This Garden World

Today my wife, 9 college and post-college aged counselors, and a small flock of high school volunteers finished our first week of our new outdoor ministry. We had around 30 middle schoolers for a week of mountain adventure, camping, and numerous attempts to share the love of Christ and the vision of redemption with these young souls. Middle schoolers are a tough bunch. The week however, was incredible in many ways. I struggled along side the counselors–many of whom were wading into the waters of the 13-year old brain for the first (or second, I suppose) time. Next week, a new group of counselors will take on a new group of teens–this time high schoolers. My temptation is to write off the frustrations of this week and chalk them up to the imminent weirdness of middle school, and move on to high schoolers–a group I feel a little more confident with. But I can’t. These kids demonstrated so starkly the rawness of our culture. Their questions were many, and sometimes more difficult than their ages would have suggested. I remember talking to one of the counselors early in the week who was frustrated and feeling like his group was making progress in their group dynamics and maturity level one day, but completely backslid the next. A friend of mine who is a youth minister gave me some insight into this. He said that the beauty of this week; and of that frustrated counselor was that even though the inquisitive middle schoolers might forget the answer to their respective questions (i.e., moral relativism, drinking, why Catholics believe this or that), what they will remember is that someone–at some point in thier lives–took the time to answer their questions and talk through them with them. And they answered them without saying, “just believe”, or, “because it is”, or some other such phrase–the likes of which plagued so many Catholics in mine and earlier generations.

So many Catholics (particularly the parents of the generation I find myself working with at the moment) have been hurt by the Church in some way. Our common cultural reaction seems to be one of two things: either leaving the Church altogether or even worse, “playing the church game”; in essence, saying, “I don’t really trust you, God, but I’ll keep going to church on Sunday and doing the things I’m supposed to do to keep up my end of the bargin.” These kids deserve better. And that’s what they got, I hope. They got someone–not their parents, incidentally–saying that there is a good reason to believe what that Church suggests; that there is real life–life to the full, in fact–that Jesus came to bring. There is redemption for our relationships with God, within ourselves, with others, and even with the created world, even if it might not look like it most of the time. Hopefully, when the world gets dark, when the questions seem overwhelming, these 11, 12 and 13 year-olds can look back and perhaps say, “I don’t neccesarily remember the exact reason, but I know there was a time when these things made sense, when someone took my concerns seriously , and when redemption really seemed to have something to do with my life.”  

While preparing for a seminar I’m doing on the Psalms tomorrow, I ran across a profound reflection on the Creed and the ancient Christian understanding of the Incarnation. The reflection comes from Antiochian Orthodox priest and writer, Patrick Henry Reardon in his wonderful book “Christ in the Psalms”. Reflecting on Psalm 8, Reardon says this:

From the very earliest translations of the Creed into the English language, the mystery of the Incarnation has been expressed in a rather puzzling way, even if our long familiarity with the words has reduced our sense of their grammatical enigma. We say of the Son of God that He “became [or "was made] man.”

The puzzle posed by this construction is exactly how to classify the predicate nominative “man” in this instance. Is the sense of the expression indefinite–”a man,”  much that we might say that “Fred became a farmer”? But if so, why didn’t the translators simply say that? “He became a man” would not only make sense; it would be both grammatically and theologically correct.

Or is the meaning of the expression merely descriptive–”he became human,” much as we might say “Fred became agrarian”? Here again, the translators could easily have said that, if that is what they meant, because God’s Son most certainly did become human.

No, neither of these translations were deemed adequate. Rendering very literally from the underlying Latin…the translators said that He “became man”, leaving us with this stylistic puzzle. One can hardly think of an occasion, after all, in which we might properly say “Fred became farmer.”

What the translators give us here is an idiom, which is to say a form of expression unique to a particular setting and standing outside of expected usage. On reflection, their recourse to idiom in this case is hardly surprising, for the event under discussion, the Incarnation, is itself “idiomatic” in the extreme, in the sense of being completely unique, utterly unexpected and standing free of normal patterns of acquiescence. How better, after all, to speak of an incomparable and unparalleled event than by recourse to an idiomatic improvisation.

God’s Son did not only ”become human,” though it is true that He did. Nor did He simply “become a man,” although this likewise is a correct statement of the fact. He “became man” rather, in a sense defying grammatical precision as thoroughly as it confounds also the expectations of biology, psychology, metaphysics, and other aspects of the human enterprise, thereby shocked and left reeling, all its vaunted resources now strained and overcharged at the infusion of unspeakable glory.

The most correct formulation of the Incarnation is the one to which we are accustomed: “He became man.” Christ is the archetype of man, bearing all of humanity in Himself. “It was for the new man that human nature was established from the beginning,” wrote St. Nicholas Kavasilas; “the old Adam was not the model of the new, it was the new Adam that was the model of the old.”