands), but even inside the cave there are better and worse representations. The shadows on the cave wall are clearly inferior to the puppets and the fire that cause those shadows. (Indeed, Plato’s irony here is rather intense, since a written dialogue is itself clearly inferior to a live, one-on-one conversation.) What we look for in our liturgical life, in our prayer life, in our lives with other Christians, are the puppets rather than the shadows, the light of the fire rather than the brightness on the wall. Why? Because these things are more like the things outside the cave. In particular, the fire is more like the sun, which for Plato serves as a metaphor for the Form of the Good, or, if you are a Christian, God. The Law is great, but Jesus is better. Both are images of God, but Jesus is more like God because, in a mysterious and wonderful way, Jesus is God.
I was excited to talk to Fr. Kimel on the phone, but it would be even more exciting to meet him in person, to spend an evening with him talking about theology (or just about anything). Last fall I did meet a blogger in person: David Hartline, of Catholic Report, happened to be in the Athens area and he came by for a visit. We chatted in my office for a while, and it was refreshing to share some time with someone who sees the world through the eyes of a lived Christian experience, as opposed to the experience of the analytic philosophers who surround me most of the time where I work (there was also a wonderful payoff for me, when a copy of David’s new book, The Tide is Turning, arrived in my office mail a couple of days ago). I’m an analytic philosopher, too, but analytic philosophy is less real than Christian experience, it is more like the shadows than the things outside the cave (could anything be less real even than analytic philosophy? I don’t think so, but don’t tell Plato).
The web is a wonderful thing: it is filled with fun stuff (and, of course, some not-so-fun stuff, and some very dangerous stuff). But it suffers from virtuality: we can lose contact with what is importantly real when we experience only the web versions of things. Pornography is only the most obvious example: folks who make use of internet porn lose contact with the essentially important act of genuine human intimacy, indeed, they begin to replace real human sexuality with the web-based kind, usually finding that they need more and more to satisfy their desire (this is known in psychology as “adaptation”, a process of growing accustomed to something in such a way that the stimulus-response cycle grows ever diminished over time, requiring more and more stimulus to achieve the same response). Can this be generalized? Some folks spend a lot of time surfing the web. I know a few who spend more time surfing than interacting with their family. And living in a web-based world encourages us to think exclusively in our own way rather than in ways that are open to the interpretations of others. Surely we’ve all had the experience of having an email correspondence misunderstood. Maybe something we wrote as a joke was taken at face value, and we found ourselves apologizing to a hurt friend or offended colleague. Blogging comes with its own dangers: ego, pride, self-absorption? It can be valuable: I’ve learned a lot from reading Catholic blogs, and I value what I’ve learned. But a Christian community is more than that.
A few years ago, my friend in the faith Fr. Philip Walsh passed from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant. I hadn’t seen him in years, and I regret not having kept in touch with him better, because now that part of my community is lost to me, at least for the time being. Perhaps I should work harder on the connections that remain, and also on forming new ones. Maybe this would be a good idea for a meme: Who are the five Catholic (or Christian) bloggers whom you would most like to meet in person, but have not (yet)? Here are mine, in no particular order:
1. Fr. Al Kimel
2. Mike Liccione
3. Christopher Blosser
4. Fr. Richard Neuhaus
5. Tom Kreitzberg
Since it’s late and I’m lazy, I’ll just tag them, too. Since Fr. Neuhaus is arguably not really a blogger in the way the others are and also probably doesn’t read this blog, I’ll cheat a little and expand my list to include
6. The Darwins.
