Incarnational Stream: Writing

Richard Foster, founder of Renovare
On the “Incarnational Tradition” from his Streams of Living Water.

Here we come to the most fundamental arena of the Incarnational Tradition: the arena of everyday life. It is the place par excellence, in which we make visible and manifest the invisible realm of the spirit. To move into this sacramental way of living, we must take deep into our heart and mind Paul’s words, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Colossians 3:17)

The most basic place of our sacramental living is in our marriages and homes and families. Here we live together in well-reasoned love for everyone around us. Here we experience “the sacrament of the present moment,” to use the phrase of Jean Pierre de Caussade. C. S. Lews wisely observe, “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.”

Work is another everyday place – perhaps the most substantive place – for incarnational living. By “work” I am referring not merely to our job; I am referring to what we do to produce good in our world. I am referring to our vocatio, our vocation or calling. Now, I really must bear down on this point of our work as the place for living sacramentally. While some have a special calling to pastoral or priestly work, the calling for most of us is smack in the midst of the workaday world. This is where people desperately need to see the reality of God made visible and manifest.

The third place that we learn to live sacramentally is in society at large. Here we bring the reality of God to bear upon cultural, political, and institutional life. We work to life our culture, not just through the commonsense moral standards of decency and honesty, but through art an literature and drama, justice and beauty and shalom. We nurture “the good, the true, the beautiful” throughout society – through the person-centered caring of the schools we run, through the beauty of the parks we build, through the entrepreneurial empowerment we offer the poor, through the imaginative and redeeming literature we write, through the ecological sensitivity we bring to land use and development, and so much more.

The Incarnational Tradition underscores the fact that God is truly among us in the warp and woof of our very earthy existence. God is not distant, nor is he disinterested. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. We, you understand, are not alone. God stoops to our needs and allows himself to be glimpsed in the material world.