Incarnational Intelligence

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“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!”

Sometimes Jesus grabs you by the beard hairs and tugs. In the seven woes from Matthew 23 we find Jesus berating those in positions of religious and cultural power for their greed, violence, and hypocrisy. This is the unsanitized Jesus, a prophet who writes in the dirt and breathes the raw Spirit over his disciples. Jesus exercises incarnational intelligence while the teachers of the law and Pharisees practice an artificial intelligence by constructing memorials to the past to curate self-serving nostalgia in the present (a dodgy game still in style). This rebuking by Jesus is particular to a time and people, but the lesson is not exhausted. Curated nostalgia is a vile temptation in every generation that leads to lifeless, breathless idolatry.

And it is our very breath that connects us to the Living God and protects us from the artificial, the unreal. Our breath is a reminder of the shared vulnerability of being alive. Our breath keeps our hearts tick tocking in the here and now. To be human is to recognize the givenness of life ritualized in our rhythmic breathing; surrendering exhales and resurrecting inhales. Our breathing humbly binds us as kin to one another, as children of God. For God has no grandchildren, Fr. Richard Rohr says, only children.

I see a choiceful play here between Jesus and the teachers of the law: incarnational intelligence (membership with life) versus artificial intelligence (nostalgia for life, artificial life, and forgetfulness of life). Nondual doorknockers- do not rap your knuckles at this dichotomy. This is a spectrum grounded in the real, not phases to pass through or reach up to, but orientations of vulnerable embodiment of life. Each day is rife with trap doors and tripwires to knock the breath of life out of you into disembodied artificiality. As babies we begin with immature incarnational intelligence, always in great need, and we communicate that need relentlessly at the top of our lungs. If we are lucky, our innate incarnational intelligence is nurtured by a membership into maturity where all members belong to one another, sharing in the collective suffering and success. A decentering of self ultimately takes place when one chooses to live in loving responsibility within the community. This is ripened incarnational intelligence. But even with a high incarnational intelligence, danger lurks. Falling into nostalgia for a better/different/happier times is a loitering temptation. A malaise sets in when one is tempted out of membership and into nostalgia. When the past is idealized, forced or unforced, it bestows life to the artificial. And I say woe to those whose intelligence becomes artificial. When a person becomes merely a performer, when incarnational risk is forsaken for systemic fluidity, we can easily dissociate from mercy, justice, and faithfulness. When incarnational intelligence is forfeited, we softly kill the prophets among us by admiring their lives for future memorialization, rather than embody it anew in our lives. Artificial intelligence slowly sets like jello and we begin relating to God not as the giver of breath but as a distant grandparent. The God who is humbly immanent becomes a nuisance kicked to the curb, or worse, cast to a faraway nursing home for unmanageable deities. The God who breathes where the wind will blow is unable to spin the pinwheel of the artificial.

I think this is why we neutralize Jesus in every generation. This is why we keep killing the prophetic. We move from incarnational intelligence to artificial intelligence. Woe to those who line their pockets while keeping their distance from the breathing world that God so loves. Woe to those who throw Gatsby parties while thumbing their noses at hungry people. When we attempt to artificialize what is incarnational, we pave the road to forgetting the shared incarnational life as the children of the One breathing us into being.

In the membership of the breath of life, there is no fairness or comeuppance, it is simple givenness and reciprocity. Go ahead and draw a free breath from the membership of life, for each and every one of us is in dire need of our next breath. You may swim in money or not have two discontinued pennies to rub together, but our breath invites us back into resolute connection with the One and one another. Recognizing our neediness for breath bends the knee to a vulnerable Mystery that inhales our greed, violence, and hypocrisy and exhales God’s justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Our breath claims our common neediness as a re-membering towards incarnational intelligence, the antidote to artificial intelligence.

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