What makes something Sacred? - Advent 13
If the incarnation insists on anything, it insists that our physical bodies matter to God.
How do you depict something sacred?
Something significant happened - a meeting between the finite and the Infinite that changed the way we see reality - and we memorialize it. We honor it & add some shiny gold leaf. Humans have done this since the beginning.
My only problem in the process of making something sacred is that we usually cut out all the really human stuff. Most paintings of the newly born baby Jesus are of him sitting upright, clean and clear-eyed with a shiny halo around his head. And I get it. This kind of depiction looks way better in a painting than the newly born alien-faced baby the doctor hands to you in the delivery room. Mary as well. It’s honoring to portray her as well-rested and dressed in her Sunday best rather than just waking up in the morning with an achy back and morning-sickness breath.
We will always take our most important stories and sacredly set them apart so we remember them for the rest of time. But this process becomes unhelpful when we separate our own fleshy humanity from the humanity found in these sacred stories. When we dismiss the naked fleshiness under all the fancy clothing, we can dismiss ourselves from being ones who could also find ourselves in a sacred story.
If the incarnation insists on anything, it insists that our physical bodies matter to God.
Jesus was crucified naked. Nakedness was shameful & the Roman soldiers were going after his humiliation. But honestly none of us want to see the genitalia of the King of Kings when we enter into a sanctuary.
So I get it. It’s a holy reverence that implores us to put a loincloth on his beaten and pierced body. But to be clear, this is editorializing the story. Even if it is only in our mind’s eye, we must hold to a vision of a God who shared the fullness of our naked vulnerabilities.
Mary is worthy to be revered because she was asked to bear in her body the weight of sacred motherhood.
Let’s give kindness to her body, and kindness to our bodies as well. Because our body, with all its fleshy, sweaty, hairy, nausea-prone, heartburn-prone, cellulitey gloriousness,
will be a part of the sacred story we will one day find ourselves in.
May the embrace of your physical body be remembered as one of your most physical acts.
These meditations are a freely given visual offering for this Advent season.
Thank you for following along.
Most of them originated from my book Honest Advent….
Which is available where all books are sold.
