The Divine Presence Within and All Around Us by Xochitl Alvizo

Back in 2008, I took a class with Mark D. Jordan titled Queer Incarnation. As you can imagine from the title, the topic was the incarnation of God in Jesus within Christian understanding but though a queer theory lens.

The idea that God took flesh and made God’s home among us.

God took flesh.

When I was in class and those words were spoken out loud, I knew why I still loved Christianity. I remembered what it is that made me hold on to the tradition even while recognizing Christianity’s harmful manifestations – because of its declaration that God/ess took flesh; that we can know God/ess in human form and that she dwells among us (I know, Jesus is identified as male, but the class was about queering religion, after all). Christianity affirms and loves a God/ess who is bodily interrelated to us, with us, and that Ultimate Intimate Reality shares in our existence and experiences the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. God/ess affirmed our existence by being one of us.

And at the same time, I wondered why I was drawn to this message, this gospel good news, in the first place? Why did the words, “And God/ess took flesh,” (John 1:14) mean so much to me? I do now think that it was because I was not aware of the innate value of my very existence. I think I struggled to believe that I was sacred. So, to think that I am flesh and blood with the Divine, with God/ess, with Ultimate Intimate Reality, was refreshing in a beautiful way.

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I have always hated the dichotomy people make between “being” and “doing.” In seminary people would often make the point of saying that ministers had to learn to “just be” and not always have to “do.” I would always cringe at hearing that comment. I knew that there was something about that that just seemed plain wrong to me.

In part I know it’s because believe that the very reality of existing is an active reality – not a passive one. Be-ing is a verb, and it does not make sense then to separate be-ing and doing; be-ing is just as active as do-ing.

But then I had an experience that gave me something to add to this idea…

A friend once gave me a little red wallet as a gift, and in it she wrote a personalized meditation for me; it said, “I am allowed to just be.”

I am allowed to just be.

A few months before I would have been bothered by what I would have thought was an implied dichotomy – a false separation between doing and being. But now I see the value in the meditation my friend wrote for me – because I came to understand the implicit value it declared about me:

I am valuable, I am love-worthy, I am sacred just by my very existence
(I don’t have to “do” something to make that be true – it already is)

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Christianity declares that God took flesh. I still really appreciate that message. In Jesus we know God/ess in a wholly human embodiment. The mistake, I think, is to think that this occurred as a way of “rescuing” people, of “saving” us through this supposed sacrifice (of taking on flesh) on the part of God, as if we are only worthy now because God took our “lowly” flesh. That is a part that has never rang true to me – the implication that we humans are so horrible that God taking flesh is a way of saving humanity has never made sense to me. I rather think that “God/ess took flesh” as a way of reminding us who we are.

It’s like we forget. We forget that we are inextricably related to the Divine; that we have never been void of divinity. So perhaps Jesus, recognized by some as the wholly human embodiment of the Divine, was a reminder of that reality…She was like, “Heeeeelloooo – YOU are sacred! Look, you and I are one! Humanity is not separate from Divinity – we are of the same flesh!”

Queer Incarnation, indeed.

“In the beginning there was the divine word and wisdom.

The divine word and wisdom was there with God,
and it was what God was…

The divine word and wisdom became human
and made itself at home among us.”

–John 1:1,14a ( from the Scholar’s Version of the Gospels)

It is good to revisit the familiar in new ways, sometimes necessary, and to take a moment to be still and aware of the Divine Presence within and all around us.