MAN BECOMES GOD

...Palatty M. Catholic Mission, P.O...

...This is a pathetic example of what happeus when traditional wisdom is lost, and traded away for "going to where the people really are" (to use a current catchphrase in religious education...

...An argument once advanced for celebrating the feast during the spring makes Christmas sound like a fertility rite: since the world was created in a springlike, blooming state, Christmas, the birth of the world's true life, must be in the spring...

...Gilt and brass glow in long green rows: goldenrod, goat's beard, cinquefoil and primrose...

...They are like the English professors who ask questions like "What do you think Yeats meant when he has the narrator mention the fire in his head...

...Because I own all of me I can become intimately acquainted with me...

...The Christmas feast affirmed the holiness of the flesh, flesh "chosen before time began," as adoptionism never could...

...Even in the New Testament what happened in and with Jesus of Nazareth is not interpreted every.where as an incarnation of God ormmore exactly---of God's son or God's Word...

...The pagan influences are interesting enough to sug...

...No one reasonable wants to become God, but this is due partly to the fact that as we are now we cannot really know what or who God is...

...That is part of the point...

...The theme of an exchange between GOd and man (or between the two 'natures'), highly relevant for Hellenistic hearers, means nothing at all to an age so sensitive as ours to the absence of God and "God's darkness.' Our problem today is not the deification but the humanization ~ man...

...On Being a Christian, Doubleday, pp...

...Their faith is in their ]aith, and as such it doesn't matter...

...Christmas is a good time to reflect on what the Fathers of the church called deification, the belief that we are meant to share in divinity, and that anything less is less than Christianity...

...For sinnets here the silent Word is pleading . . . Nails, spears shall pierce him through . . . . " The joy of a child's birth and the tragedy of his later suffering were associated from the first...

...The Word did not become flesh just in order to move us or bring tears to our eyes annually...

...Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine because I alone choose it...

...Christmas was the feast of the Word made flesh, an emphasis which had been obscured by the adoptionism which saw Jesus's divinity as something conferred upon him at his baptism...

...He is the author o~ Saints for Confused Times (Thomas More Press...

...Of course the conservative who regrets the absence of a photographer at the tomb entrance is just as tone-deaf~ Both seem to want God to conform, to fit into patterns their views demand...

...Without denying that there might be some truth in this, it should be pointed out that it is much too simple a notion...

...God at work in us may seem to be absolute emptiness (as God was to Abraham, Job and Jesus in Gethsemane...

...This king "came not to be served but to serve," and his reign began in a stable...

...rather, Jesus's divine humanity was his by nature, and ours was a gift...

...it also misses so much of what the story, as a story, has to say...

...No other feast expresses the paradox of Christianity better: the God who came in the vulnerable and needy form of a child is very much a part of the tradition which includes Abraham's dark obedience, the crucified Christ, and the God who makes himself bread to he eaten...

...In fact, pagan elements were usually condemned at first, and were reluctantly accepted only when it became clear after several generations that, condemned or not, some of the old ways were going to stay...

...In his important book On Being a Christian Hans Kiing asks of deification, "But does a reasonable man~ today want to become God...

...23 December 1977:816 Gregory lqazianzen said that those who attempted to pry into the mystery of God would go mad, and Basil said that anyone who claimed to know God was depraved...

...Bede writes that before the arrival of Christianity in England, the 25th of December was celebrated as "mother's night," and it involved an allnight vigil...

...but there does seem to be a joylessness in people for whom such sterile considerations are important...

...We cherish the image of God, the notion of what it means to be Christian, a picture of the church...

...Not that I would quarrel with the truth of what gets said in such homilies...

...but has anyone ever seriously suggested that the Fathers believed deification to be intelligible...

...Butter-and-eggs, loosestrife, black-eyed susan bands salute the sun's reviewing stand...

...Pagan emblems like the evergreen were borrowed for the feast...

...gest to some writers that the feast of Christmas grew from a need to woo pagans from their own feasts, leaving them with enough of the old ways to content them, while sliding in the Christian message on the sly--the sugar around the pill, so to speak...

...A doctrine of Incarnation which does not go aN far as the Fathers did in asserting our own divine humanity can become idolatrous: Jesus becomes another remote god, and not the God who emptied himself to share humanity...

...It is better to begin with our unknowing, spending what might b e a confusing and dark time in the presence of someone presently unknowable, in order to find out what we are called to be...

...In all the world there is no one else exactly like me...

...I would suggest, though, that it is not enough to use words like "humane" or "humanization" withot reference to deification...

...At the same time, the assertion that there is something divine about this child, that the strange story of Incarnation begins in this universal human circumstance--this is what makes Christmas at once the most accessible and radical St...

...The reason that we cannot at present know what God is is that we are in the idol-making business: even God becomes an idol...

...If this interpretation is to have any meaning at all for modern man it will only be in virtue of its implications for man's becoming man...

...It was not considered as important as the feast of Epiphany, which (because it was the sign of Jesus's revelation to the world) was commonly believed to be more central to Christian faith than the celebration of Jesus's physical birth...

...Where they really are is in some kind of shopping center, being victimized, more than anything else, by a society which sees ever3ahing as controllable, potentially understandable, with happiness and fulfillment a goal and a right, rather than an occasional, fortuitous thing--a world with no unpredictable or uncontrollable limits...

...and all of them stand in the way of God, the life of Christ, and true Christianity...

...The reference to "modern man," "reasonable men today," "our problem today," and "an age so sensitive as ours" all perpetuate the notion of modern enlightenment vs...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JAMBS FINN COTTER ALONG KINftS EIGiiWAY Ranks of chicory, troops of tiger-lily stride at roadside this Fourth of July...

...If modern man does not understand a statement like "God became man so that man might become God" this iS only because no one understands iL It can be lived only by emptying ourselves of all our notions of God and man...

...feast...

...Catnip and hawkweed corps, battalions of bouncing" bet, present stalks, attention, eyes right: Beat the buttercup, whistle the vetch, follow the bellflower, forward march...

...By so doing I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts . . . . Whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me...

...If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new . . . . I own me, and therefore I can engineer me...

...Not quite to prove the point, but nearly, let me offer an example of human self-definition worked up by someone less profoundly informed than Hans KUng (who, working from a tradition which has accepted the belief in deification, correctly identifies many of our false gods...

...But nearly everyone has experienced the birth of a child in some way, and this commonness brings the feast close to home...

...Xcnrier's New Mission Hundreds of sick, 89 villages, hungry, 600 open huts, naked 1600 desperate and parents and dying, 3400 shivering stretching children need their your help...

...Stories and poems are as real as coral reefs, and their meanings are not simply detachable...

...One ancient implicati.on of the doctrine of Incarnation has been neglected in recent years...

...However, this notion of Incarnation can stop too easily at sentimentality...

...we do not know what becoming God would mean...

...The Irish writer Noel Dermot O'Donoghue has written of "the depths of which dogma is the surface...

...The symbols which surround the story of Christmas are upsetting ones: a pregnant virgin gives birth to a child in a barn, and the child is the world's salvation...

...23 December 1977:818...

...The person who can speak easily of the Resurrection as a "faith event," or some equivalently slimy term, and who locates its meaning within the Christian community's reading of that event (leaving the datum on which the belief was based in a limbo which apparently doesn't matter), looks to most believers and non-believers like someone embarrassed at being caught in a tradition which has at times been able to speak, without hedging, as if it really did believe what it says it believes...

...The radical belief expressed at Christmas is that the source of everything sent his o~m.life into flesh because of love, and shares that life with us...

...The story of the Incarnation, and the ancient belief in deification, might show us that it b not enough to aim at being human...

...The important distinction was not between Jesus's divinity and our humanity...

...Nowgong, Assam, India...

...To ask for intelligibility is, I think, a mistake...

...No serious theologian or mystic of any age has been unaware of the absence or darkness of God, though in our time of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and universal boredom it is no longer the theoretical preserve of theologians, but an omnipresent reality...

...Armies of yarrow, diasy, rhododendron parade to the wind's fife and drum...

...centuries, came to be an important feast, it is worth wondering what such a slowly dawning thing has to tell us...

...Jesus, according to the Fathers, is the image of what each of us is meant to be...

...Dogma, and the stories which give it birth, attend it, and grow around it through time, point us in the direction of a reality so deep that no story (and certainly no dogmatic formulation) can exhaust it...

...OR BANK DRAFT TO: Rev...

...The other overlooked fact is that Christmas grew in importance not so much to fight off paganism but to Commonweal: 815 fight off another version of Christianity...

...It is, to say the least, difficult to imagine rising from the dead...

...It contains the words, "Good Christians, fear...

...442-443) Hans Kiing has done so much v~uable work (especially in combating certain unchristian notions of infallibility and ecclesiastical franchises on God's truth) that it seems picky to mention what is wrong with this passage...

...No Christian feast can finally be separated from the others...

...In Sell-Esteem (Celestial Arts Press) Virginia Safir writes, "I am me...

...Origen opposed the celebration of Christmas, which he found too much like the pagan custom of celebrating the births of kings and pharaohs...

...Salana, D.T...

...It is true, as Hans KUng says, that this doctrine has a meaning if it can speak to us of what it means to become truly human...

...There were other pagan associations as well...

...It is so unsettling that many otherwise sensitive theologians find it hard to hear its implications at all...

...The radicalism of the Incarnation might seem to have been domesticated by our way of making Christmas a simply jolly feast, but some of its harsh and unsentimental aspect has always showed through, for example in the traditional carol "What Child Is This...

...If Christians have, over the centuries, made Christmas an important feast it might be because of the closeness of the event to ordinary experience...

...In this the feast is like the early Christian affirmation "Jesus is Lord," a deliberate counter to the Roman "Caesar is Lord...

...The Word made flesh, born on Christmas, rose from the dead on Easter...

...And while there is a point to Origen's worry that Christmas celebrations were suspiciously like the pagan celebrations of kingly birth, the celebration of Jesus's birth and the stories which surround it, with all their scenes of poverty and exile, turn the conventional notion of kingship upside down...

...but it is this emptiness at Work in us which can uncover the divine humanity, and it is this which defines the truly human, rather than anything we can arrive at on our own...

...I am me, and I am OK...

...What were stirring patristic slogans at that time--4ike 'God became man so tha t man might become God'm are almost completely uninte!ligible today...

...Until the fifth century there was no agreed-upon date for the celebration of Jesus's birth...

...Paul called Jesus "the first born" of many brothers and sisters, and in the gospel of John Jesus asks the Father "that the love you had for me may be in them, and I may be in them...

...The fact is that despite everything said to turn them in other directions, Western Christians like Christmas better than any other feast...

...Easter and Pentecost were both considered more important in the ancient church, because they celebrated the Resurrectionmwhich was, after all, the point of Jesus's life--and the birth of the church which is charged with spreading the gospel A variation on this scrooge-ish line is the reminder that Christmas didn't happen exactly as we think it did, that the infancy narratives are instructive fables, and so forth...

...If Christmas, over several I JOHN t~VEX', an editor with Templegate Publishers, contributes a regular column to these pages...

...I own everything about me---my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice . . . . I own all my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes...

...II I m MAN BECOMES GOD JOHN GARVEY A hard saying at Christmastime During every Christmas season someone feels obliged to point out from the pulpit that Christmas is not the greatest Christian feast...

...empty hands PLEASE SEND YOUR LIT]'LE MITE BY CROSSED M.O...

...previous darkness...

...Or that intelligibility is the point...

...This is, of course, a hard saying...