Limitation and Incarnation
Limitation is all we have.
I remember when I was coming back very fully into the faith, someone explaining why the whole concept of a Judeo-Christian monotheistic God was so revolutionary and a completely different sort of thing than one of many polytheistic gods. God is just so vast yet He IS - in his infinitude, he exists. Key to that is his choice of an incarnation.
I happened upon an AI/VR product demo today. As time goes on I get less and less impressed by these… not because they’re pipe dreams, but because even if they worked as billed, they sound awful.
You’ll reach for a bag of tea, and a little button will come up, asking if you want to start the boiling of the water. You just have to say yes.
I think these designers really hate the world.
That might sound like an overstatement but I’m fairly serious. What is so awful about turning on a stove yourself - even if that means having to get logs and stoke a fire (which it doesn’t, these days, for most US citizens)? Why our hatred for material things and work?
There is such a desire to push “beyond” and to “what’s possible” - it’s a frequent perversion of the innate desire we have for the transcendent that imitates the very fall in the garden - curiosity for things not fit for our state in life.
A lot of technologists are gripped by this perversion and push it hard. What’s the way out? Well, like most things, love.
Love the stoking of the fire. The ritual of putting water in the kettle and boiling it. Letting the tea steep. These things are what we have. If we don’t have the work and labor going into the process, we just have tea. Tea, unearned (and ungifted), without the easing in and out, without the lovely ritual, is nothing but bitter leaf water. But ritualized, Tea is lovely.
Why did God become man?
The whole thing about saving mankind and foiling Satan and being benevolent? Yes, but why? Out of love.
Love not for self but love for the world - the incarnate world; the tangible, gritty, stoke-your-own-fire world. Not the gnostic move-beyond-everything world. God exists there, too. He spends plenty of time there. Yet, he is just enamored and fascinated with this world. He bounded it and put limits on it - because he knows just how boring the formlessness is. He’s there, too.
When you face your limits, be grateful. The most powerful being in the universe took them on willingly.