Advent Ghost Town, Part Two

The thing about Incarnation is that it treats humanity like it’s divinity.

Both my abuser and Brother Dawson believed in their “merismos” – a grand division between humanity and divinity, an almost complete separation of soul from spirit. Continually making this separation and opting for the divine personality within us, they thought, was the key to a truly spiritual life. To deny and suppress the intellect and the emotions and the will for the sake of the spiritual way (as defined by the church and its leaders) was to truly arrive – to become, in the Texas Apostle’s parlance, a true “son of the house” and not a pathetic, rebellious child. Of course, this call to denial and suppression was just a mask, a false front, a complex language game engineered to protect the sin both men indulgently participated in.

That sin was control and its various manifestations: arrogance, anger, aggression, manipulation, deception.

Their mission was to make their mark, to overwhelm their subjects in their own broken shadow.

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My love for Christmas runs deep. Perhaps those two lost years caused me to appreciate the beauty of the season that much more, the hand that stole them unintentionally impressing an even deeper romance and wistfulness within me. Whatever it is, my wife will tell you that I can barely contain my love for all the symbols, stories, food, music, movies. The exultation is profound for me. And I’m bound and determined to make up for those lost years, and all the tainted ones thereafter, by enveloping my little family in that same exultation. (My 3 year old is already a devoted fan of Elf, which means that I am clearly winning!)

At the very heart of Christmas, for me, is Incarnation. I’m no War on Christmas fundie, but Incarnation is the reason for the season. I cannot imagine the same meaning – the same depth – to this celebration were it not for the grand story that God’s own substance was forever interwoven with humanity as the second Person of the Trinity took on flesh. That’s right – forever! Incarnation, combined with Resurrection, means that the humanity became deity and the deity, humanity, seated now at the right hand of God the Father and reigning with him and the Holy Spirit forever and ever (amen).

That this was an act of unsurpassed love – a self-emptying divine risk! a gracious humbling! – is without doubt. But it is also an elevation. Jesus was sown into death a corruptible body, but he was raised a spiritual body. All those in the Messiah are already likewise raised, as good as done, their image-bearing humanity no longer defined by the corruption of sin but the animation of spirit. This means not just a promise of new life beyond death but a reification of the inherent beauty of all our humanity – spirit, soul, and body, intellect, will, and emotions – as holy, spiritual, divine.

It is, all, good.

And everything is spiritual.

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Of course, Christmas is about Incarnation. But Advent is about waiting. It is about sitting, willingly, in the midst of the pain. It’s about seeing the desolate city – the ghost town once whole and alive, now vacant, broken, destroyed – and longing for deliverance.

When my parents moved us to Vermont, an act of escape from more havoc wreaked by my father’s ministry, we were greeted by the fall chill. The very modest Christmas (my father refused to get a job) that shortly followed included a discount lift ticket to the local mountain. Even as the abuse and isolation continued, and increased, there was a ticket to freedom. That Christmas day I took my duct-taped secondhand snowboard to the bunny hill and strapped in, alone, for the first time. I tried the handle tow and fell. Repeatedly. Within an hour I was on the chairlift, competently sideslipping the green circles on my heelside edge (scared as hell to make a turn).

I was still certain that something was fundamentally wrong with me, my abuser sure to remind me of this regularly.

But in those moments, boot on board on steel edge on snow, I felt somehow…whole.