Good Morning Everyone!! Happy Tuesday!! Tomorrow is Christmas Eve… Most of you will get half days at work and then Thursday and Friday off, so this is the final lock-in! Get after it today so you can take full advantage of the holiday.

For our main course today, we’re going to continue this Christian theme by seeing how Aquinas talks about the Incarnation as God’s presence in the world (divine providence). To burn that off, we’re going to do a presence check. Finishing off with our Book Nook, we’re going to open up Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.

Pull up your seats, Thought Breakfast is served!!

We tend to look for meaning by escaping the ordinary. Whether it’s perfect meals, perfect gatherings, or perfect moods… we seem to assume that true meaning and purpose lives somewhere else; after things are fixed, optimized, or elevated.

St. Thomas Aquinas claims that “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.” God does not save humanity by bypassing human limits, routines, or bodies. Therefore, the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is God affirming the ordinary conditions of human life: Jesus was God experiencing the constraints of time, fatigue, hunger, and repetition.

Since God entered the world of matter, that means that matter matters. Meaning, then, isn’t found by leaving daily life, but by being fully present within it. The ordinary, mundane reality that we often use spirituality to escape from becomes the medium of holiness, rather than the obstacle to it.

Aquinas puts a spin on the limits that humanity faces (time, body, routine), saying they’re not defects but rather conditions for virtue. As we said yesterday, virtue grows slowly through repetition; not all at once through some dramatic moment. The holiday rush we might feel right now tries to erase the limits of time and routine (we are waiting for our day off to spend the holiday with our families). Aquinas invites us to inhabit these limits and find God within them, not outside.

Jesus Christ was born in a manger (a literal animal shelter) because there was no room left at the inn. God didn’t wait for things to be clean, calm, or impressive. He chose to come into the world in the outdoors, under stress, within uncleanliness. He entered into noise, inconvenience, dependence, and most of all, waiting. Therefore, presence is the gift; not performance, not perfection, and not amazement.

Identify one ordinary moment you usually rush through this week.
(meal prep, commute, errands, etc.)

Ask yourself:

The purpose here is not to romanticize the mundane, but to stop treating it as meaningless.

“Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. For the light of grace does not take away the light of natural reason, but strengthens it. Therefore, sacred doctrine makes use of human reason, not to prove matters of faith, but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine.

Since nature is ordered to grace, and human acts are ordered to their end, divine wisdom works not by abolishing what is human, but by elevating it toward its proper fulfillment.”
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (I, q.1, a.8; cf. I, q.2)

Here, Aquinas directly supports the Incarnation without naming it explicitly. By doing this, he’s perfectly weaving faith and reason which set the foundation for all Christian thought.

He affirms the limits of routine, body, reason, and work as meaningful. Quietly dismantling the notion of escapism and “spiritual bypassing,” Aquinas finds a way for us to find meaning in all moments of life and not just the extravagant ones.

Munch on that for today. In this holiday season, prioritize presence over perfection. Your Christmas dinner party doesn’t have to go perfectly, it just has to bring the family together so you can all be present with each other. Be present today, and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast