De Incarnatio

Allow me a little medition on the heart of Christmas--the Incarnation. It is a commonplace analogy to liken the Incarnation to the act of an author writing himself into his own novel as a character. This analogy isn't bad, but it is far from the mark. The reason metaphors ultimately fail us here is that the Incarnation is itself the ultimate metaphor. The authorial metaphor fails for the simplest reason--the novel has no real life: it is purely imaginary. The Incarnation, on the other hand, is the ultimate reality. In comparison with it, our lives are nearly imaginary.

To begin to understand the Incarnation in any sense whatever we must consider the fact that God Himself took on a new life, a life that in itself was not immortal, but merely mortal. It was a life that could not be until the creation of time. Thus God not only shares our flesh, but our time. He bound Himself volutarily not only to the three dimensions of our corporality, but to the fourth dimension of our temporality. In fact it is questionable whether there can be corporality without temporality. But regardless of the answer to that question, God has chosen to live in time as we do, and by so doing, has sanctified the time in which we find our own lives lead.