On flesh

In Jesus Christ you see that the Word has become flesh. In Jesus Christ, you see that the flesh isn’t just the flesh. That the flesh becomes itself when it’s united with transcendence. That’s not flight from the flesh into transcendence, it’s the other way around. It’s [the] coming of transcendence into flesh and making the flesh to be what it ought to be. And I think that is a fundamental to the Christian faith. It’s [a] perception of [the] world as suffused with the presence of God, as a gift to us, and of ourselves as sites in which God as well is present.

And so this is an account of ordinary human life and ordinary human pleasures that is enhanced by relationship to God rather than kind of diminished by the relationship with God. Because the idea is neither that we simply enjoy things qua things and that is the end of it, nor that we fly from things to the eternal beauties of the divine world, as sometimes ancients have talked, but rather to unite these two. And only when we unite the two does the earthly come to its full identity with itself, so to speak.