The Culture of the Incarnation
An Essay by Jordan Haddad, Ph.D.
Every community, no matter how small or large, no matter how ancient or new, is simultaneously both the recipient and the steward of a particular culture. We South Louisianans know this well, for we live in a community whose air is thick with cultural expression and life.
While other parts of our country, and even our state, experience life as the cyclical rhythm of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, our common life is marked by Football, Mardi Gras, Crawfish, and Hurricane seasons. While many towns across the U.S.A. might be indistinguishable from one another, filled as they are with the same restaurants, the same music, the same stores, and the same industrial art, there can be no mistaking when you’re in Acadiana, ‘down the bayou,’ or in the Crescent City. The food, the music, the customs, and the life, that is, the culture, down here are simply different.
‘Culture,’ though, like ‘time,’ is one of those familiar terms that is easy to describe but hard to define. Examples of one’s cultural experience can be rattled off at a moment's notice, but what exactly is culture? One easy way to define it is as a community’s common expression of the ideas and values that characterize their shared life together and embody their understanding of the meaning of life, God, and the world. Just as every person dresses, acts, and talks a certain way in order to express and communicate his or her perceived meaning of life, so too does every society manifest its shared meaning through its cultural traditions and customs.
While all of this talk of culture might seem self-evident, I wonder how many of us recognize that the Church herself embodies a particular culture and life because she, too, is a society. The Church, we would say as Catholics, is actually the society established by Christ, which is meant to envelop and absorb all other societies on earth, while embracing the goodness of their own identities and preserving their relative autonomy. As Jesus explains in Matthew 13, the Kingdom of God, which is, ultimately, the Church, can be likened to a tiny mustard seed, which grows into a large tree in which the many birds of the air, that is, the nations and peoples of the earth, may reside and build their nests.
Whereas American culture, at its best, is defined and shaped by those pivotal moments in its history, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the abolishment of slavery and the overturning of the Jim Crow laws, our shared victory over the Nazis in World War II, the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the end of the Cold War, our Catholic culture is defined by those singular moments in salvation history when God manifested himself to his people in increasingly significant ways. These include such events as the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Incarnation of Christ in the womb of Mary in Nazareth, the Transfiguration atop Mount Tabor, and the Resurrection and death of Christ outside of Jerusalem’s city gates. While each of these is significant for the life and culture of the Catholic Church, the Incarnation occupies a special place.
The Incarnation was a wholly unforeseen event from the perspective of the Old Testament, and it remains an impenetrable mystery even for the Church who lives on the “other side” of this event. In the Incarnation, God has not simply spoken or acted in a generic way but has freely and irrevocably become one of us by assuming our shared human nature. Just as the Son of God is consubstantial (of one substance or nature) with the Father, so, too, is Christ consubstantial with the human race. Whereas people of every time and place have looked upon the beauty, order, and marvels of this world as manifestations of the existence and goodness of God, in Christ we are not only told of God but actually tangibly come into contact with him, and by coming to know Christ, we come also to know the Father, thus encountering the Trinitarian mystery of the God who is Love.
The Incarnation reveals many things to us, but one of the most important things that it reveals is that this created order, our universe and our world, are not as far from God as we would have otherwise thought. In Christ, God not only walked among us but also spoke our language, ate our food, drank our wine, laughed at our jokes, celebrated our weddings, and experienced our sorrows. While many before and after the Incarnation have thought that one must despise this world in order to ascend to the realm of the spirit, Jesus Christ has revealed to us that holiness can be found in the midst of the mundane.
It is for this reason, among others, that we Catholics, wherever it is that we have walked the earth, have carried within us a genuine love of life, festivity, and sacramental worship. As Hilaire Belloc, the British-French writer and historian, once wrote: “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s laughter and dancing and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!” In a world that has grown tired and lost its ability to hope, we Catholics have a great secret to share with those around us: God has become one of us, so we ought to rejoice and be glad.
This basic Catholic experience, which can be seen so clearly in the lives of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Philip Neri, St. Thomas More, St. John Bosco, and Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, has been the great religious force behind the shaping of South Louisiana culture over the centuries. Our shared love for the good things of this world – food, music, festivals, family, and community – has emerged from within the wider, common Catholic experience of worshiping the God who has become one of us, which reshapes not only how we think about the relationship between heaven and earth but also the experience of suffering, temptation, and loss.
If we South Louisianans wish to avoid losing our particular culture by way of an all-encompassing assimilation into the wider American culture, which is swiftly becoming more and more secular, then we must return to a deeper experience of life centered on the worship and discipleship of the Incarnate Lord, for in Christ alone we come to see not only who God is but also who and what we are. As a result, we must put on the “mind of Christ,” as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, and live each day “in Christ” if the underlying ideas and values that characterize our shared life as a people of South Louisiana will not only be preserved but also grow and flourish, for all that is not built on him as its firm foundation will pass away.
Jordan Haddad, Ph.D., is a Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Notre Dame Seminary and President of The St. Louis IX Art Society
Artwork by Blair Barlow Art
Lord of All, Oil On Canvas, 40 x 60 in. (2019)
