Yesterday, I stopped by a local Starbucks for a hot coffee. Outside the store sat a homeless man asking for money and food. I was struck by his appearance—his sad eyes and shivering body, his look of quiet desperation. I went inside to order and, while waiting, noticed three young Dominican friars outside approach the man. They stood over him and prayed, then came inside for their coffees and pastries.
I must confess, I felt annoyed. These clean-shaven, white-robed friars had offered nothing more than a prayer over a desperate human being. But then I caught myself. Who was I to judge what passed between them? Perhaps they would return. Perhaps their prayer meant more to the homeless man than I could know. Still, watching them, I thought: What does this Advent season mean? What are we waiting for?
I went outside and asked the man, “Do you want something to eat?” He said yes. I brought him inside, bought him food, and stayed with him for a few minutes. It was the least I could do. I had to act on what I am—a Christian—more so—a Franciscan.
This is not to say the Dominicans did wrong. Their tradition is profound: for them, contemplation is reflection on the Divine Word, and from that contemplation flows preaching—giving others the fruits of one’s interior reflections on God. The Dominican spirit is to hand over to others the fruits of one’s prayer. For Franciscans, contemplation is relational. To contemplate God is to go out of oneself and into the other by way of vision. Prayer is seeing with the eye of the heart. Angela of Foligno put it this way: As we see, so we love, and the more perfectly and purely we see, the more perfectly and purely we love. To love is to act. Essentially, the way we love shapes the world around us.
Francis of Assisi was a radical follower of Christ—unlettered and unfettered by abstract thinking. For him, divine life did not exist outside human experience but was fully realized within it. Like Jesus, Francis embodied divine presence while embracing the complete human condition. He knew hunger and exhaustion, experienced joy and grief, deep friendships and failures, and faced death itself. Rather than viewing the sacred and secular as separate realms, Francis possessed an incarnational spirit. He showed that divine life emerges through the very depths of human experience. The sacred is not found by escaping our humanity but by fully entering into it. He spent many hours in prayer, meditating on the scriptures. He was so in tune with the stories of Jesus that his biographer, Thomas of Celano, wrote that Jesus was constantly on his mind, on his lips and in his heart. Everything and everyone spoke to Francis of Christ.
The God of Jesus was the God of Francis—a God who crosses boundaries and startles us with spontaneous acts of compassion—a God who disrupts rather than maintains order. Brandon Ambrosino describes the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11) as an example of Jesus’s God. Rather than condemning her to death, Jesus stoops down and doodles on the ground. His action is disarming and enrages his listeners. The barriers between sacred and secular begin to dissolve as an ordinary human gesture—doodling in the dirt—becomes the location of divine encounter. “To act ethically,” Ambrosino states, “is to participate in God’s disruptive future.” The divine call becomes not adherence to religious convention but the courage to embody God’s unruly love through unexpected moments of grace that transform both giver and receiver.
The New Testament, especially the Gospel of John, makes a startling claim: the infinite God is infinitely near and can be fully known through the human life of Jesus. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). This declaration challenges both religious abstraction and philosophical generalization. Ultimate reality is not found in universal principles or mystical experiences that transcend particularity but precisely in the irreducible specificity of this person, Jesus, in this moment, encountering a woman, in this place, amidst a crowd.
This specificity extends to every aspect of Jesus’s existence. He spoke with a particular accent, grew up in a specific cultural context, learned a particular trade, formed distinct friendships, faced unique challenges. The theological term “incarnation”—from the Latin in- and caro (“flesh”), meaning “to be made flesh”—emerged as early Christians struggled to articulate this mystery of divine embodiment in the person of Jesus. The doctrine represents not merely an addition to existing religious thought but a fundamental reimagining of the very locus of divinity: from distant transcendence to intimate presence. A new awareness of God’s presence emerged in Jesus’s life.
The scandal of the incarnation deepens when we recognize that particularity is not a limitation; rather, limitation defines essence. Jesus did not become more divine by transcending his human specificity; his divinity was revealed precisely through his complete embrace of human particularity. The infinite God is not diminished by taking on finite form but is revealed as the kind of God who can be fully present within the constraints of one human life without losing anything essential to divine nature.
If the disciples experienced a unique awareness of Jesus as bearing divine presence, this recognition emerged from Jesus himself manifesting an unprecedented consciousness of God’s immanent reality. He lived from a profound, integrated awareness of the divine that transformed not only his own being but the very nature of the divine-human relationship.
Carl Jung recognized that Jesus represented a revolutionary development in human consciousness—what Jung termed “individuation,” the process by which a person integrates conscious and unconscious dimensions to achieve authentic wholeness. For Jesus, this process appears to have reached its ultimate depth, where personal will aligns with divine will and the separation between self and God dissolves. Jung later expanded this view, arguing that the incarnation marks a transformation not only in human consciousness but within the God-image itself: God becomes self-reflective through the human psyche.
Christianity thus emerges not primarily as an ethical system or institution but as a mystical movement seeking to replicate this unitive consciousness—making the immanent divine accessible to all. “You are gods,” Jesus tells his listeners (John 10:34). The fully integrated self, at its culmination, transcends its own boundaries and discovers its divine source. Consciousness becomes so attuned to its ultimate ground that it no longer mediates between subject and object; instead, the divine reveals itself directly through consciousness, as consciousness.
Teilhard de Chardin was trained in scholastic theology but set it aside for something more relational and immanent: a deeply felt theology, much like that of the Franciscans. For Teilhard, God is in the mess, the sorrow, the joys, the fears, the wars, the triumphs.
Teilhard returns us to the incarnation. The God who emerged in the life of Jesus of Nazareth is a disruptive, unruly God who pushes us out of our comfort zones and our abstract prayers into the face of the homeless, the sick, the anxious student, the veteran, the new parents—every single person and creature—where God is seeking to rise up and shine as the divine energy of love. Divine love is neither generic nor ethereal; it expresses itself in this way and that way, in this particular person and that particular creature, in this particular difficulty and that particular misunderstanding.
The Church adopted the theology of Thomas Aquinas. God is pure, absolute Being (esse)—the act of existing itself. In God alone, essence and existence are identical. God does not need creation but delights in it; our very existence is a participation in God’s life. Thomas’s God is transcendent, rational and abstract, insofar as God is ontologically distinct. For the Franciscans, God is Trinity, relationship itself. God is in the particular, the Word made flesh. To be created is to embody God. We do not move from particulars to universals, as Thomas Aquinas taught; rather, the universal is in the particular.
Like the Franciscans, Teilhard emphasized each particular person and each event discloses divinity. Every quark is a revelation of God. He was an empirical mystic. The oneness of God is expressed through each particular life—this event, this person, uniquely one. Like the Franciscans, he understood that divine particularity opens us up to one another, because God is always the overflow of any particular existence, always more than what is here, always drawing us beyond ourselves toward the other. Omega is the radiance of these divine particularities converging in the unity of love. There is no abstract, transcendent God enthroned above to whom we must bow and pledge allegiance—bowing is for worldly kings. To “bow before the other” is to embrace the other because to embrace the other is to embrace God.
Teilhard returns us to the living God and offers a new narrative: incarnation is the story of evolution. Every quark, atom, leaf, cat, tree, and person speaks God in its sheer existence. What we hold in common is not participation in the abstract but particularity itself—the shared condition of being unique bearers of God. The beauty of God is the richness of our diversity.
If incarnation is true, then the oneness of God cannot be an abstract divine unity above us, but the trinitarian overflow of God among us. God is the excess of the present moment, the more of myself, the beyond within this person, this difficult situation. God’s transcendence is not spatial but temporal. Everything in its particularity bears witness to divine surplus. And this overflow has another name: future. Everything has a future because everything is God-bearing, and God is future.
Somehow, we messed up the brilliance of the incarnation and created for ourselves a very abstract and divided world. By following abstract principles of unity and perfection, we have flattened out the incarnation, forming it into an abstract doctrine with abstract terms, forgetting that God chose to enter the world not as an idea but as a particular human being in a particular place. Incarnation is a reawakening of the particularity of God. Advent time is a call to wake up and look around, to see that God is being born every second of every day by someone in a particular place, at a particular time, through a particular act. Jesus came two thousand years ago but we are here. We are God’s becoming, and creation is happening now.
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