Continuous Incarnation

Musing on Living Our Charism

Knowledge of our furry and feathered friends can teach us much. Whether, furry, feathered or human, we are blessed with our own unique DNA. It is my conviction that our csj charism of unity is part of our DNA just as the built-in urge to hibernate or fly south for the winter is intrinsic to some mammals and birds. This gift for creating unity is part and parcel of our spiritual DNA. As daughters and sons of the Joseph family, we do not acquire the charism but rather resonate with it. Through deepening faith and lived experience our awareness of the charism increases.  As we become more sensitive to this gift within us, we are better able to release its giftedness. 

Lately, I have been prayerfully reflecting on our csj spirituality and wondering how its way of life might be stated in terms more accessible to today’s seekers. I have discovered for myself alternate language in keeping with today’s thinking. I hope I have recaptured the essence of the spirituality which Medaille initially articulated using the terms uncreated Trinity and created trinity.

Medaille used the concept of the uncreated Trinity and created Trinity to foster fidelity to the charism.  He ascribed respectively active and all inclusive love, self-emptying love and communing love to the Father, Son and Spirit and the virtues of zeal, obedience and cordial charity respectively to Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  Recently, in pondering the link between our csj spirituality with the living out of our charism I’ve come to think of our spirituality of communion as the three movements of unsparing, deepening contemplation, and evolving consciousness which bring to life the charism.

But we are not alone, as humans, in this endeavor. All creation is living into this dynamic as the Creator, Son and Spirit are the underlying mystery of the universe which is like an invisible and hidden music that interplays beneath and within the visible familial roles of both humans and creatures. This awareness can bring an intentional manner of being that enables us to live csj spirituality with purpose. Thus our everyday actions put “skin on our spirituality”.

My musing on our spirituality leads me to marvel at how the inborn nature of the animal world mirrors aspects of our own spiritual orientation. We are one!

A Story Of Intimacy – “Mary Of The Cosmos”

Mary of the Cosmos

There is a new story to be told, one that requires a vision of the Universe that is alive with creativity and imagination…a story that calls out for new images, symbols, language and structures.  This is the gift of the artists, the poets, and the dreamers – to pull us forward into new perceptions of reality. Inspired by Thomas Berry, artist Bernadette Botstwick, sgm of the Green Mountain Monastery and the Thomas Berry Sanctuary in Vermont has created ‘Mary of the Cosmos’, an icon which “beautifully celebrates the sacredness and holiness of all matter in the cosmos.”  

The representation is rich with symbols:

• The flash of flame circling Mary is the fireball, the first flaring forth at the beginning of creation.

• The three stars represent the cosmological ethics of differentiation, subjectivity and communion.

• The Earth is at Mary’s centre, the planet becomes the birthing bed of Jesus.

• The relationship between Earth and Moon speak of rhythm, tides and the wisdom of the feminine.

• The red cloak that Mary wears points to her humanity, while the blue undergarment reflects Divinity integral with her humanity.

• The universe is flowing through Mary whose body is made of the star stuff of the cosmos.

How would we perceive reality if, like Mary, we envisioned in each droplet of experience, the cosmos flowing through us?   Essential for this transformation is a deep valuing of our experience, well beyond our five senses. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead insists that every experience must be both “experiential and relational.”  It is the relational that begs attention. As the poet John Keats reminds us: “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”  To truly embody an experience is to welcome with awe the amazing intimacy of creativity it holds.

The icon draws us again:

• The straightforward gaze of Mary, as she looks further into the future, reveals a unified vision of matter and spirit, inviting us with outstretched arms, into the fullness of communion consciousness as life bearers for the planet.

Perhaps this is the double union we are now called to as Sisters of St. Joseph, to be earth mystics. Jesus, humanly fully embodied the essential values of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. Our charism compels us to create a space for the more, be it more compassion, more understanding, more caring and more appreciation of the cultural diversity which is now calling us to the deeper relationships of kinship with all of created reality. Every experience of life with all its complexities and paradoxes longs to be taken up into this sacred space.

The image of ‘Mary of the Cosmos’ and symbol descriptions are used with permission from Green Mountain Monastery.. For poster and cards of this icon visit www.greenmountainmonastery.org

Spring Reflections

Spring Reflections On Christology – In Conversation With Ellen Leonard

“In Christ’s Resurrection, the earth itself arose,” declared St. Ambrose of Milan.[1] We take the opportunity of this time of reflecting on the salvific moment of Christ’s resurrection to re-think our Christology. As before, we turn to the work of Elizabeth Johnson. There we learn to re-position our human story within the enlarging horizon of  planetary and cosmic history and recognize that there are far reaching implications for our faith lives. As Johnson relates: 

It rearranges the landscape of our imagination to know that human connection to nature is so deep that we cannot properly define our identity without including  the great sweep of cosmic and biological evolution.[2]

Within this perspective of a new landscape, we realize that we exist symbiotically – and that our very existence depends upon the natural world of God’s entire creation.  In fact our creation issues forth from and is entirely dependent upon all the beings and elements of earth and universe. It is the perspective of a new humility. The sarxor “flesh”of Jesus’ incarnation in John 1:14 indicates for us that Jesus, the incarnate One, was inseparable from earth. Thus born, the genetic material of his body was kin to the grasses, fish and whole community of earthly life birthed in ancient seas. The “flesh” of John reaches beyond Jesus to encompass the whole biological world of living creatures and stardust of the universe. As ourselves, Jesus carried within his being the “signature of the supernovas and the geology and life history of the Earth.”[3]

Re-situating our faith story in this epic landscape has significant implications. The earthly finitude was embraced by our God and thus inestimably blessed and good. It is the perspective of a “deep incarnation” and has considerable moral and ecological implications for the contemporary living of our faith.[4]  This Jesus embodies the hope of “all creation groaning into fulfillment” (Romans 8).  As Schillebeeckx insists, the church, the community of disciples is “the only real reliquary of Jesus.”[5]

The final transformation is the stuff of our very lives bringing the kin-dom of inclusivity and justice to all the beings of earth. This body of Christ, this reliquary, is found in present time, in our lives as we call one another to a deeper justice, knowing that all is interconnected and interwoven. It is no surprise to realize that the places of deepest degradation of Earth are the places of deepest degradation of humans. The poor live near the ash heaps of our consumer society, the women and children suffer at the edges of polluted rivers and fields. Justice for one is justice for the other. All is connected. All bodies matter to God, that is the message of “deep incarnation” that our  emerging theologies of this new landscape beckon us to understand. Social justice, repair of unjust structures and ecological justice, reconciliation of relationship of all bodies merge into a call for integrity of all creation, the peace of the universe. We are called to embody the community of Jesus, the community of Earth in a new and just way for all creation.

[1] Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, ( Maryknoll:Orbis, 2006), 177.

[2] Elizabeth A. Johnson, “An Earthy Christology,” America April 13(2009), 4.

[3] Sean McDonagh, To Care for the Earth, (Sante Fe: Bear, 1986), 118-119.

[4] Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: the Experience of Jesus as Lord, (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 641.

[5] Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Deep Christology: Ecological Soundings,” in From Logos to Christos: Essays in Christology in Honourof Joanne McWilliam,  eds. Ellen Leonard and Kate Merriman, (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 170Ibid., 165.