Incarnation.

I've already shared this on facebook, but I wanna find it someday, and so this is a much better place to put this...It was on Fr. Ted's blog yesterday.

"From the human point of view, the coming of Christ undoes the Fall and restores the human race to its intended path; but this fall-redemption arc must be seen as a subsection of the greater arc stretching from creation to deification. The Incarnation is not primarily a remedy for something gone wrong; it inaugurates the union between God and his creation for which all things were created. The cosmic dimension of salvation is clearly expressed in Orthodox worship. The rejoicing of all creation at Christ’s birth, the sanctification of water at his baptism, the darkening of the sun at the crucifixion as ‘all things suffer with the Creator of all’ – these are not mere literary devices. They signal the intimate connections between the work of creation and the work of bringing what is created into union with God in Christ.” (Elizabeth Theokritoff in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, pg. 69)