Incarnation - Dance of Dross and Dream

When I think of the Incarnation you come to mind. 

My friends Bill and Billie (soul-mates named at birth) wrote this on their Christmas note.  Oh, thank God it shows, I thought, that part of me that makes them think this. 

What is “dross,” my friend the writer had asked a few mornings earlier when I had used the word.  I had thought he was kidding; words are his medium.  I had begun to respond literally, that dross is the scum on the surface of something, like tarnish.  But even as I was saying that, I had suspected that he was calling me to a deeper truth.  Calling us to a deeper truth…like these quiet days in the aftermath of the Christmas rush of buying presents and decorating for the season and then the flurry of wrappingcookingtravelingeatingeatingeating.

 The “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  In-carn-ation.  The perfectly pure Word of a perfectly perfect God became flesh, like us.  And with that he joined us in this – struggle or dance? – of humanity, purity and dross all mixed in. 

Dross is that part of the metal that is not metal, released from its hiding in the solid by the melting process.  The metal is melted to make it workable, to form and shape it into some use.  The impurities, that would otherwise weaken it, come to the surface where they can be skimmed off.

So my friends Bill and Billie see in me something of the pure in me.  It shows through the dross that I know is there.  That’s why I thank God it shows.  But I’m stuck sometimes with my dross, my imperfections, that I and those who have to live with me see.

I think my friend the writer was asking a rhetorical question when he asked what dross is.  I think he was suggesting that to be human is to be word and flesh, eternal and dying, ideal and real, metal and dross.  

Life is to be lived as Christ lived it, in-carnate, in flesh. 

There’s a teenager alive in each of us, more often in some of us that in others, but certainly in me.  We can look in the mirror and on a face with perfectly clear skin see one pimple, and that darned thing ruins our day.  Having an almost perfect complexion becomes having a zit becomes being a zit!

We are not dross.  That is not the ugly truth.  That is the ugly lie.  We are not the sum of our faults.  We are the sum of our humanity, this amalgam of perfection and impurity. 

Thank God that those in our life see beyond the dross, see the good that is in us.  And thank God they are, like God-with-us…with us in this struggle, this dance, of humanity.  Thank God that we can be formed, by their loving affirmation, into something useful.

Coming up

Losing it: new year's resolutions and the crucible of humiliation

LOL: Love On Legs

  FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.