If you’ve not tapped into Proost’s excellent resources then you really should.

The ‘Wait’ video I created for Vaux some time back is really good for advent, and can be downloaded here. It was filmed at a local station in London, using the monitors that the drivers use to check doors are clear. Unfortunately the Sigur Ros soundtrack wasn’t licensed, but there are instructions on how to recreate it… and I might just have to upload the soundtrack here so people can splice them back together.

Whenever a gift is given, an invisible cargo is exchanged with it, loaded with semi-conscious messages about power-relations between giver and receiver. Offering an expensive gift to someone can be a power-play: I am rich enough to give you this. Even letting someone out into traffic can carry the same message: I am more gracious than you, more relaxed and important, and thus I am able to let you out – it’s a small thing I can do for a little person like you.

In the parable in Luke 7 we saw in the last post, we saw this being played out: a Pharisee is giving Jesus the gift of a meal. But the cargo that is delivered with that gift is more important than the food: I am the sort of person who would invite Jesus for dinner.

And so as we come to the end of this Advent series – which I hope you’ve enjoyed – we come to what I think is the essential miracle of the incarnation: the miracle of restraint. At the moment of reception of this most wondrous gift, there is virtual silence. No fanfare. Angels may have sung in the fields – something I doubt to be honest – but at the breaking in of God into human form there is nothing to shock or bedazzle.

The incarnation is the gift that carries no cargo. It has been emptied of all power. It is thus both offensive in its simplicity and infuriating in its humility. It is as if the church would prefer God to have done something powerful and strong – that’ll show them! – but God refuses. Why? Because that would twist the power-relationship, and leave us less than free to make our response to it.

In How (Not) To Speak of God Pete Rollins describes Derrida’s view of the perfect gift thus:

(1) the receiver does not know they have been given a gift
(2) nothing is actually given
(3) the giver does not know they have given anything.

In light of this, the incarnation event is this perfect gift. As we wake on Christmas morning, billions of us, we are unconsciously entering this generous space, for we do not know that we have been given anything, nothing has actually been given, and in the unformed mind of that helpless new life, the giver had no idea that they had just given something quite wonderful.

Have a great Christmas.

Brother Hare

Born with your clothes on, trembling in your scrape,
wide eyes open, soft, as new things are, warm;
alone, pressed small into a shallow form:
hope peers to see you in your shifted shape.
Peace, the angel whispers. And yet we shy
away from you, small one, with your split lip
running from the north with news of friendship,
grace tumbling like snow from a friendly sky.
No rest for you, grey one; you won’t be tamed.
Love of speed’s the only home for him who
has no ground, when trouble comes, to run to.
And still you dance, brother hare, trickster named;
you turn and turn again across the field,
winking at the moon, on joyful heels.

Post-Partum

Amniotics spilt, and semiotics rupture;
there are no words, just raw screams and suckles.
Child of God, child of man – no difference:
new life is unmoored emotion,
a wide sea of tears and sick,
and just one desire:
to feed, gather in, be mother-close.

But God won’t stay.

Controlled crying;
separation an immediate fact post-partum:
we must learn to settle ourselves,
become content with occasional communion.

These all foretastes of a future rupture:
a larger curtain rent, another cry of pain
thrown down into Mother’s hands,
three days to cry,
unknown seconds
before we may leave them.

© KB 2007

Whenever we engage ‘the other’ we have to overcome our fear of doing so. Engagement that holds no such fear is not engagement with an ‘other’; it is easy to love what is lovely – we are called to overcome our fear and love that which is not.

As we consider the grounds of the divine empathy that gave rise to the Incarnation, I’ve suggested that we need to consider what God’s fears about engaging ‘the other’ of humanity might have been. In an earlier Advent[ure] I put the case that it was the fact that the ‘mystery of humanity is a mystery to humanity itself‘ that would have been God’s concern. Would we even understand what God was doing?

If this is right, then God needed to reflect on what God might look like from our perspective. This is the root of all proper empathy. Not that we see the other clearly, but that we get close enough to the other to see what they see of us.

As Zizek notes in The Monstrosity of Christ:

For Hegel the Incarnation is not a move by means of which God makes himself accessible/visible to humans, but a move by means of which God looks at himself from the (distorting) human perspective.

This is a truly stunning insight into the why the incarnation is so vital to our faith. It is only through becoming human that God could actually reflect on what God looked like from this distorting human perspective. It is not that God became man simply in order to know what it was to be human, to know our human failings. God became man in order that God would be able to look back on Godself and see just why humanity had rejected and distorted the nature of God. As Zizek continues:

Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.

This is the epicentre of the earthquake that is the incarnation event. And this then should be our central concern of any incarnational practice: we engage the other not because we believe that we need to help them become whole, but because we believe that we need them to help us become whole too.

The bitter old man stands
at the gates of the earth
waiting, watching,
guarding the only entrance
and exit to this citadel planet.
The babies file in
and the dead file out
and he watches them,
grimly keeping count.

He watches, he waits
he shivers to shake
tired cold from old limbs,
for he must stay awake
for the one they say
will attempt a salvation.

One eye is kept on the horizon,
on the distant reaches of the future
where-from surely his nemesis
will ride with armies
and demand entry:
the battle of the gates of the earth.

So heighten awareness
and tighten security
and all the while…
he does not notice the infant God
slipping in among the embryonic ranks
of those awaiting entry.

Become powerless
to slip the trap of the powerful.
A Trojan baby
now inside the citadel planet.
Waiting, hiding, growing,
evolving an inner salvation;
the original subversion.

© KB 2004

Originally published in The Complex Christ / Signs of Emergence

As I wrote in the previous post, one of the fascinating things about the Incarnation is that it stands as an actual interruption, a marked moment of time with a before and after. Nothing was the same before, and nothing will be the same again.

It’s been out of thinking on this rupturing of our timeline that I have been pondering a sort of theological thought experiment. I’ve blogged about it before, but it seems timely to mention again.

We imagine God, in the moments before the Incarnation. The hours, becoming minutes… leading to those last few seconds before, in the traditional sense, Mary is ruptured. What is God thinking? As God prepared this great empathetic act with ‘the others’ that he had created, what were the hopes and fears that played on his mind?

In my series on empathy I outlined two positions – represented by Levinas and Zizek – of where the fear of engaging the other lies. For Levinas, the fear is located in the enigma of the other: we are not sure if we understand the other, they are an enigma to us.

For Zizek, the fear is located in the enigma in the other: we are not sure if the other even understands themselves, and this is frightening. This is connected to Hegel’s maxim that ‘the enigma’s of the Ancient Egyptians were enigmas to the Ancient Egyptians themselves.’

In our theological thought experiment, I wonder if God meditated similarly on these profoundly free beings he had released:

were the mysteries of the humans mysteries to the humans themselves?

This is the real and genuine risk attached to the Incarnation event if we are to hold true to our own freedom: God did not know in advance if it would work. From Levinas’ perspective this is because God is not sure if God has understood the human condition adequately. From Zizek’s perspective this is because God is not sure if humanity has understood it’s own condition adequately, and thus will not understand what he is about to do.

Either way, our second Advent[ure] in Incarnation brings us to understand that all incarnational work has to be based on genuine risk. If we claim to know in advance, then we have collapsed the mystery of ‘the other’ we are going to serve.

So the season of Advent comes around again. The waiting, the cold bite of the wind, the familiar carols reheated. Hopes and fears. It’s my favourite time of year, I think, partly because the event of the Incarnation is still just so impregnated with mystery and rich with metaphor. So I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts all focused on advent, and the advent-ure that it invites us to participate in – theologically, philosophically, metaphysically and personally.

I’d been wondering what to kick the series off with, but the other night I went to see the new Coen Brothers film A Serious Man, and it really made a big impression. The piece is complex and highly Jewish, and I’m aware that as a non-Jew and non-film-buff the depth of my understanding of it is going to be limited. But I feel that it does have something very interesting to say as we head into Advent, something that marks the bifurcation of Judaism and Christianity.

The film appears to be a meditation on the effects of inaction. The recurring refrain in the film is ‘But I haven’t done anything’: the protagonist’s life is falling apart, but he’s not done acted in any way to precipitate these events, and now seems powerless to turn them. He visits a number of Rabbi’s for advice, all of whom are totally impotent and offer nothing. No theological solace, no way out, no hope.

As the film draws to a close – and I’m sure there will be many feet of type written about the significance of the ending – we finally see our ‘serious man’ take some action, with the rubber on the end of a pencil, and an envelope of cash. With God apparently unable or unwilling to act to help him – despite his very serious attempts to try to engender that help – he takes matters into his own hands, and thus in his immoral act rejects his faith.

What struck me as I turned the film over in my mind was how Advent really is the final critique of this impotent and inactive God. In the classical sense, much of Judaism has an element of tragedy about it – ‘history moving from a glorious beginning to a tarnished end.’ But the origins of Christianity celebrate the fact that it is pure comedy: ‘moving through trouble towards an end that is actually a glorified new beginning.‘ The divergence of Christianity and Judaism hangs on whether one believes that in Jesus we see God actually taking action, stepping into history and moving the pieces again.

Both of those are quotes from Peter Leithart’s book ‘Deep Comedy‘, and my first Advent[ure] in Incarnation is thus to see this season as the opening lines to the most tremendous joke. It is a joke in which roles are subverted and words are twisted. It is a joke which is shocking in the extreme – with God impregnating a girl. It is a joke in which something actually happens. A joke in which the apparent tragedy of human history suddenly takes a comic turn.

As Leithart writes as he concludes his book:

[Shakespeare's] Twelfth Night is named for the last night of the Christmas season, the final celebration of the Incarnation. It is a night for carnival, for the suspension of the serious and structured. Malvolio wants to stop the merriment, and so it is fitting that he is ultimately excluded from it. He is excluded and overcome through trickery, practical joking, mirth. Satan digs a pit for the merry, but Satan falls into the very pit of merriment. And it tortures him forever.

‘See, I am doing a new thing. Can you not perceive it?’ As the world steers to tragedy, I’m beginning a new joke. Don’t you get it?

Probably be posts every couple of days, so look out for them, spread the word etc. Looking forward to it.