No one says it better than Christian Wiman, a poet who happens to be terminally ill: “If nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time ravaged self.”
We need the specific, the concrete, the real.
It’s like the story of the little girl afraid of the dark at night in bed. Her Mom tries to comfort her by telling her, “God is with you.” She protests, “Yes, but I need someone with skin on!” Don’t we all need the incarnate? We all need someone with flesh, someone embodied.
How can God come to us today? “Human beings are God’s language,” writes Rabbi Harold Kushner in “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” That’s one way God is still speaking to us, appearing to us, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see and flesh to touch.