In Regard to the Theme of this Blog

The theme of this blog must consist of two interconnecting parts.

First, “roused, readied, reaped” describes a story-arc that follows the structure of the Gospels’ treatment of God’s relationship with his creation.  However, the Gospels are merely lenses that present this arc in a constrained focus; the wider focus of creaturely experience follows the same arc.  I contend that the roused-readied-reaped story-arc is not limited to the Gospels, nor is it the creation of the Gospels or their authors.

Now, “roused, readied, reaped” is what happens in a special way to the Gospels’ Jesus—in a perfect way, as I would like to develop in subsequent posts.  I cannot demand that the reader subscribe to that contention of Jesus’ perfection, but I can expect the reader to credit my frankness in having stated it as a premise of this blog.  And now, of course, I am going to say that we, and all Creation, partake of the same story-arc.  We are thrown into the realm of experience; we are seasoned by our exposure to it; we meet our ends bearing more-or-less fruit of greater-or-lesser quality.

The inestimable genius of the Gospels is the declaration that the peril to our souls is not the danger of failing to meet some standard, but rather the dangerous temptation of exempting ourselves from the story-arc.  None of us could escape being roused—for that is by definition the basis of our participation in life—but we can certainly resist being readied (by insisting on burying our experiences under dogmas), and we can certainly resist being reaped (by insisting on defining the standards by which we will be judged.)

This tendency to insist on dogmas and standards is, as the reader is no doubt aware, the source of many of Jesus’ conflicts with his enemies—and of the conflicts he sees playing out around him.  The roused-readied-reaped progression reaches its fruition only when the moral agents involved will have it so; otherwise there is only deadly futility and despair.  And “deadly” has its ever-present connotations in the Gospels as in much of religion.  There are as many “deaths” in spirituality as there are spiritual experiences.

So that is the first part of this blog’s theme: the “Roused, Readied, Reaped” of the title itself.  As the above was intended to show, however, the “readied-and-reaped” two-thirds of the title cannot each be coequal with the first third: “roused.”  The “roused” aspect is not similarly at the discretion of the moral agent in question; the “roused” aspect is that which is entwined with the very roots of a person’s being.  So this will be the second part of this blog’s theme.

We can try to make ourselves “readied” for salvation.  We can maintain that we believe this or that, and we can work on our minds so as to bend them into the shape of our desired beliefs.  We might simultaneously think that we cannot ultimately control what we think, but it is only the experience of undershooting in that regard that we register; in the final accounting we may find that we have often overshot in self-indoctrination, to our detriment.  We have decided how we will be “readied.”  And here it will perhaps suffice to say, given the fantastic constellation of proffered religious “salvations,” that we have also decided how we will be “reaped.”

But the business of being “roused” cannot be so easily transacted.  We are roused at each instance of the story-arc—instances tumbling one upon the other—and in these moments of responding to moments before conceptual moments have passed—in those pre-moments, as it were—we have revealed to us the unyielding substance of our souls.  It is for the sake of that soul-substance, not the substance of our doctrines, or of our hopes in various salvation-plans, that we are right to beg mercy from God.

We must ask that our responses to the moments of life spill forth rightly from the seat of an inner being only God can know and only God can tend—as God  would will.  Nothing figures more prominently in the Gospels than the necessity of the inmost self—the primal self, the infra-cognitive self—being predisposed to lunge for the light rather than the dark.

The ephemeral yet ever-poised primal nature of the soul exerts itself more often than we can consciously acknowledge; indeed it is that very self of which our pitiful consciousness pretends to be master—a pretense that sends us on the quest for wisdom beyond understanding when yet we have decided that what we find will subject itself to our capacity, as we imagine, to understand.

It is as though we thought that salvation came from some doctrine written upon our souls.  Make no mistake; I am not talking some glib wisdom about how the scribbling of doctrine will not bring forth life in a dead soul so decorated.  I am talking about a dead, stony soul within each of us that will not be enlivened if doctrine is scribbled upon it, or carved deep into it by learning; or by experience; or by submission to some religious authority.  Neither might our souls be enlivened by drenching them in tears.

Our souls are thus unyielding because they are our true selves.  If we—as we must—assign fundamental importance to the status of our souls, then we must reckon that the status of any surrounding or countervailing reality (no matter how “real” in some objective sense) is subject to change.

We can see this all-important nature of the soul’s status demonstrated in some of the Gospels’ most harrowing passages:

In John 8 Jesus disputes with certain of the Jews.  (By “certain” I refer to the company of speakers and all those present who gave overt assent—the text requires nothing more.)  The Jews take exception to a remark of Jesus, and say:

“We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?” (KJV)

In his response, Jesus says, “I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.”

Before the exchange is over, Jesus has told the Jews—those contending with him in that place and at that moment: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”  (Some translations employ notions of “desire” or “preference” instead of “lust,” but the Greek does not lack connotations of passion.)

Jesus is describing what matters.  Theological niceties aside, being or not being a child of the devil is just about as bad as it gets.  Jesus is talking about the state of a soul wherein it lunges and lusts after the same things the devil does.  That the soul in question might at some point have been describable as a child of Abraham is a consideration that no longer exists.

To be roused—to respond without thinking—to moments as the devil would is, in reality, to be of the substance of the devil.  Jesus is not issuing a polemic, but a pronouncement.

Of course the concepts of God abroad among the crowd held that God is not only just but merciful as well, and the disputation, for Jesus’ part, does not conclude without him describing the grounds on which one might be restored as Abraham’s offspring:

“Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.”

 Visceral, fleshy response, even to something describable in the most esoteric religious terms, is what reveals the state of the soul.  Without an understanding of this premise, readings of the Gospels are futile.  For example, there is the story of the widow’s mite:

“And he said, Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had” (Luke 21:3-4).

I must admit that I never understood what good the widow was doing anybody by casting in “all the living that she had.”  Surely Jesus is not commending her for throwing herself upon charity or for throwing her life away.  Inasmuch as we must assume that her motives are commendable—for what else would be the purpose of the story?—then we must understand that Jesus is predicating the story of the widow on the importance of her upwelling desire to contribute to the cause of God—on the importance of what seizes her when she is roused to the challenges of her meager life.

So we are given the story of the widow.  Attributing to the story no more than seems reasonable, we can take it that a woman—born, living, and dying as a pious Jew, never having heard or sought the teachings of Jesus—can, on the basis of her soul’s proclivities, be reckoned righteous in the sight of God.  That the foregoing statement is a rather amateurish expression of liberal religion, I will not deny, but I hope to contribute something new to the discourse.

I hope to practice the habits—stereotypically associated with conservative commentators—of methodical Gospel interpretation, but I can scarcely see how the roused-readied-reaped story-arc could lead to an affirmation of conservative Christianity—or of Christianity at all.  As I will have to show, I don’t think that Christianity has gotten the Gospel stories wrong; I think that Christianity has looked into the Gospels and gotten the wrong stories.