A Christmas Meditation

EarthAbbey member, Alan Mann, reflects on what Christmas gives to those who long to live more in tune with the earth.

‘When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman,’ Galatians 4:4

‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ John 1:14

We live in an age when people are happy to acknowledge that they are ‘spiritual’, but few wish to say that they are religious. Indeed, many seek out spiritual experiences, but fear what it would mean to have a religious one. As can often be the case, our fears are born from dichotomies that need not exist, or because in expressing clear boundaries we remain right in what we affirm, but wrong because of what we deny.

Though to many ears the following may seem paradoxical, what we have lost in preferring the spiritual over the religious is a sense of true connection to the earth. We have lost a sense that a religious experience is one that is rooted, earthed, embedded, or as the Christmas story expresses it - incarnated. As Richard Rohr once wrote in his little book, Preparing for Christmas, ‘the word religio means to retie - to rebind reality together, to reconnect things . . . to experience and enjoy the Great Connection, to live in a place where all things are one,’ (p60).

As the great creation myth of Genesis tells us, our connectedness to the creation is fundamental and primal: ‘In the beginning . . . God took a handful of soil and formed a human body. Then God breathed into this body and gave it a life that reflected God’s own.’

At the beginning there is no dichotomy, no platonic fight between the flesh and the spirit or desire for the spiritual at the expense of the religious. As the Creation Story suggests, we receive life, but only after our bodies have been fashioned from more temporal elements. It shouldn’t surprise us then, that our spirituality is intended to reflect the earthiness of our being. To call ourselves human is at one and the same time, to recognise our spiritual natures.

There are many messages, many ideas vying for our attention at Christmas, both sacred and secular. Some are valid, many are dubious. At EarthAbbey, we hope that one message you are able to hear is one that affirms our connectedness to the creation. To realise that we become evermore like Jesus, not by escaping the earth, but by burying ourselves deeper into the soil of life.

Peace to you and the world in which you dwell.

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