At its heart, Christianity describes a creative process whereby human beings, and the whole material world, are drawn deeper and deeper into relationship with the divine. This process – incarnation – is inherently sexual at a symbolic level – the word penetrates the flesh, and in the womb of the flesh, takes on embodied form, giving birth to new possibilities for human life and relationship. It is a model of continuous human growth and development at both an individual and communal level – the word is made flesh, the flesh brings forth new words and so on. The fuel of this process is love – not parent-child love but adult, generative love which teaches us, through the discernment of right desire, our path through the world and the creative work which is ours to do. Jesus both teaches this path of divine incarnation through loving encounter with the world and with others, and, in himself, fully embodies the divine-human union, which is its fruit.
The Christian Churches, however, are stuck in a parent-child model of love in their theology and corporate structure. An obstacle to embracing a fully incarnational vision of Christianity is the historic denigration of the flesh, and with it the divine feminine. The role of the word – symbolically male – has been to dominate and subdue our unruly flesh – symbolically female. The word is divine but the flesh is human, sinful and creatively passive. Within an incarnational structure word and flesh are equal partners, playing equal parts in bringing about the divine-human union based on a relationship of mutuality and respect. Male and female, word and flesh are understood as aspects of each person, not divided between men and women. We see the lack of this incarnational process all around us in the rape and desecration of the natural world, the shift from embodied relating to virtual reality, and in an all-pervasive managerial culture that sees no problem giving people with no embodied knowledge, experience or skill authority over those with expertise on the ground. This vision of incarnational Christianity requires a coming to equality of the divine feminine, of the creativity of the flesh and the resurrection of the body in our theology, liturgy and corporate structures. Caroline and Claire are exploring what this might look like in their respective artistic practices. Their work is informed by the writings of Carl Jung and Ilia Delio among others. [Return to Home Page]