What it Means to be Born and Re-born

A traveler may be going down a path, either a physical path or a path defined by his intentions.  It is possible that he might be thrown off that path by some force or circumstance arising from an intersecting direction.  Both the traveler’s original path and the direction of the intervening factor can—indeed, inevitably will—be viewed as outworkings of chains of cause and effect.  If the identity of the traveler is linked to his physical form, then the origin of his new travel will be understood to be his first direction, now complicated by an alteration, and the causal chain that forms the history of the intervening factor will be reduced to a subset of the traveler’s history of cause and effect.  The traveler follows, in the usual analysis, a bent path, even if his new direction is indistinguishable from the path of an overwhelming intervening factor, and even though, as is indisputable, the intervening factor is the product of a causal chain just as inescapable and infinitely regressive as that which attends to the traveler.

This is because, in this scenario, the essence of the traveler is linked to his physical form.

Another example is not so simple.  Assuming no complicating physical differences between two peoples, an excruciating situation could still be forced on a child whose heritage was contested.  For the sake of consideration, a situation can be envisioned in which a child of some manner of colonists was raised by natives, and only later discovered the fact.  Which heritage would be his?  What if he was legitimately adopted by natives as an infant and then appropriated in early childhood by a third family, this one again of colonists?  To which culture might he attribute his earliest recollections of human interaction, to say nothing of imprints established even earlier?

This second scenario is more complicated and more difficult because it deals with psychological matters.  Or then again, it might be said that its complications and difficulties arise only from misplaced emphases on parentage or heritage—when more worthy considerations ought to be in view.  In any event, the fact remains that evaluation of concepts as they proceed from the mundane to the sublime by necessity requires abandonment of mundane mental constraints.

A chief example of shedding such constraints is that required in properly understanding Jesus’ insistence on being born again/born from above.  The simplistic notion of a one-time life-changing experience (for which Christianity conscripts Jesus as a ritualistic blood-washer) simply has no basis in the Gospels.  The Gospels speak repeatedly of parentage and heritage as mutable concepts, and as human beings—rather than as once-born or twice-born—as being sons or children of whatever personal metaphor will further the purposes of a lesson.

To return to the first scenario, that of the diverted traveler, and to attempt to transmute it into the purposes of the Gospels, is merely to see the futility of such an attempt.  Our souls are not tied to physical reality, and physical analogies to spiritual truths are limited at best—and they are at their worst as the truths become more crucial.  We are, in the spiritual realm, beset by every force and every possibility from every side at every moment—if it even makes sense to use physical analogies.

If we choose to appeal to the teachings of Jesus, then the scenario of the diverted traveler only applies in light of how Jesus applied terms of parentage and heritage.  If we embrace the faithfulness of Abraham, then the attributes and history of Abraham become the character and story of our souls, and so on for every instance we face among innumerable possible instances.  We are redirected by forces, for good or ill, and our heritages and our inheritances are those of the new paths, as though we had never traveled any other.