John 1:1-14
Who am I? We sometimes wonder. We might think we know who we are. I have a name, I have opinions, I have a past, I have my own particular fears and dreams. I have my personality, my way of seeing things. All of these are aspects of who we are. We have our life stories. Sometimes it feels like we are trapped in these life stories. We will all of us here have brought our life stories, our opinions, our subtle attitudes, our pasts, to this moment now. The question is: how does this event, this birth, thousands of years ago, impact who I am?
A baby was born. In obscurity. A baby born of a young woman. This event has become the subject of Christmas cards, poems, paintings, hymns. It is difficult, under all this heavy weight of tradition, to know what this event means for us. For you and for me.
This sense that we are sometimes captives of who we are. That personality, that way of seeing the world, it can hang heavy on us. We may find we are longing for that springing up of newness in the midst of what we know all too well.
We hear though how God took on this human nature which sometimes seems to weigh us down. ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us.’ In this birth then, God was born into our human nature. We might say, ‘And the Word became flesh and lived within us.’
One of the greatest theologians and mystics of the Church was the German Dominican Meister Eckhart. If you find a copy of Meister Eckhart’s collected sermons under your Christmas tree, don’t give it away to your friend, find time to sneak away from the festivities and read some of it, slowly. This is how Eckhart begins his Christmas sermon. ‘Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature.’ Eckhart is saying this birth, this birth of God, is not an old event. Yes it was a historical event, but this birth of God is a birth which is also happening here and now, in our own human nature. ‘St. Augustine says,’ Eckhart continues, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’
Eckhart is drawing out what is said in John’s Gospel, about how this birth transforms our understanding of human nature. ‘But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.’
God is born in human nature so human nature can give birth to God. What does that mean in practice? Is it just another story? Let’s go back to our sense of ourselves. Our past. Our name. our opinions. Let’s say that is some of who we are. But what about this other part, this secret part? If we can find some space, some time, perhaps that dance of emotion, and opinion, worry and planning, over-thinking, going on within us, day after day, can slowly calm, and fall away? Those who practice meditation, or contemplative prayer, have to make a space to find the stillness which lives at the heart of who we are. But this stillness is not a secret simply for those who engage in certain spiritual practices, this depth of stillness lives in each of us. It is an infinite, sometimes undiscovered, country within us.
This placeless place is where God may be born in us. ‘And therefore,’ Eckhart says, ‘there must be a silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that, and give birth to His Son, and perform His works free from all images.’
Perhaps in our demanding, confusing lives we may begin to sense there is more to us than what we thought. In the midst of our anger and impatience, a deeper patience can be unearthed. In the midst of our anxiety and doubt, a peace is discoverable. In the midst of our dislike and fear, a richer love can be brought to light. In the reality of our humanity lives the reality of our divinity. God-with-us. God-within-us.
‘I am aware of something in me which shines in my understanding;’ Eckhart preaches, ‘I can clearly perceive that it is something, but what it may be I cannot grasp. Yet I think if I could only seize it I should know all truth.’ We can all have that sense, of a richer, deeper life which lives on the other side of the life we seem to be living. We often appear to live in a narrow space of self but what if we step out of that narrow space and into that new landscape?
‘But how do you know,’ Eckhart says, ‘what nobility God has bestowed on human nature, not yet fully described, and still unrevealed?’ If we grow in the knowledge that who we are are those who bring God into the world, those who manifest Christ, those who can share something of the riches of God’s mercy, love and forgiveness within the demand and confinement of daily life, we may find we are no longer living in that narrow sense of self we are so familiar with.
‘The Son of the heavenly Father is not born alone in this darkness, which is his own:’ preaches Eckhart at the end of his Christmas sermon. ‘you too can be born a child of the same heavenly Father and of none other, and to you too He will give power. For all the truth learned by all the masters by their own intellect and understanding, or ever to be learned till Doomsday, they never had the slightest inkling of this knowledge… Though it may be called… an unknowing, yet there is in it more than in all knowing and understanding without it, for this unknowing lures and attracts you from all understood things, and from yourself as well…’
Who am I? I am more than I think I know. In the midst of who I am is a space, a placeless place, the deepest part of the soul and in this part of the soul God, in all God’s fire, beauty and abundance, wishes to be born.
‘May the God who has been born again as man assist us to this birth, eternally helping us, weak creatures to be born in him again as God. Amen.’
The Reverend Ben Brown 2024.
Quotes from Sermon One by Meister Eckhart. Translated by Maurice Walshe.