Olympian Spirituality vs. the Incarnation

I remember hearing a story years ago about a Russian saint who would make the rounds of his village to see how people were doing and share the gospel with them. One of his disciples was very disappointed to see him spend two hours of his valuable time listening to a peasant woman nattering on and on (as he thought) about her chickens and their various illnesses and trivial spats and quirks and relationships with each other and the various humans in the vicinity.

After they departed her company, the disciple said to the master, “Why did you waste your time talking about chickens? You could have been discussing the things of the Spirit!”

The master replied, “Her whole life is in those chickens. That is where she is. So this is where God meets her.”

Or, as St. Thomas put it, “That which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.”

Or, as St. John put it, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

God meets us where we are and speaks to us on our terms because we cannot meet him where he is. He stoops down to our level. Hence all the weirdness in the Old Testament of God accepting blood sacrifices and grain offerings and circumcisions and all the other bric a brac of the ancient Bronze age folk he was speaking to. It’s how they thought and lived and navigated the world, so he used their lingo and cultural forms. He still does.

Of course, the point was not to leave them there, but to elevate and enlighten and, in the end, transform them (and us: God is playing a very long game–so long that most people never stop to consider the possibility that we are still living in the early Church).

But the way God changes us is by meeting us where we are. So Jesus, aware that we require things like “daily bread” urges us to ask for it in the prayer he taught us. Nothing like the good animal act of eating to remind us that while we are Spiritual Beings we are also fragile animals, made of meat, needing to poop, and in continual need of these little subsidies of food and drink every few hours. And, of course, that is also a sacramental sign since the bread spoken of in the prayer is also a reference to the Eucharist.

That is intended not only to keep us humble and grateful, but to remind us that it is our part to supply to others what they need and (just as important) to help take away obstacles they face in running their course rather than hucking more roadblocks in their way while finding fault with them for struggling.

I think of that as I read stuff like this:

Here’s the thing: That stuff plays well at Republican Rite Catholic cheese and wine soirées with the Napa Institute, but for people struggling to navigate in a world ruled by MAGA predators who constantly use gooey fake piety to perfume the scent of blood on their breath, it is just nauseating. So, for instance, it is telling that the Register‘s utmost vision of Christianity is that it is here to save the West. And in the circles the Register, Napa Institute, and those who speak derisively of “vile wokism” move, “the West” now means a very particular skin tone and income level.

When you and your circle are guilty of grinding the faces of the poor, it is very consoling to tell yourself that your victims are worldings flattened by secularism and interested in bread alone while you are thinking of Higher Things. It can’t be that the poor are scrabbling for a hand-to-mouth existence in the midst of a tyrannical state fleecing them blind, threatening to deport them, and speaking of them as parasites. It can’t be that they are too exhausted to have the leisure to ask spiritual questions. No. it’s because you are just naturally spiritual while they are secularized trousered apes with no grasp of the deep things of God.

I run into very, very few people who hold the faith in contempt because they don’t like Jesus. Indeed, I see lots of people begging the Republican Rite Christians to show them Jesus–and being told to take their Wokeness and go to hell. The contemptuous Nietzscheans I encounter have far more in common with drug-addled supermen like Elon Musk and the self-regarding Orange Messiah of the Dunning-Kruger Religion who dabbles in eugenics. The real reason people are fleeing Republican Rite Christianity is not secularism or scientific rationalism. It’s repellent liars and Mammon-worshippers like this traitor to the gospel:

…and similar people whose primary interest is not the good news of Jesus Christ, but rage at LGBTQ, or refugees, or Muslims as the animating principle of a ghastly theo-political MAGA antichrist machine that has interposed itself between seekers and the God of love Christ reveals.