The Incarnation

I delight to see God shining from my body as the super-radiance of evolving self-organized bio-chemical complexity.

Does this glow come from matter, or does matter condense from this glow? The wick is dead without a flame. But the flame is dead without a wick. Matter and Spirit, like particle and wave, are just two ways of seeing the same phenomenon.

Why not settle our bodies into meditation, or walk with awareness in the forest, observing every electron blossom from the boundlessness of conscious space? Then, instead of descending as a mysterious Other from above, will not the Spirit percolate out of the earth as the bio-radiance of sacred matter?

I'm Wiccan, I'm Vedantist, I'm Buddhist, I'm Christian. Do you see a contradiction? Well then, maybe your eye is not open wide enough. The part you focus on defines the whole. When you focus on one sparkle, you see one face or facet and no other. Yet the whole jewel is greater than any facet. The jewel of God-Consciousness has as many faces as there are human hearts.

If you ask me, "Is a tree God?" I say, Yes. "Is God beyond the tree?" Yes. Both are true. I see God through the tree. The tree is a window. But the window is not the sky. I see the sky through the window, and the window illuminated by the sky.

When the eye is clear and simple, every creature on earth is God's window. Gazing through that creature, I enter Bodhichitta: boundless, formless, conscious space. Yet this infinite Buddha mind is contained by an atom.

Now I penetrate even deeper into conscious space. I find that space is alive, vibrant with waves of innate compassion. These loving vibrations of silence generate the whole universe, like a Word spoken. The cosmos is no cold vault of darkness hung with desperate momentary stars. In essence, cosmic space is a Person - one who intimately cares for every finite point conceived within that boundlessness. A vast carefulness envelopes the galaxies: the cosmic Christ, the Buddha nature, Krishna consciousness. If you think these terms signify three different things, you have not experienced thing-less Radiance.

This cosmic Christ yearns to share his love with every sentient being on every world encompassed by the infinite space of awareness. To communicate this love to the least of these his creatures, the infinite Person takes on a finite human body and clothes himself in flesh, the flesh of tbe Avatar. Jesus was the most recent avatar in history. Is there an avatar incarnate today?

Every photon of Jesus' body was God, as is every photon of my body and your's. The difference is, every photon of Jesus' body was conscious, like an opened eye! Jesus' body was the vessel in whom cosmic space became Christ Consciousness, aware of every pain and rapture of human love. Through Christ's excruciating ecstasy on the Cross of his own body, love infused itself into the earth, soaked into the soil, enfolded the fallen sparrow, irradiated every berry on the twig, ennobled the dust. The incarnation of Christ was the consecration of matter, rippling its blessing into the stars.

This brings us back to where we started: the divine chemistry of our own flesh. What good is the work of Christ unless we too, in every atom of flesh, trans-substantiate God's glory into matter?

Truth whirls and turns like a wheel. Dust becomes God as God become dust. This is why fools are wiser than wisemen. They just dance!