The Year of Our Lord, Coronatide

Photo by Gareth Harper on Unsplash

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Today we mark the incarnation of the Lord, whose presence is now sealed in flesh and history.

The event of the incarnation brings into sharper focus the other events that have been put on visceral display before our eyes. We not only arrive at the culmination of our hope and desire during the time of Advent. I am also realising that as the Son comes down to us, the sun is also going down on another year, and what a year it has been.

As much as many of us would like to put the difficulties of a pandemic saturated year behind, it is unlikely that we would forget this particular waltz around the sun anytime soon.

Having begun the year with a prospectus of concerning city life and loneliness, we have almost at once experienced the shutdown of that city, and having most of us plunged into isolation. This casting a pall over urban life has also uncovered the sufferings, fissures and pathologies that flow within the veins of this form of social organisation.

In the midst of our isolation from the terrestrial world, another digital world emerged to become the most prominent lifeworld both locally as well as globally. As many Christians have come to experience, the Church was certainly not immune from this digital shift. As the physical presence of the Church began to recede in the face of government restrictions on gatherings, the centrepiece of the Church’s response has been the normalisation of an online presence to the faithful. Rather than through physical assemblies, the faithful gathered around screens for worship, and this has generated anything from outrage to reconsiderations of past biases. For myself, arguably the most significant change for this year has been my re-evaluation of the merits of the Church’s online presence, especially in circumstances where cooperation with civic authorities in the midst of a plague meant that it was the only presence available. It provoked in me many questions about the sacramental status of the Body of Christ when it has to traverse a digital landscape as its pilgrimage back to the Father took a decidedly digital turn.

Questions notwithstanding, what endured through the pandemic was a desire to be in tactile communion again. Isolation brought out feelings of nostalgia for all the communions that we had in the recent or distant past. In some parts of the world, easing of restrictions have allowed some restoration of embodied gatherings. The question that remains for us is whether these restored communions assume not only a renewed vigour, but also a redefined purpose as sites of the real and places of solidarity, or whether we will slide back into old habits of allowing the virtual to dictate the shape of the terrestrial. My hope is that our patterns of communion would be shaped by this upcoming solemnity of the incarnation of the Lord, where the Lord’s passion for all to be in heaven led Him to empty himself and find solidarity with His creatures in human form, so that in His human form, all may encounter that which responds to their deepest desire, and by extension put them in touch with the eternal.

For now, however, this is the time where we at Awkward Asian Theologian say it is time for a rest. I for one need it, for big changes are afoot. As such, normal posting will resume in mid-January.

I would like to thank everyone for following me through this year, and for the feedback they have provided. A special thank you goes out to patrons of the blog, who have provided crucial support in keeping this blog running. For all of you, I am profoundly grateful.

A merry Christmas to you all, here’s hoping that 2021 is a less awkward one than 2020.

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