"The greatest poverty," wrote poet Wallace Stevens, "is not to live in a physical world."  Fair enough.  On the other hand, physicality without a larger framework renders it incomprehensible.  Moreover, it seems that unless we can grasp that larger framework, we would still know very little about who we are.

     

    As spiritual beings, we humans tread a tenuous path.  We love our physicality and the fruits of living in a physical world, and we should.  Yet we are also acutely aware that we are more than our physicality.  We all experience feelings of transcendence, whether we believe them to originate in immanency or something beyond it.  We daily encounter the limits of physical category.

    Maybe that's the logic of the incarnation.  As we continue walking through the Advent season, we have time yet again to ponder that investing in only materiality leaves us wondering what everything earthly really means, a life spent looking for what it can never know.  Yet denying materiality in favor of transcendence, and only transcendence, forces us to construct meaning on a bed of sinking sand, drowning us in what we cannot see.
    

    Only when immanence and transcendence are fused can we see what meaning, and God, really mean.  Only in Advent's coalescing of time and eternity can we see what life can ultimately be.