The Connection Between

the rather pedestrian event,  the winter solstice and the birth of Jesus, the incarnation is something RMJ posted about today.   The readings in his post reminded me of one of the most moving things in the Catholic liturgical year, the Easter Proclamation centering on the Easter candle,  the ending of which is . . . 

May this flame be found still burning
by the Morning Star:
the one Morning Star who never sets,
Christ your Son,
who, coming back from death's domain,
has shed his peaceful light on humanity,
and lives and reigns for ever and ever.

I'm  all in on that but think it's too narrow,  favoring more of a cosmic interpretation of the incarnation and embodiment of God in material substance, an idea that is more compatible with Franciscan Christology and theology than it is most conventional Catholicism or even most of mainline Christianity.

The combination of the two events, the Incarnation and the Resurrection are not separable, both being aspects of the very real, living Jesus, both before his death and after the Resurrection.    As that quote from Hans Kung posted here a while back notes, the infant so tender and mild in that Silent Night idea of things already bore the imprint of the cross.  And on the other side of his bodily death was life of a kind that is quite unlike the material life, though, if Paul is to be believed, is physical in a way that modern thinking can't really deal with.  Here from 1 Corinthians 15:

35 But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have when they come back?” 36 Look, fool! When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn’t come back to life unless it dies. 37 What you put in the ground doesn’t have the shape that it will have, but it’s a bare grain of wheat or some other seed. 38 God gives it the sort of shape that he chooses, and he gives each of the seeds its own shape. 39 All flesh isn’t alike. Humans have one kind of flesh, animals have another kind of flesh, birds have another kind of flesh, and fish have another kind. 40 There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. The heavenly bodies have one kind of glory, and the earthly bodies have another kind of glory. 41 The sun has one kind of glory, the moon has another kind of glory, and the stars have another kind of glory (but one star is different from another star in its glory). 42 It’s the same with the resurrection of the dead: a rotting body is put into the ground, but what is raised won’t ever decay. 43 It’s degraded when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised in glory. It’s weak when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised in power. 44 It’s a physical body when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised as a spiritual body.

If there’s a physical body, there’s also a spiritual body. 45 So it is also written, The first human, Adam, became a living person, and the last Adam became a spirit that gives life. 46 But the physical body comes first, not the spiritual one—the spiritual body comes afterward. 47 The first human was from the earth made from dust; the second human is from heaven. 48 The nature of the person made of dust is shared by people who are made of dust, and the nature of the heavenly person is shared by heavenly people. 49 We will look like[f] the heavenly person in the same way as we have looked like the person made from dust.

50 This is what I’m saying, brothers and sisters: Flesh and blood can’t inherit God’s kingdom. Something that rots can’t inherit something that doesn’t decay. 51 Listen, I’m telling you a secret: All of us won’t die, but we will all be changed— 52 in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the final trumpet. The trumpet will blast, and the dead will be raised with bodies that won’t decay, and we will be changed. 53 It’s necessary for this rotting body to be clothed with what can’t decay, and for the body that is dying to be clothed in what can’t die. 54 And when the rotting body has been clothed in what can’t decay, and the dying body has been clothed in what can’t die, then this statement in scripture will happen:

Death has been swallowed up by a victory.[g]
55
        Where is your victory, Death?
        Where is your sting, Death?[h]

(56 Death’s sting is sin, and the power of sin is the Law.) 57 Thanks be to God, who gives us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! 58 As a result of all this, my loved brothers and sisters, you must stand firm, unshakable, excelling in the work of the Lord as always, because you know that your labor isn’t going to be for nothing in the Lord.

The great commentator on this, the classicist and writer on religion David Bentley Hart has pointed out in reaction to people misrepresenting his view, claiming that he denied the physicality of the resurrection points out that he has said nothing except what Paul said in this passage, pointing out that the common conception of the "physical" and its relation to spirit was quite different than that held under our common modern, scientific definition of what physical reality consists of, noting that angels were held to have a physical body while being spiritual beings, the only non-physical entity or consciousness being God who is the only uncreated being  He talks of the implications of verses 35 through 44 in which stars, the moon, the sun, are talked about in the same way that living beings are talked about as a prelude to including human beings in that same universe of glorious (implying spiritual) embodied entities.  

In his reaction to the atheist-materialist fad of pansychism, claiming that consciousness is an inherent attribute of naturally organized physical entities, atoms, molecules, subatomic molecules, that "conciousness" getting more like what we experience of consciousness as the entities increase in their complexity and organizatoin, Rupert Sheldrake asked the entirely reasonable question, well, then, is the Sun conscious?   It is certainly an extremely complex, very active physical structure, self-organized, as it were.  If you're going to take that resort to the "hard problem" of trying to deal with clearly incarnate consciousness and its relationship to problem of understanding it in materialist terms,  I don't see how you can say that's an unreasonable question and, in fact, that its affirmative answer would be any more outlandish than the idea that atoms and molecules, possibly subatomic particles, maybe even energy has consciousness - though I think it's absurd to think that talking about what the panpsychists conjecture and the normal, universal conception of what consciousness is based on human experience of our own consciousness and our observation of animals and other behaving organisms as the same thing makes the first particle of sense.  

And if those particles that we're told are, at a fundamental level, much like light and energy, conscious, why not the light?  

These are just a few things that come to mind on a winter solstice morning as I try to deal with an ongoing family problem.  I might get more posted today,  I hope so.  Thank you

Here is RMJ's second post of the day on that appropriate O Antiphon, O Radiant Dawn.