Advent Day 12: The Bell Cannot Be Unrung

I didn’t know

When I gave that thing up . . . that thing – the thing that so defines who I am . . . when I gave it up to the call of the needs of another . . . I knew what I gave . . . I knew what a big deal it was . . . I knew I would be changed . . . I knew there would be loss . . . 

What I didn’t reckon on is how very permanent it would be . . . that all the absolving . . . all the praying . . . all the wrestling . . . all the all of it . . . would indelibly rewrite me.

Somehow being changed is not the same as never being the same.

And I have been and will forever be . . . not the same.

For her, that girl over there on the other side of this particular line of time, for her do I mourn.  I liked her.  She was fabulous.  And I gave her away.

It was important, or so I thought.  And I think I was right.

But oh, I do miss her.

***

Thinking on the cost of choosing, with humility and trepidation do I try to imagine God’s own choosing and its great cost to the very Divine.  

To choose human flesh, not as window-dressing, not as a suit of protective armor, but as a very identity . . . to choose that vulnerability . . . that limitedness . . . what must it have been like to step across that line?  

Did God hesitate?  Did God ponder the enormity of the change for God’s own self in The Divine Coming?  Did God ask God’s self what am I doing?

Did God hesitate?  

All I know is I would have.

A Far Humbler God

“[In the contryside, I grew up] listening to the counsel of a far humbler God than He who guided the untroubled conscience of the British ruling class.”  –John LeCarre, in his 1989 Introduction to his 1962 novel, A Murder of Quality.

Yesterday’s weekly meeting of ministers preparing, praying, and pontificating (yes, we do that even amongst ourselves), focused on Jesus’ time in the wilderness as told in the Gospel of Mark.

During our discussion phase, dear friend and wise man Bill Cox raised the question: did Jesus know who he was before he was baptized and sent into the wilderness?  Or was Jesus’ own identity revealed to him over time?

And if Jesus was not self-aware that he was and is God, does that mean that he was somehow separated from the Trinity?  Or, perhaps even more radical, did the very Trinity itself become so self-emptied that She/He/They/It (have you ever noticed there’s no good pronoun for the Trinity?) lost or stepped away from identity in those moments in historical time we Christians think of as the life of Jesus?

In other words, what does the wilderness, the place where God is, or at the least, seems, absent, look like when God’s very self goes there?  Can God be absent from God?

It’s a frightening proposition: that God’s entry into time and space was so radical that God’s very self is affected somehow, fragmented even.  We speak of the cost of the cross to God, but seldom think on the cost of being human to God.

Greeks saw the gods in time and space as cavorting sportsters, having fun usually at human expense.  Bill’s question, however, suggests a far graver idea: that perhaps God lost God’s own self in coming to save my and your self.

It is a vision unsettling, this idea of a far humbler God.