Five Incarnations of Advent 2025: Black, Yellow, Red, White and Jewish
2:08 PM Thursday.
Shalom, Duffy.
My Mom's breast cancer has returned. She needs a mastectomy this Advent season. The prognosis is good, and we are mostly relieved, but as you can imagine, it's still quite upsetting. Her resilience is such a powerful inspiration.
As I have already confessed to the vegan side of my Christian support network, I am struggling with the perception that we don't have much time left to scale up a vegan Hail Mary to mitigate God's climate wrath (and maybe prevent most breast cancer). It's something I have been worried about for a while, as you know. I thought maybe it was part of my 2010s delusionality that I could leave behind, but now I am wondering if there is a vegan baby Jesus in the 2026 Advent bathwater. Does the Church have a new vegan baby on its hands? Maybe by 2033?
Against this backdrop, it's feeling a little bit difficult not to judge the luminaries that follow for falling short in their preaching on vegan liberation theology. But I don't know, maybe one or more of them is vegetarian and keeps it to himself. I am willing, furthermore, to disagree with Christian theologians who believe that Jesus was raised as an Essene vegetarian, and that he never ate meat. But even if Jesus ate meat before his Crucifixion, and fish afterward, would he do so now? I could understand if 1/3rd of the bishops and cardinals were vegan, 1/3rd vegetarian, and 1/3rd flexitarian. Am I really applying a reasonable expectation, considering the average age of active bishops (66 years) and living cardinals (78 years)? On one hand, we are talking about older generations of Church fathers that I probably shouldn't expect to be up to speed on the latest vegan, vegetarian, and flexitarian climate mitigation trends. On the other hand, we are talking about spiritual luminaries of the Way who should probably be quite adept at vegan, vegetarian, and flexitarian penance. What do you think, Duffy? Should Catholic laity be upwardly leaning on the bishops and cardinals to get their diets more balanced by 2050, or should it be top down, with pressure coming from cardinals and bishops on the laity?
At any rate, the idea in what follows is to see the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ-consciousness in each of the four color directions of the Lakota Sioux Medicine Wheel, and also in the cross at the center of the Wheel.
Week 1: Hope (The Black Christ) Cardinal Sarah
Week 2: Peace (The Yellow Maitreya) Cardinal Zen
Week 3: Joy (The Red Messiah) Cardinal Jimeno
This is just one possible way to think about the Medicine Wheel in Advent fashion. My thanks to Steven Charleston and the Creator for suggesting it.
This week, God seems to be calling me to fix my attention on Cardinal Sarah as a symbol of the Incarnation - as the "Black Christ." Some - I among them - thought Cardinal Sarah would have been an excellent choice for Pope, too. There were so many fine and even necessary alternatives. How can one man ever be the right choice? Short of the Last Advent, I suppose all Popes are in some sense humanly imperfect choices, as we were discussing. Perhaps I make too much of the Pope, and not enough of the bishops and the cardinals?
I'll conclude with four questions for Google Gemini.
Q1. What does Cardinal Sarah think of liberation theology, including black liberation theology - has he ever written or preached on the subject?
Q2. What did James Cone mean by the black Christ?
Q3. For Cone, liberation was understood in terms of material egalitarianism, while for Sarah, liberation is understood in terms of a spiritual salvation and afterlife promise that transcends material inequalities in this earthly lifetime?
Q4. Has post-Vatican II Catholic social thought tended to include both perspectives in tension?
Perhaps next week I will say more about Cardinal Zen, and then each of the others in due course, God willing. I am not too good at pinning down my future writing self.
Thanks for reading. I look forward to connecting over the phone on Sunday evening.
In Hope,
Jonathan.
End 7:20 PM.
Comments
Post a Comment