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From Volume 10, Number 3, Winter 2004 Incarnation Season “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14) It is the news that changed everything. The transformation wrought by God’s invasion of matter permeates matter to this day. And because of the indwelling of the Incarnate Christ in us, through the Spirit of God, the presence of God is able to permeate not only matter but the network of human systems and relationships through us. The period from Advent through Christmas, and in some cases in the time following the Epiphany to as late as the Presentation (Feb 2) has often been called “Incarnation” season. It is appropriate to abide by those limitations only if we are in the midst of planning liturgies for worship. However to view this season through the perspective of time, then it is an error to think of it in terms of a short period that comes and goes within the cycle of life. Since the event of the Incarnation, all times are “Incarnation season.” Richard Foster, author of Streams of Living Water, identifies six streams or traditions that, in his view, make up the fullness of the Christian life. These are:
The Contemplative Tradition: The Holiness Tradition: The Charismatic Tradition: The Social Justice Tradition; The Evangelical Tradition: The Incarnational Tradition: Foster has noted the distinctive nature of Celtic Christianity as one in which the six traditions occur naturally. What is most interesting is one of his comments on the Incarnational stream: “We have learned how a prayer-filled life lays the foundation for both the virtuous life and the Spirit-empowered life, and how these in turn give us the ability to engage in social justice and the proclamation of the good news of the kingdom. The one element remaining is to understand how all of these components function in ordinary life, which is the task of the Incarnational Tradition.” (Streams, p. 237) Just as in the Incarnation, the Word was made flesh, so a people who live incarnationally enflesh the Word by their lifestyles in community. I note “in community” for the fullness of God is greater than any one person can manifest. However, in Christian community the uniqueness of each individual in the context of community joins to present a broader and more complete portrait of the Word among us. Richard Foster has also noted the similarity of content between the six traditions and the ten elements of the Aidan Way. The purpose of our identification is that Celtic Christianity represents a moment in Christian history that was much closer to “getting it right” than our own times. At the same time, our approach does have its problems. We often refer to Celtic Christian spirituality, and in so doing run the danger of missing the point. The ten elements are a single whole, as are Foster’s six traditions. It is not a case of choosing one spirituality (i.e., Jesuit, Benedictine, Franciscan) to fit our inclinations and personalities. Our individual spirituality is simply the way we seek to incorporate these elements and traditions. A few years ago I was teaching a number of courses at a Christian university. I had begun there teaching a number of technology courses when someone in the administration actually read my resume and discovered that my graduate degree was in theology. Shortly thereafter I was asked to develop a senior level study on applied theology which was called “Spirituality in the workplace.” For the purposes of this course (and because many of the students had taken my technology classes) I used a rather intriguing analogy that I’d heard from a member of the Order of St. Aidan. In a PC, the operating system communicates with the various elements of the machine and enables us to utilize the computer’s power. With a system like Microsoft Windows®, the operating system is copyright protected (to the dismay of the Open Source community) and the program code is a closely guarded secret. However, there must be some level of openness for software companies to produce programs that will work with the operating system. That openness is found in the Application Programming Interface (API). The Windows® API contains thousands of functions and each software program uses certain of them, though not all, depending on its purpose. So with each individual Christian, our spirituality is the way our lives interface with the fullness of God. Though there are many schools of spirituality, their purpose is the same, to allow the believer to incarnate the life of the Word in his or her own life. In that sense, Celtic Christian spirituality is unavailable to us unless we happen to live in a place and among a people that duplicates the conditions of life experienced by the Celtic Christians in the 5th – 11th centuries. However, a discipline such as the Aidan Way is designed to keep us focused on the wholeness of life represented in Celtic Christianity while pursuing it from the context of our own spirituality. For this reason the Aidan Way of Life is necessarily vague in detail about its expectation of us. Each member of the Order of St. Aidan must, with the soul friend, craft a personal Way that incorporates the fullness of the Way in that personal context. The Incarnational stream, in terms of the Aidan Way, is expressed in living the personal way we have created. (To be continued) |