“Incarnation is the overcoming of the gap between God and everything else. It is the synthesis of matter and spirit. Without incarnation, God remains separate from us and from creation. Because of incarnation, we can say, “God is with us!” In fact, God is in us, and in everything else that God created. We all have the divine DNA; everything bears the divine fingerprint, if the mystery of embodiment is true…”

“It is important that we understand the importance of incarnation. The belief that God is ‘out there’ is the basic dualism that is tearing us all apart. Our view of God as separate and distant has harmed our understandings of our sexuality; or our relationship to food, possessions, and money; and of our relationship to animals, nature, and our own incarnate selves. This loss is foundational to why we live such distraught and divided lives. Jesus came precisely to put it all together for us and in us. He was saying, in effect, ‘To be human is good! The material and the physical can be trusted and enjoyed. The world is the hiding place of God and the revelation of God!’” (Rohr, 2018, Essential Teachings on Love, p. 20-21).

I have been thinking about how I was raised to value the spiritual as separate from the physical. The physical was going to burn up in the “last days”...well you probably know that whole modernist teaching. I have become more and more convinced that spiritual and physical are seated together, not at odds, within God. God created and continues creating the physical world. For God, a dualism of spiritual vs physical does not exist.

This week, I realized that the physical is connected in some significant ways. Have ever been in nature and felt God with you or present in the swaying of the trees? The scripture talks about how creation groans and waits for the children of God to be revealed. Family, we are tied to God, ourselves, and one another as physical and spiritual beings having been incarnated as His children.

I invite you to engage this Ignatian exercise today.

Read Psalm 104. God is revealed in the natural world. All is a gift to us. With the psalmist, give thanks for the glory of God's creation. Consider: Where do I see this awesome glory revealed in my life and the larger world?

Ignation exercise taken from The Ignation Adventure by Kevin O’Brien, SJ

--Dianne Morgan