BILLTESKA

Great speech about ending poverty at the national Press Club today: click link at left to hear it.

Human birth wasn’t necessary. God could have become human without being born of a woman. The Incarnation could have been just as real without Mary and the manger and all that. God could have just created a New Man, fully grown, with no childhood or other history, just as the first Adam was created – out of dust. God could just as well have gathered some more dust and made clay and breathed into it and so on, and skipped the whole birth part. And some would have preferred it that way.

A creationist student recently asked me whether I really thought that we came “out of the slime”. I would have to say, on reflection, "yes, I do." The bible itself says that we come from slime. Well, from dirt (or worse): we usually say dust. But take some dust and just add water and you’ve got slime! That is actually pretty biblical. The point of that part of the story is that God did not make us out of nothing, but out of something He had previously made. Likewise, when God came to us in the flesh, it was not in a brand new creature, but out of the body of an ordinary woman. God’s purpose in the fulfillment of Creation is accomplished in an ordinary human birth.

“Wait a minute!” you are thinking. “It wasn’t ordinary at all, Mary was a virgin.” Yes. The way she became pregnant was unique, but the ensuing pregnancy and birth were entirely ordinary. That was the way God chose to become flesh – through the human process of pregnancy and birth. Process is the key word here. A birth is not an instantaneous event, but the culmination of a much longer process of gestation, development that goes on in private, hidden, out of sight.

Tonight, we celebrate the mystical fact that God is in the world incognito. Salvation is a hidden process – not secret, exactly, but unnoticed, unremarked, unrecognized: a long series of gradual, subtle developments that we don’t even know are happening. This hidden process, typified by Mary’s pregnancy and birth, is not confined to her. Just as her Birthgiving is the culmination of her own process, she herself is the culmination of a much longer process of development – or evolution, even. Like her, the world had been pregnant by God for ages. The story of this evolution is called salvation history, human history seen as a deliberate preparation for the Incarnation, what the first German scholars who started thinking about it called Heilgeschichte.

Ever since the first hominid began to reflect on her own consciousness, leaving behind the anxiety-free innocence of the animals, and faced the fact that we are going to die; ever since we started thinking that was a bad deal and began to think about Good and Evil, in general; in short, ever since we became human, in the full sense of the word, and ever since we became aware of the fact that we were human – made out of humus, the slime to which we shall shortly return – God has been at work to repair our condition, which is to say to repair the condition of the whole world; to complete Creation. This Redemption was not an instantaneous event: not something that happened just at the moment of Christ’s Death on Calvary, nor even in the singular Event of His Most Holy Life, taken as a whole. The Birth, Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ were rather the crowning event of a much longer process. The world brought forth its own Redeemer in coöperation with God, whose fructifying activity had been going on for ages.

Over the centuries and millennia, God had inspired men and women, forming and developing and evolving our religious imagination. As our own Prayerbook Catechism teaches, this gracious activity is seen in the teachings of “many sages and saints”, including (but not restricted to) the prophets of Israel. But it was Hebrew culture that God chose to prepare a supreme dwelling-place – the House of God, the Ark of the Covenant. Christians now apply these terms to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Because, when preparations were complete; when human consciousness – our religious imagination and moral sense – was sufficiently evolved; when the historical process had reached the critical point, which the poetic language of scripture calls the fullness of time, there appeared on earth a new possibility, something God had been working on but which had not been seen before, something at once ordinary and extraordinarily new: a human being capable of perfect coöperation with the divine will. Heilsgeschichte tells the story of God’s activity with creation, evolving the capacity to receive God in the Flesh.

Mary of Nazareth was certainly unique in that the possibility she represents is brand new, and in that she alone became the Mother of God. But I think it a mistake to regard her as unique in any other way. To separate her metaphysically from all other women by claiming for her unique exemption from the human condition is an error, as St. Thomas Aquinas observed. (And who am I to disagree with him?) The purity of Mary is not to be sought, I think, in an Immaculate Conception, as defined in modern papal dogma. Her spotlessness, which the Church has proclaimed since the Sixth Century, is more a matter of spiritual evolution than of special divine fiat for her and her alone. In fact, I am willing to imagine that any number of First Century Jewish girls could have done what Mary did. She was representative, not unique. Her blessedness is among women, and from among all these blessed women she was chosen and she accepted.

The purity of Mary is not a personal, metaphysical gift but the end result of God’s redeeming work in history, the fruit of long, patient, subtle, gradual, and hidden activity creating the conditions in which there could appear a New Eve, who would say “Behold, the Handmaid of the Lord”, and not “Here! Have a bite of THIS!” But Her spotlessness refers to the long purification that Creation and humanity had undergone by the activity of the incognito God over the ages. In her, Creation is become the spotless vessel of Divine Grace: the Mother of God.

There is some controversy just now about the theory of evolution, but clearly our Catholic Faith has no problem with it. If God did not shun the Virgin’s womb, why not create Adam (conscious dirt) through a process, too? Just think of it as enlarging the pattern: the pregnancy and Birthgiving of Mary are to the longer process of salvation history just as that process itself is to the evolution of life. The seas bring forth life, which then evolves its crowning glory, the reflective consciousness of Adam, which then evolves into the religious consciousness of Israel, which produces as its crowning glory the likes of John the Baptist and Joseph of Nazareth, and his Most Holy Spouse. Why not, since God did not shun the Virgin’s womb? But, of course, that requires a certain level of comfort with slime. People who can’t abide the notion of evolution usually turn out to be Christological heretics of some kind, not really accepting the notion of the Incarnation, either.

An extreme emphasis on the Sovereignty of God, in which God is opposed to a creation viewed as totally depraved, and in which God does everything and Creation does nothing, is a mentality uncomfortable with the idea of processes, either historical or evolutionary. Too messy. God does it by command. Creation is passive at best, recalcitrant at worst, and in any case destined for destruction in apocalyptic fire. That kind of religious imagination, like the Inn at Bethlehem, has no room in it for the Incarnation, except possibly as a necessary precondition for the Sacrifice on Calvary, which is what is really important. The Incarnation takes place out in the stable, with all the other lowly instruments of some other purpose. It is not important in itself, to this way of thinking. It is more an instantaneous, miraculous act of God than a culmination of ages of Divine activity within an increasingly coöperative Creation. It is no coïncidence that the New England Puritans (whom our Anglican ancestors had the good sense to hound out of England) didn’t even observe Christmas! They didn’t like slime, they didn’t like process, and they didn’t much like the Incarnation itself. Nowadays, their spiritual children don’t like the theory of evolution.

But what if God’s healing activity in the world, like Mary’s pregnancy, is a matter of setting things in motion and letting nature take its course. If we look back and see Mary’s Birthgiving as a process that typifies the history of salvation, and that Heilsgeschichte as a process that typifies the vastly longer process of biological evolution, so maybe we can look forward as the Incarnate God continues the Redeeming work, healing and transforming our little garden planet, in God’s own hidden, incognito way, and then reaching out to the galaxies unto the Ages of Ages.

God has proclaimed the Creation good, and though we may see its goodness marred by our sin, Creation itself has never ceased to be good. That is why we are content to think of humanity as coming out of the slime, why – as the Te Deum sings – God did not shun the Virgin’s womb. For, as usual, the hidden Mystery of the Incarnation, the Mystery of the Incognito God, is not so much a matter of God’s condescending to us as of Creation’s ascending to God, as the Byzantine ode of the Nativity has it:

In Thee all Creation exults, O Spotless One, for thy womb is made wider than the heavens and thy breast the throne of God!