Encountering the Divine

I was going to call this post "How I am learning why I gave up social media for Advent long after I decided to give up social media for Advent," but I thought it was a word or two too long, so I changed it. The reality, though, is that's what this is about; a few days into shutting down from social media for this beautiful season of Advent, I read something from Joseph Ratzinger (who else?) which re-focused me and showed me what I think the Lord was trying to show me, and now I am going to share that here.

In his wonderful work "Introduction to Christianity" (I'm 55 pages in and I can tell you that it needs to be read by all people, although it's quite dense), Ratzinger starts by wrestling with the question of belief and how we, in the modern world, can still be people who believe in God, when that belief is so radically difficult. In the midst of the difficulty of belief, though, we are presented with the answer to our questions as that of the person of Christ. Christianity, he says, has at its basis a claim to be the revelation of God since "it has, so to speak, introduced the eternal into our world." For us, then, in this Man, our reaching out to God has changed from a leap into the eternal to something profoundly more simple:

"The leap that previously led into the infinite seems to have been reduced to something on a human scale, in that we now need only take the few steps, as it were, to that person in Galilee in whom God himself comes to meet us." 

I could have stopped there and been happy, but it was important to continue, for Ratzinger continues and shows how we have misused the great gift of God becoming man, and how our humanity has taken what seemed like a few easy steps and made them impossibly difficult. The problem, he explains, is that: "God has come so near to us that we can kill him and that he, thereby, so it seems, ceases to be God for us." When God reveals Himself to us as man, He approaches us from a stance of humility, and in His profound humility we have the ability to kill Him and to make Him unimportant for us.

Without knowing it at the time, this must be why I needed to shut off social media for Advent. God wanted to show me that sometimes I need to remove the things which block me from seeing Him, because otherwise I'll do what is so very human to do and kill God by making other things more important than Him. Especially in this season of Advent, then, which is about preparation for the coming of the Messiah, who comes in the humblest way possible as a small infant laid in a feeding trough, I need to take every step to be sure that I won't miss Him.

God came to Earth 2,000 years ago as a little infant, and in a few weeks we will commemorate that great day with one of our two greatest feasts, one which begins our journey to salvation. The leap that man previously needed to make to God now has a bridge in Jesus Christ, yet even taking the steps to meet that little infant in Galilee is a profoundly difficult task. Hopefully this Christmas, I will quiet my heart and my mind, I will set aside the things that blur my sight and clutter my path, and I will find my way to the God of the universe Incarnate in that Baby born of the Virgin.