Grace Cathedral

Submitted by congregant, Helen Borgan. Words by T.S. Elliot.

The hard work of God
has not finished.
For his most mysterious
creation, Incarnation,
is not finished.
The forging union
Ensouled body,
Embodied spirit,
the most difficult,
the most impossible
of all God’s tasks,
is still under way,
is still in the adolescent
moment of our maturing,
of our flowering.
For each of us is the site
of this unimaginable creation
still to be realized.
Jesus himself underwent
this arduous, fearsome process.
He lived the still incomplete being
that is the human being:
In his mission
In his authenticity
In his love of God
In his care for others
In his courage
In his talents
In his confrontations
In his supplications
In his anger
In his temptations
In his betrayal
In his unjust trial
In his silence
In his torture
In his despair
In his agony
In his death
The work of completing
Incarnation into New Being
Into wholeness
Into reconciled opposites
Into harmony was going on for
him and every human being, then
and now. That the full work of incarnation has not been completed,
after so long, speaks to how difficult the task is.
My prayer is to be able to see
the direction toward wholeness Incarnation is taking,
even in chaos and the mess of things,
in myself, in my neighbor, in the world.
For even as the Big Bang is still going on
and Evolution of life is still going on,
so God’s process toward the completion
of incarnated being, human being, is still going on.
In this sense, God is still creating.
He has not taken his Sabbath yet.
“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union.”