Reflections on Incarnation in this Season of Advent

Post Author: Claire Dietrich Ranna

The familiar faces of my parishioners occupy the screen before me as I sit on my zafu, a cushion Buddhists often use while doing a seated meditation called Zazen. I started this weekly meditation group within months of my arrival at Christ Episcopal Church almost six years ago. It is modeled loosely on a recovery meeting I attended throughout my early twenties at the San Francisco Zen Center. When the Bay Area issued its shelter-in-place orders in March 2020, we started gathering remotely, which we continue to do to this day. 

While we rotate through practices, the overall structure of our time stays the same each week. We begin with a check-in. “How are you today?” I invite. “What are you holding that you wish to put down, maybe for an hour, or maybe for longer?” After everyone has spoken, I offer a brief reading before introducing a practice. Sometimes it’s centering prayer as articulated by Thomas Keating, the Catholic monk who was integral in reintroducing Western Christendom to our contemplative roots in the mid-twentieth century. Or maybe it’s Zazen as I learned from the monks at the Zen Center. Or maybe it’s a Celtic Christian visualization taken from Irish poet John O’Donohue’s gorgeous book Anam Cara. Whatever it may be, I invite us to settle into our bodies into a comfortable posture, bringing our awareness to our breath, feeling ourselves firmly planted in our good bodies on the good earth. Then I guide us into the practice. After twenty or thirty minutes, we come back together, usually with another brief reading or poem, and we reflect on our experience, the reading, or whatever else is bubbling up within, before we sit in silence for a couple more minutes and I close with a final prayer. 

I begin this week with a brief reading of Hannah Shanks’ This Is My Body: Embracing the Messiness of Faith and Motherhood, which opens with the simple sentence, “God cares about bodies.” It’s such an obvious but understated claim for Christians. Of course, a God who would choose incarnation cares about bodies! But how often is this affirmed, celebrated, relished in our churches, our sermons, and our conversations with youth group members and aging elders alike? We can’t say God cares about bodies and then shame people for being fat, or wearing a tank top, or becoming incontinent, or enjoying sex. Shanks is like many of my peers who, upon having children, found Jesus’ words, “This is my body, given for you,” which he uttered at his last meal with friends as he lifted up and blessed the bread, taking on new depth and meaning. To experience our own and each other’s bodies stretch, ache, cramp, and break to bring new life into the world gave us a glimpse of what the incarnation had cost God. Those who experience miscarriage or the death of a child, as God did, know this price profoundly. I remember these same words floating around my frazzled head, delirious with love and sleep-deprivation, as I watched my daughter and then my son feed at my breast. This is my body, given for you, I’d think, enraptured, in awe. This is, I have to believe, precisely the kind of connection Jesus wanted us to make between his words and our lives – Jesus, who also loved bodies, loved women, loved life.   

I announce that we’ll be doing a body scan and invite those present to either find a comfortable, sustainable seated position or to lie down nearby, which I do myself. The core of this exercise comes from psychologist Kristen Neff’s popular book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. Now sixteen years into recovery from a life-threatening eating disorder and the traumas that gave rise to it, I’ve found body scans to be extraordinarily grounding, and this group also loves them. I gently guide everyone to close their eyes and to notice the sensations of their in-breath and their out-breath. After taking time to settle, we begin by focusing our attention on the soles of our feet, noticing any sensations there, the temperatures and textures we encounter. We give thanks for all this part of our body does for us throughout the day. We bring awareness to any tension and release it with a long exhale. And then we move to our heels, our ankles, our calves. Sometimes I say more, sometimes less, but gradually we make our way up our bodies to the crown of our heads, practicing gentle curiosity, releasing tension, and expressing gratitude as we go. Eventually, after relaxing all the tiny muscles around our eyes and mouth, our jaw and throat, we lie on our mats – because everyone has chosen to lie down, smart people that they are – and we breathe. I invite them to notice the wholeness of their bodies, many parts singing in harmony, and to become aware of any change they may have brought themselves in this practice. In and out, up and down, the breath moves in and through us. I’m reminded that the Latin root of the word “inspire” is simply “to breathe.”

For most of this hour, we’ve been together in silence, attending to our muscles and bones, our skin and tendons, or aches and anguish, with compassion and curiosity. We have not lit candles and recited the well-loved and well-worn words of the Lord’s Prayer together. We haven’t shared communion or heard the words of sacred Scripture. But at the end of the body scan, I know that what we were just doing was prayer. I know that inhabiting our own skin with intention and tenderness is a holy thing–and for most of us, an unfamiliar thing. We live in a culture that is hostile to the body, especially the female and non-cis gendered body. All too often we worship in churches where naming the delight and pleasure of embodiment is taboo. Being more present in our own bodies also opens us to see more clearly the oppression and exploitation of the bodies around us. Our bodies are not only sources of wonder but also of solidarity. When we relearn how to feel and how to stay with ourselves, there will be joy and pain alike, and we will be able to hold them both. 

Advent is a wonderful time to think again about the ways we leave ourselves, the ways we abandon these precious and God-given homes, and our commonly held prejudices against incarnation. As we prepare to welcome Jesus once again into our world and into our hearts, we might begin to embrace embodiment as, itself, sacramental. We might notice the joy of slowing down and actually tasting our food. The wonder of awakening each morning well-rested and full of life. The delight of our eyes actually seeing the flickering candle flame, the lights strung on the tree. The gift of smelling fresh pumpkin pie or gingerbread hot out of the oven. The pleasure of a lover’s kiss. The warmth of a friend’s embrace. The strength of our legs moving through the world. We are creatures, yes, every last one of us, like Mary, like Jesus: creatures wonderfully made. If being in your body is especially hard for you, as it has been for me, and your body does not always feel like a safe place to seek rest and respite, I pray you can be gentle with yourself, go slowly, and both seek and find all the support you need. May we come not only to believe but to know, with every fiber of our being, that our bodies are indeed temples of the Holy Spirit.  

Everyone in our meditation group looks dazed as we return to our seated posture but also lighter and less burdened. We speak more slowly and softly as we reflect on the last fifty minutes together, the intimate inner experience we have shared in parallel. Eventually we close our eyes for a few final minutes of silence, after which I open my mouth, praying to our gracious and loving God, who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, who numbers the hairs on our heads. Amen.