The 24 Rhythms of Hearth & Hinterland: Incarnational Living
Words on Staying Put in a World That Wants to You to Float Away
Most of us were taught that being spiritual is about being above things.
Above our mess.
Above our body.
Above our neighborhood drama.
Above our ordinary lives.
We learned to think that faith was something clean and elevated. The reason we went to church on Sunday, at least partially, was to wash away the grit and grime of the week. To recharge. To remember where our true life and promise lay.
And that promise was something that happens inside you, or after you die, or somewhere else entirely.
But in all my years of study and practice, I’ve yet to find that supposed truth in scripture. The Christian story doesn’t begin in the clouds. It began, and still begins, in dirt.
The first pages of scripture don’t describe a God hovering at a distance, issuing decrees from afar. Instead, we see God’s hands in soil, breathing into lungs, an intimate presence walking in the cool of the day. The Creator stoops. The Creator shapes. The Creator stays.
And then, when humanity forgets, when it fractures and flees that presence to choose its own way, that same Creator doesn’t solve the problem by pulling us out of the world.
God found his way into it. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14)
God didn’t visit.
God didn’t hover.
God didn’t remain a quiet observer of our struggle.
God dwelt.
The Greek word John uses, eskēnōsen, means to pitch a tent. To tabernacle. To move into the neighborhood and stay long enough to smell like the place. To know it’s pain and its beauty in all of it’s fullness.
The idea of incarnational living begins right there, in our own desire and willingness to appreciate the clouds while getting our hands wrist deep in the mud.
Our primary role in this world is not to be defenders of a doctrine that we construct, because how is that much different than eating the forbidden fruit all over again? No, our primary decision must be to remain present, to let God meet us, and be known through us, in the particular bodies, places, relationships, and limitations it would be so much easier to escape or pretend didn’t pertain to our new holy life at all.
God Doesn’t Save Us From Our Humanity
Somewhere along the way, many of us were handed a version of Christianity that treated the body like a liability and the material world like a temporary inconvenience. Salvation was framed as extraction—getting souls out of flesh, believers out of history, heaven out of earth.
But the entirety of scripture seems to refuse that storyline.
Jesus doesn’t come to erase our humanity.
He comes to assume it.
Our Eastern elders said what is not assumed can not be healed. Christ didn’t redeem us by standing apart from the human condition, but by entering it fully. He lived a life of fatigue, hunger, touch, grief, sweat, joy, and a horrific death.
He was born to a poor family in an occupied land. He experienced life as a refugee. He grew up in the obscurity of a backwater community. He learned a trade that calloused his hands. He walked dusty roads. He ate what was put in front of him, and didn’t eat when that food wasn’t present. He let people interrupt him. He wept when his friends died. He bled when the empire decided he was expendable.
And somehow, that was and is the salvation of the world.
Incarnation isn’t a detour from holiness. It is holiness, made visible.
And living incarnationally is the only way to be and know true holiness, because that is where we experience the fullness of the universal Christ that is shared within all of creation.
The Christian life can never be about escaping reality because the only way to experience the fullness of Christ is to remain rooted in the pain of the mud without losing the hope of the clouds.
The Scandal of Staying Put
One of the quiet disciplines of incarnational living is staying when it would be easier to leave.
Staying in a body that’s aging or aching.
Staying in a marriage that requires daily choosing.
Staying in a neighborhood that doesn’t photograph well.
Staying with people who can’t be reduced to slogans.
Staying with neighbors who routinely ask more of you than they offer.
I’ve always admired the Anabaptists in this area. They didn’t just offer a teaching, they modeled it as a foundational ethos.
Faith wasn’t primarily something to be correctly believed intellectually. Orthodoxy wasn’t the primary motivation. Their faith was something practiced visibly, communally, and locally.
Discipleship happened more in the kitchens and fields of shared labor than it did in their Sunday sermons.
Following Jesus means learning how to love our actual neighbors — not the abstract ones, not the hypothetical ones, but recognizing that the people we share our fence line with (as well as our digital timelines) will be inconveniently different from us in seemingly important areas, but it is of no real matter. The mandate to love them only grows stronger as the divide widens.
That is, at least partially, the scandal of the Gospel. (Luke 6:27-36)
Incarnational living resists the fantasy of distance.
It says God is not more present “out there” than right here.
It says holiness is not waiting for us somewhere else.
It says heaven is not a promise after death, but a promise for now.
It says this place—this life—is the arena of redemption.
When Jesus announces his ministry in Luke’s gospel, he doesn’t speak in abstractions:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor … to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” (Luke 4:18)
Those aren’t spiritual metaphors floating free of material reality. They’re bodily, social, economic, and communal realities.
An incarnational faith has consequences.
For those who are a part our lives.
For the communities where we live.
For our own well being and joy.
Sacrament Is Everywhere, or It Is Nowhere
My own Celtic stream of Christianity had a way of seeing that feels almost dangerous to modern sensibilities. At the very least, it can feel silly in the beginning.
They didn’t look for God primarily in grandiose, carefully curated spiritual moments. They expected God to be threaded through daily life — through work songs, intentional thresholds, shared meals, and weather of all types.
They blessed the hearth.
They blessed the fields.
They blessed the waking and the sleeping.
Not because those things were useful, not because doing so was symbolic, but because they were alive with divine presence all on their own.
There was no hard line between prayer and labor, sacred and ordinary. Everything existed in thin places — where heaven and earth brushed up against each other if you were paying attention.
This is why incarnational living and prayerful living always feels slower than the curated religion offered by human empire-building, even when that empire building bears a cross on its banner.
Incarnational living asks you to notice what you’ve been trained to ignore.
The Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican traditions speak of this through sacrament — not as magic, but as meaning. Bread and wine don’t stop being bread and wine. They become what they always were meant to be, carriers of a grace so thin that they cease to exist independently and become a spiritual reality that blends both together in much the same way that God entered the world as Jesus Christ, the original incarnation.
And if that’s true at the altar, it’s true at the table as well.
It’s true in the body you inhabit.
It’s true in the work you do.
It’s true in the land beneath your feet.
It’s true in the person you find least likeable.
“The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” (Psalm 24:1)
Not the parts we approve of.
Not the parts that are comfortable.
Not the parts that build our brand and reputation.
Not the parts we can monetize.
Everything.
Incarnational living is simply the refusal to live as though that isn’t true.
Jesus Had a ZIP Code
One of the most overlooked details in the gospels is how located Jesus is.
He doesn’t wander endlessly as a spiritual nomad. He returns to familiar towns. He’s known by name. He has a reputation. People remember him as someone’s son, someone’s neighbor.
When Philip tells Nathanael they’ve found the Messiah, he doesn’t say, “He’s from heaven.” He says, “Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph.”
And Nathanael’s response — “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” — tells you everything you need to know about how incarnation works. And being someone born and raised in the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia in the United States, this line always felt particularly potent.
God often chooses a place with a dubious reputation.
A place people dismiss.
A place no one expects much from.
A place that is culturally backward.
And then he stays there long enough for the place to matter.
Incarnational living means resisting the urge to be everywhere and choosing instead to be somewhere.
It means letting your faith take on the accent of your region, the pace of your people, the wounds of your land. It means allowing yourself to be shaped by the limits you didn’t choose instead of constantly trying to outrun them.
The Orthodox call this kenosis, self-emptying — not self-erasure, but the humility of presence in place. It is the willingness to love without control, to serve without spectacle, to remain without expectation of success.
Jesus doesn’t redeem the world by managing it. He redeemed it by loving it from the inside.
Resurrection Always Has a Body
One of the quiet heresies of modern Christianity is, in my opinion, the idea that resurrection means leaving materiality behind for a more heavenly existence above.
Because the risen Christ still eats.
Because he still bears scars.
Because he can still can be touched.
Resurrection doesn’t discard the body. It restores it.
Our material bodies — yours and mine — are not obstacles to holiness. They are the place where holiness insists on showing up. They are the vehicles and modality that God chooses to inhabit to bring his Kingdom here to Earth.
Incarnational living holds this as a cornerstone of its wider theology.
It cares about how we eat, how we rest, how we touch, how we speak. It asks whether our lives are divinely inhabitable, not just productive.
It refuses spiritual shortcuts that bypass grief.
It refuses piety that avoids social and community responsibilities.
It refuses a hope that can’t be bothered to get its hands dirty.
“Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:17)
Our works don’t save us, but a spiritual life that never enters the world or cares enough to release it from the darkness of oppression (physical, economic, political, and spiritual) offers no real hope or good news in the first place, because what its desired distance says is that its light can not shine in the dark. Or even worse, it wishes to keep its light all to itself.
Practicing Presence in an Age of Escape
We live in a time that rewards disembodiment and distance.
We scroll instead of sit.
We curate instead of commit.
We brand instead of belong.
The incarnational living I’m proposing here is an act of resistance against normalizing that way of life.
I would have you learn the names of people you would rather ignore.
I would have you show up in the places you would hope nobody would see you visiting.
I would have you choose fidelity over novelty.
I would have ask you to choose a life that might at first appear painfully small.
A meal cooked.
A porch light left on.
A phone call returned.
A prayer whispered while sweeping a shared sidewalk.
But these are not insignificant acts. They are the slow, steady ways resurrection enters the world, at least if we are to believe scripture.
Jesus tells his followers that whoever welcomes a child, welcomes him.
Whoever gives a cup of cold water does not lose their reward.
Whoever loves the least participates in the life of God.
Incarnational living dares to take him at his word. Full stop.
A Benediction for Rooted People
This is not a call to do more. It is simply a call to stay.
To stay with your body.
To stay with your place.
To stay with your people.
To stay with the work of love.
You don’t have to go looking for God in grand gestures or distant destinations.
God is already where you are.
Pitching a tent.
Breaking bread.
Bearing scars.
Calling your name in a familiar voice.
I’m calling you to plant your feet in whatever dirt you were placed on and dare to grow roots so deep that you cannot be plucked from it.
Let your prayers learn the shape of your days.
Let your faith smell like the work of your hands.
Let your love take on weight.
Because the Word is still becoming flesh within you.
And the world is still waiting for people who believe that God meant what he said when he chose to dwell among us.