Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars.…
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings.
Those are the first and last stanzas of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “Christ Climbed Down.”1 Ferlinghetti’s understanding of a particular (and peculiar) dogma may have been off — the “Immaculate Conception” doctrine refers to the conception of Mary, not to that of Jesus Christ — but that’s not the worst of his heterodoxies, at least from some broadly accepted Christian perspectives. For many Christians, the implication that the more important birth of Christ is that which he awaits “in the darkest night of everybody’s anonymous soul” is something one might expect to hear from an incorrigible heretic — from, say, a Quaker.
Our Quaker tradition reads stories in scripture as pointers to inward events. In a Quaker reading of the annunciation narrative,2 each of us is an anonymous Mary, in whose dark heart-womb the seed Christ lives. Christ, the image (eikon) of God-who-is-love,3 the seed promised to Abraham,4 is the promise, or “principle,” of divine life waiting within us to be born and to re-create our hearts and souls by imparting to us its own life. But, as Isaac Penington has warned us, that living seed is easily missed or rejected.
For though this principle be all life, yet it is at first but as a seed, and the appearance of the Lord in it is but as in a seed; very little, low, weak, hard to be discerned, easy to be overlooked and despised, and some greater and more undeniable appearance expected.5
We don’t recognize the seed because we don’t expect to find the deepest and most powerful truth of our lives in something small and frail, almost invisible, apparently worthless and even undesirable if glimpsed or felt. Our expectation is that the experience of the presence of God will be affirming, uplifting, powerful, awe-inspiring. But this tiny, wretched, seemingly powerless seed of sacrificial love? Not what we’re looking for.
Yet in our inner darkness the seed continues to live and move, the “secret virtue [i.e., hidden power for good] and stirring of the life in [the] heart.”6 And when at last the seed is found and recognized; when, understanding what it is and what it offers, we respond with our “Fiat voluntas tua,” allowing it to be born and to grow in us: then is the coming of God in human form, the coming of Christ in the flesh — in our flesh. Then is the coming of God in power,7 “the very craziest of Second Comings.”
It is the seed of God, and it is the very nature of God [i.e., love: see Penington's "Concerning Love"]; and [a person] in whom it springs, and who is gathered into it, born of it, and one with it, partakes of the divine nature. Peter speaks of the great and precious promises, whereby the saints are made partakers of the divine nature. All the promises are to the seed of promise, to Christ the Son of God, to the seed of God, to the heirs of life and salvation in Christ; and they are all fulfilled to them, and enjoyed by them, who are ingrafted into, and one with Christ, the seed; which cannot be, but by the grace, by the truth, by the light, life, Spirit, and power, which he sows in the heart; which are not many things, but all contained and comprehended in the one seed.8
Earlier generations of Quakers, perhaps more attuned than we are to that living inward promise, refused to erect “rootless Christmas trees,” symbols of spiritual rootlessness resulting from our ignoring or despising the life of sacrificial love flickering weakly in the dark depths of our hearts. And of course they refused to erect crosses and crèches, which divert our gaze from the living icon of love, the inner Christ, to physical and conceptual idols.9 As Jean-Luc Marion tells us, the idol stops our gaze at itself, occluding the horizon, and then, mirror-like, returns our gaze to us in a spiritual narcissism; but the icon inverts that process: in the icon, the invisible “opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth.”10 Christ, the seed of love in the heart, is “the icon of the invisible God.”11 Through that icon, the invisible power and nature of God12 engage us and transform us unto what we behold.
And so we Friends direct our attention not outward to an idol-symbol but inward to the living icon, the seed of God, within — to the small stirring of love in our hearts. By feeling and responding to the movement of that life in our spiritual wombs, we dispose ourselves to become Theotokos, the God-bearer, and thereby to be re-created in the divine image — a true “immaculate conception.” May our Advent, the season in which we can only acknowledge our longing for the saving birth of love, come swiftly to its end: may Christ take flesh in us today. May this be the Christmas Day on which we say,
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year.
_______
NOTES
1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958), 69-70.
2. Luke 1:26-38.
3. Colossians 1:15 (see note 11, below); 1 John.
4. Galatians 3:16.
5. Isaac Penington, “Concerning God’s Seeking Out His Israel” (1663).
6. Isaac Penington, “To All Such That Complain That They Want Power” (1661).
7. See Mark 9:1.
8. Isaac Penington, “The Seed of God and of His Kingdom” (undated).
9. “Idol”: “A form or appearance visible but without substance” — Merriam-Webster Online.
10. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 19. Here, from page 21, is Marion’s translation of “an astonishing sequence from Saint Paul,” 2 Corinthians 3:18: “We all, with face unveiled and revealed [anakekalummeno prosopo], serving as optical mirror to reflect [katoptrizomenoi] the glory of the Lord, we are transformed in and according to his icon [eikona], passing from glory to glory, according to the spirit of the Lord.”
11. Colossians 1:15: “Hos estin eikon tou theo tou aoratou.”
12. See Romans 1:20.
