Advent II: On Being Incarnate

This Advent more than others I find myself highly attuned to the embodiment of God, the notion of the incarnation. Perhaps it has something to do with feeling weary, run-down and sick for most of Advent thus far that has me realizing again the limitations of my humanness and my own embodiment.
I had the privilege of welcoming my first niece into the world earlier this year. And while I am not someone who generally coos over every infant in sight, I couldn't help but loving this tiny human with a part of me I didn't even know existed. Watching eyes learn to focus, watching lips learn to smile, watching hands learn to grasp were all profoundly beautiful experiences and I found myself marveling at the process of this embodiment.
How quickly we take for granter our ability to learn the most basic and instinctual of human traits. That is unless we are somehow forced to relearn them at an later stage in life - like my dear friend Jaclyn who had to learn to take baby steps again after a major surgery had rendered her paralyzed from the waist down. She was only too aware of her own embodiment.

Another poignant reminder of the limitation of embodiment came to me in reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This beautiful work of art was painstakingly crafted by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man in his forties who suffered a life-altering stroke that caused him to have locked-in-syndrome. His paralysis left him literally locked-in his own body. His only point of communication with his surrounding world came through blinking his left-eyelid. This book (which has been rendered into an equally beautiful film by the same title) was captured as Bauby "dictated" each letter through the systematic blinking of his eye. The resulting work challenges the notion of what it means to be alive, free and embodied.
Bauby wrote "When the blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wing beats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better." What a tragically poetic understanding of embodiment.
This advent I have thought of the incarnation from a new perspective, rather than God being locked-in, cautiously finding his footing as a toddler, or fighting off illness; perhaps the incarnation is God finding a place silent enough to hear the gentle beats of butterfly wings. Maybe the incarnation is God learning to hear not better and better, but differently, God learning to hear with human ears, and love with a human heart. Maybe in some simplified way the incarnation ought to challenge our understanding of what it means to be alive and to be free and what it means to be embodied.