Does prayer change things? Or us? Or both?

This morning, awaking early and getting in some reading, I began to see a pattern. I think a Message was getting through.

For everything I happened to pick up in my still-half-groggy state, it now seems, had one point to make.

First was an online Advent devotional that snagged my interest as a checked my email (yes, I guess it’s a bad habit to make email my first foray into the morning world). The piece quoted a letter of C. S. Lewis where he wrote of God’s becoming human: "The Incarnation was God’s ‘weak moment.’"

Yes, that’s a jarring picture. But, says Lewis, "when Omnipotence becomes a baby in a manger it has ‘weakened’ itself.’" To be sure we mean a weakness not of powerlessness in the face of inevitable circumstances. We mean a weakness born of love. But still, it’s a seemingly a counterintuitive motion for lofty Deity. An odd coming low.

And then, in a preface to a work on the early Christian theologian Origen I’m making my way through again after its sitting on my bookshelves for years, I came across the idea of descent: Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote of God’s descent: his descent to human flesh, to ordinary life, to the humiliation of the cross, even his descent into hell. Von Balthasar mentioned, too, Jesus’ summons to his followers to take the lowest place. And mentioned God’s continued descent through the Holy Spirit to the ordinary people, as when Paul speaks of his fellow Christians as ignoble ("not of noble birth," he put it more delicately in 1 Corinthians 1:26). Paul was saying Christians were the people who in the world’s eyes are stubbornly everyday. Paul even says, "God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."

And then, going online (again), I spent time with an idea I’ve been pursuing for some writing on the Trinity. I was looking up the word ekstasis, a Greek word from which we loosely derive the word ecstasy. Ekstasis can also mean (and more literally refers to) displacement. Ekstasis suggests an image of something being thrown, transported. And it applies to God: God, in all his fullness as a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, threw himself down, threw himself into our ordinary life, for all its grubby spectacular splendor, into all its gritty and glorious particulars.

And then I think this: If God comes "down" that means he shows up where I am. Moves into the neighborhood of my ordinary concerns and jostling anxieties. Moves into this morning made too early by my awaking and not being able to go back to sleep.

It has all come down. Glory Itself. It's taken him some trouble, but he's willing. Which means he’s here. Right here.