The Cycles of the Curses

The curses of Genesis involve not merely suffering, but also a set of complete cycles of struggle, suffering, and death--the practical analogues of this blog's "roused, readied, reaped."  The elements of Creation are roused to their states of opposition, and the drama plays out in the readyings and the reapings.

The snake, already the enemy of mankind, is pictured as facing an unending, cruel struggle of its progeny against that of the man.  This aspect of "The Fall" does not create a struggle, but rather exacerbates an existing one--as is the case with all the other struggles--revealing the convenient and contrived nature of the conventional fixation on "The Fall."

The woman is told that child-bearing will be an excruciating experience, and dark elements of destructive lust and disordered relationships are presaged as far as male-female intimate relationships are concerned.  Again, this is really nothing new; the relationship of Adam to Eve was never what it ought to have been.

Indeed, as we have seen, the relationship of Adam to Eve ought never to have existed at all (though God's possibilities of creating potentially an infinitude of beings after Adam need never have been problematic.)  Eve is presented in the text as a creature brought into being because Adam's disposition toward God was not what it ought to have been.  Indeed, what we as individuals must strive for is exactly that which was presented as a possibility for Adam from the first: an open relationship to God, requiring nothing and no one else.

This realization about Adam and Eve is in distinction to the conventional commentators' notion that marital difficulties arise from the institution being cursed from The Fall.  Having an interest in controlling individuals by enhancing their entanglements with others, the denominations typically insist that marriage was God's plan--rather than the bittersweet, curse-laden outworking of man's inadequacies.

And then there is humanity's relationship to Creation depicted as the soil, now cursed because of us.  Adam's charge to tend to the garden is now enlarged into a dire, almost physically-intimate struggle with the ground from which he arose.  As is the case with all the other curses, the possibility exists for us to view our now-blighted relationship with the earth as one of our having a responsibility to care for something that was provided for our good, or as one of our having a responsibility to care for something that we have wronged.  Almost invariably, we as a species choose the incorrect approach--the first approach--the "we have to take care of what God provided for us" approach.

And so we plunder and despoil the Earth because we believe we must at present, and we are really not disposed to do anything but plunder and despoil it in the near future, because supposedly we must provide for our needs while we prepare for some comfortably distant future in which our innovations will let us settle our debts to Mother Nature.  Good luck to us.

All of the Genesis curses bear upon a more fundamental question about how we approach life and how we approach God.  Our preferred approach--perhaps best exemplified by "toxic masculinity"--is to pursue a tender and intimate relationship with a God that we have sequestered to Heaven, while we behave as entitled brutes toward the Creation into which God poured his goodness--all in the name of doing our duty to him.

The importance of properly viewing the Genesis curses cannot be overstated.

Creation as a World of Hurt

So now we come to the most profound aspect of our possible comprehensions of John 3:16, the verse that reads, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (KJV).  The pivotal notion is located in the word "gave."

We can say that God gave Jesus over to death.  We can say that Jesus gave himself over to death.  Both of those notions are more profound than we can completely comprehend, but our capacity of reverence for the sacrifice on God's part can only reside in realistic examples for comparison drawn from our species' experiences.  We do not typically want to die.  We regard our species as being strongly averse to death.

And yet some of us not merely accept death, but actually take it up willingly as a burden.  The very Jesus who is so loudly revered as having been willing to die for mankind also inspired a movement in which many have been willing to die.  Many of those willing dead suffered, by any dispassionate analysis, to a far greater extent than Jesus is depicted as suffering in the Gospels.  Mark, a rather straightforward gospel, volunteers that "Pilate marvelled if he were already dead" (15:44)--Jesus having unaccountably been spared the usual span of agonizing days.

So, unsurprisingly, the extent of Jesus' (and God's) sacrifice through the crucifixion has been enlarged in the conceit of the interpreters.  Jesus is said to have suffered for all the sins of mankind, even extending somehow to having endured every eternity of damnation deserved by all of mankind (or all of the elect, if the interpreter so deems.)

I do not wish to minimize Jesus' (and God's) suffering; far from it.  I wonder if the interpreters have gone far enough, inasmuch as they are concentrated on wondering how much Jesus might have endured in the crucifixion.  Did not (or does not) Jesus suffer in all aspects?

John's gospel says of Jesus, "The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (1:2-3).  (It is far more the case, in modern translations, that Creation is described as having been made "through" Jesus.)  Was not suffering involved in the creation of the universe through Jesus?  Was not Creation effected through an ineffable relationship between a One God and the One God's distinct persons?  Do we know that suffering was not or is not part of that relationship?

This question of creation-as-suffering has been danced around by the commentators through the ages.  The King James translators have Jesus in Revelation to be described as "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (13:8).  Paul in Romans says that "we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" (8:22).

Is it such a leap to wonder if the whole phenomenon of the Son's relationship to the Father is a relationship of love, and communion--and suffering?  We cannot, if we are honest, maintain that any relationship we experience does not involve some experience of pain.  While we cannot presume to understand God, yet it is incumbent on us to try to understand those things of God that we are given to understand.  Is it not always the case that God is "giving" Jesus away?  Or at least, would we want to presume otherwise?

I think we would do well to wonder if "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" is a phrase we are misusing--when we concentrate on the crucifixion.  The very creation that forms the framework of our understandings was given to us by God through his Son whom he has also given. Perhaps that is why God, at the end of the Six Days, is (otherwise) unaccountably described as resting on the Seventh Day.  Surely he was not tired; God does not get tired.  But as far as suffering goes?  Does not the Bible, at least, indicate over and over again that God has been grieved?

Jesus, having suffered as necessity would have it, declared, "It is finished" (John 19:30).  Perhaps God, having sacrificed of himself to lend his Son to creation, said on the seventh day, "It is finished."

The Real Snake of John

So Eve was tempted by a snake, and the snake brought death when it promised it wouldn't.  There are probably many ways to phrase the preceding statement, and many more ways to complain that the situation--of Eden, The Fall, and the ensuing curses--is more complex than the statement allows.

Fair enough, but it is also only fair to contend that no element of the story of Adam and Eve ought to be made more complicated than necessary.  That includes the sorry old snake.  Jesus doesn't seem to have much interest in the snake.  The traditional interpreters are the ones with the snake-fascination (or perhaps I should say the snake-as-Devil-fascination) and they have succeeded--in this and many other aspects--in blurring the clear teachings of Jesus.

A snake can usually be trod on--by a properly shod person.  The snake-as-Devil, on the other hand, can be thrown into the tangled bin of the interpreter's fancy.  Jesus as opponent of the snake-as-Devil can conjure up no end of twisted postulations about warfare and conquerings and such, though Jesus has the persistent habit of stating that the attacks of the devil can be swatted aside by the humblest of believers.

So now I want to turn to the humblest of believers and the most important thing Jesus had to say about a snake.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (3:14-15, KJV).  (The Israelites were afflicted by an epidemic of snakebite.)  These two verses, of course, are the lead-in to the evangelists' favorite verse, the famous John 3:16.  It is extremely important (and extremely unfortunate) that the evangelists' deployment of this part of John be accompanied by all sorts of balderdash--aimed at convincing the humblest of believers that convolutions of mystical thought are the language of the Gospels.

In the hogwash of conventional Christianity it is unquestioned that Jesus is engaged in a substitutionary sacrifice that can only be made available to the believer through--surprise, surprise--some mediation of the established denominations.  The straightforward Jesus of the straightforward Gospels must be seen in a feverish context of dragons and fiery dungeons.  The straightforward words of Jesus must be twisted, and the believer must be led to expect layer after layer of obscure meanings.

And so even the meaning of John 3:16 has been obscured: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."  "Gave," of course, is conventionally taken to mean the substitutionary sacrifice--and elements of that meaning are relevant to the Gospels--but it cannot be avoided that the very sacrifice of atonement ends up with God having his Son restored to him.  It does not seem that God's giving of Jesus need be especially associated with the sacrifice of the cross.

God gave Jesus to the world.  A moment's reflection will show that God gave Adam to the world.  The very logic of Adam's existence as an independent being (framed in this blog through the roused-readied-reaped arc) entails God letting Adam go.  And God gives Adam to the garden which at first he is to tend, to the woman he is to care for, and to the world that Adam's kind is to responsibly master.

The difference with Jesus is that God gives to the world a son who is perfect, who is in every essence divine.  That is indeed a great mystery, but it need be no more mysterious than the fact that Jesus is the person we are to look to if we are to be saved.  (And there is to be no tomfoolery about who is born in what century, or on what continent, or in what faith, or whether or not in earshot of a preacher: "...or else believe me for the very works' sake" (14:11)--and Jesus expects that nothing but common humanity is required for people to understand what life requires, and what good works are.)

So now we can understand the meaning of verses 13 and 14: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life."  Believers are to look to Jesus, as the Israelites looked to the bronze snake.  While these phenomena--indeed all phenomena--are functions of God's grace, it is inescapable that Jesus' teachings in John 3 are about what people need to do to be saved.  John 3 is a pan-denominational, secularly-oriented, religion-rejecting gospel of works; as far as religion is concerned, all it requires is that we lay ourselves open to the mysteries of life we cannot ever know, as the only wholesome seed-bed of our inclinations to execute the responsibilities that we always know.

Eve Was Tempted by a Snake

Eve was spoken to by a snake.  Balaam was spoken to by a donkey.  The speakers were a snake and a donkey.

The notion of a talking snake sounds ridiculous, but the situation is not made any less ridiculous by calling the snake the Devil.

The Devil, as the concocted interpretation goes, sought out of malice bring down Mankind through the Fall.  One wonders, then, why God told the snake "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed."  Had they not enmity enough--if the snake were indeed the Devil?

In the ancient world the bite of a snake could mean sudden and horrible death.  If a child of our time dies of snakebite, we cast about for reasons why our modern certainty about prevention and treatment could have failed us; how in the world could anyone die of snakebite?

In the ancient world the treasured child of any parents could be lost without warning to snakebite--and that does not even include the possibility that infection, rather than venom, might have been the cause.  The ancients understood little about the natural world--as evidenced by the silly reference to hares as chewing the cud in Leviticus.  Or as evidenced by the Genesis description of the cursed serpent: "dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life."  (The Book of Micah tries to clean that up a bit, focusing on the snake's darting tongue: "They shall lick the dust like a serpent" (7:17, KJV).)

Snakes do not eat dust, but that does not eliminate the possibility that the reference was powerful enough for Eve.  What did she or her contemporaries know of snakes or worms, or any need or possibility of distinction between the two?  Worms twisting in the soil could be just as loathsome, and surely the millennia could not have passed without worms twisting in the dying flesh of necrotic, snake-bitten limbs.

The snake, in the context of the Genesis curses, need not have referred to the Devil, or to damnation, or to the death of the soul.  The snake meant actual death.  The snake had assured Eve that she would not die, and now not only had the snake's wiles resulted in the first couple's estrangement from the Tree of Life, it had resulted in the snake--in the consciousness of Adam and Eve--being a personification of Death.  The snake had promised safety from death, and now the snake would bring death.  That would seem to be curse enough to go around.

The Disciples Roused to Wakeful Death

The stories of Judas and Peter bear directly on this blog's description, particularly "the salvation of wakeful death."  This is the state to which we should aspire, a state of all-consuming servitude.  It should probably be clear that Jesus' emphasis on the duties of the master in such relationships--including the believer-to-God relationship that all life is leading to--means that the efforts of the servant are not seen as a direct attempt to "earn" salvation.  God's role as master is permeated with unwarranted grace enjoyed by the believer, and it is indeed horrible whenever this is forgotten, and God is thereby defamed.

The stories of Judas and Peter, as related by the Gospels, are similar in one crucial regard: they can be boiled down to versions, in simplest form, of "the salvation of wakeful death."  (I do not mean to opine here whether either of the men were saved or not.  That is not my business.)  The functional aspect of wakeful death is twofold.  First, there is the remittance, offered by us, of the value of a servant--placing it above our lives.  Second, there is waiting for the final consummation of actual death.  We pay the price of servitude, and then we pay with our lives.

Judas, in extreme despair, hurled back at the Jewish authorities the blood money--described no end by the interpreters as the price of a slave.  Then he ended his life.

Peter, in an agony of remorse made more acute by Jesus' persistent questioning at the Sea of Tiberias, is given to understand that his life will consist of unrelenting service to the flock, ended with a probably quite unpleasant death.  No televangelist's "abundant life" for Peter.

Nor indeed can any of us expect other than servitude and death.  If, as would seem prudent, we are to see ourselves in Jesus' story of the Prodigal Son, then all of us--having once been true heirs of the father--are reduced to pleading for the role of the servant.  And make no mistake, the Prodigal Son, though received with such joy, is also carefully described to us as a son now no longer with a patrimony, possibly without marriage prospects, and certainly fated to be in service to his elder brother for all their lives.

Of course, we are all in service to our sisters and brothers all our lives.  God help us.

Judas First to Fall and Rise

In the last post I offered the notion that Eve (or perhaps Adam) would have committed The Sin sooner or later.  We might say that is mere conjecture, but an honest appraisal of human behavior would make it a pretty good conjecture.

It is, of course, little use to pontificate about other people's misdeeds.  The capacity for misdeeds is one of the chief things that unites us as a species.  The issue does, however, occasionally give us pause in how we view the accounts that unify and consolidate our belief systems.  A perfect example of this is the blame that is laid upon Judas.

Judas betrayed Jesus.  It might be said that Judas' act of treachery was overt and unnecessary.  What cannot be said, however, is that Judas' act was all that special.  All of the Twelve betrayed Jesus.  All of the Twelve were responsible to speak in defense of Jesus, and all failed.

Or did they all?  Did not Judas in his remorse--while Jesus yet lived--go to the Jewish officials, deny Jesus' guilt, and risk sharing Jesus' fate?  Are we supposed to assume that Judas was sure that the officials would display the honor of thieves and send him away as they did?  Judas could well have ended up hanging on one of the three crosses.  When he hanged himself swiftly he was still liable to have been nailed and hanged on a cross for days.

And what of Peter?  At the moment when he first experienced remorse at having denied--betrayed--Jesus, is there any law of man or God that would have prevented Peter from throwing himself against the doors of the meeting place, shouting Jesus' innocence?  Might not a remorseful Peter have carried on so as to--futilely yet earnestly--goad the guards into killing him, a sort of first-century suicide by cop?  What, in that case--a case of Peter behaving more admirably than the text relates--would have been the essential moral difference between a penitent and dead Peter and a penitent and dead Judas?

And yet Judas carries the stigma of suicide, though in his belief system the punishment for falsely accusing a person of a capital crime was to suffer capital punishment.  Judas had it coming.

It is this business of attempting to evaluate others' misdeeds that leads to such curious results.  One might be reminded of Paul, of how we employs the rhetoric of having been a great criminal.  Perhaps more to the point is the extent to which he, in his lamentable unconverted zeal, wrought such havoc in what were, in the final analysis, gentile jurisdictions.  How often might he have disturbed the public order in his infamous forays to enforce the ever-questionable dicta of a religious court?

Disturbing the public order was, as the New Testament relates, of particular concern to the gentile authorities, and moreover Paul speaks explicitly of the duty to heed those authorities.  After his conversion, Paul spends some time in a murky episode in Arabia.  Would it not have been more laudable for Paul to turn himself in, and suffer a stint in the mines of the governor of Damascus?

Readied for the Test Arc

Eve is described in the Book of Genesis as having entertained the serpent's arguments, "And when she saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof..." (3:6, KJV).  The "saw that the tree was...to be desired to make one wise" notion is certainly a curious one.  One would think that the emphasis would be that Eve thought that the tree might make one wise; how she could "see" it as being a fact about the tree is strangely put.  After all, the only testimony she had about the tree came from the God that she now doubted, and from the creaturely serpent, who had relied on getting her alone.

It is inescapable that the force of the argument against Eve is that she allowed herself to be shaped by influences that she should have resisted.  Granted, it might well be said, as is the standard notion, that she was "deceived," but all that does is classify her sin as something short of outright defiance.  She allowed herself to be worked into a view of God--that he could be deceptive--and instead focused her attention on the Tree as she imagined it: "to be desired to make one wise."  One wonders if the tree had to be any special kind of tree at all--to serve for the test--since only Eve's view of it was needed to constitute the sin.  She sinned before ever she ate.

Eve failed the test.  Of course, it might well be wondered how many infinities of eternities of blissful life in the Garden would have gone by before Eve--indeed, any of us in her place--would have fallen to the temptation of the Forbidden Fruit.  It behooves us all not to be placed in the path of temptation, or vice versa.  It is in this vein that we can come to understand the "deliver us from evil (that is, from the test)" part of the Lord's Prayer--a petition that we hear again when, at perhaps the most crucial point of the Gospels, Jesus in Gethsemane awakens the disciples and tells them to pray that they may be spared the final test.

We, no differently from Eve, are constantly put through the "roused, readied, reaped" arc, and it is good for us to pray that we have such arcs interrupted by the beneficial intrusions of God or of godly people.  For indeed, we are all liable to go off track and allow our internalized versions of reality control us.  We ready ourselves internally to face the existence we recognize, which is in itself an internal phenomenon.  We look at the universe the way Eve looked at the tree, creating a reality that we can never hope to test against every shortfall or distortion.

Since the realities that surround us are partly of our own making (and the "partly" part need be of no great proportion to be dangerous), then we need reckon that the challenges we face are both common to mankind, and ultimately independent of any conceits we might have about our ability to confidently describe existence.  The chief example of this is the persistent notion that Jesus' end-times statements are to be attached to the calendar.  This is not so, just as surely as it was the case that Jesus was not lying or mistaken when he described the generation of his time as including people who would experience all Jesus described as the final events.

Each of us has our own universe, and only God can keep it all straight.  We are all liable at any moment to face what is, for us, the Final Test, and it is well that we pray to be spared the worst of it.  That is the test, as surely now as in the Garden of Eden.

Total Depravity is Total Whoredom

There is a bit of housekeeping that needs to follow reading of the Eden story, although it might be said to be the starting point of any understanding of Jesus' ministry: the nature of sin's relationship to humanity's redemptive fortunes.  In short, people need to stay out of the progressing cycle of falling into sin.

This consideration is to be seen as distinct from the two prevailing notions of Christian salvation: either that salvation is effected through sacraments, or that salvation is effected through "faith alone" in the redemption offered by Jesus.  There is no point in describing either of these notions as being lacking, since neither is really to the point; it is no necessary impediment to the true nature of salvation for the believer to harbor the (as I would maintain) superfluous ideas of theology.  Most of the time the important junctures in life consist of moral challenges such that the person so engaged has little in the times of crisis to say about theology other than "Whatever."

But back to the fact that people need to stay out of the progressing cycle of falling into sin.  Cain resented his brother's successful sacrifice to God.  Cain was upset that his own sacrifice was not accepted.

It does not seem that God attached much importance to Cain's failure; the story does not describe Cain as being in trouble over that point.  The problem was that Cain was upset and angry.  "Why art thou wroth?"

And then, "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?"  That, of course, is the chief element of salvation--"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?"--not all that silly Christianity stuff.  Then again, the premise "If thou doest well" does not provide a context for a person's ongoing struggle for salvation, which we are naturally going to view as a journey toward a desired goal.

God provides the simple answer: "...if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.  And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him" (Genesis 4:7, KJV).  Modern translations attach the element of divine command to "thou shalt rule."  Wisdom, modern and ancient, has always held it to be prudent to refrain from accusing God of being so perverse as to command something that is not achievable.

So that is the substance of it.  If we struggle to stay out of the downward, accelerating cycle of sin, then we can be saved.   We are not judged by our righteousness in itself, but rather by our attachment to doing the will of God, however imperfectly.  In such a mindset resides true humility, not in the horrid Christian presumption of assigning essential depravity to ourselves--or to any of God's creatures--and then trying to hide that arrogant presumption by claiming fealty to some contrived mechanism by which our worthless selves might be saved.

Or to put it another way: we might well be worthless, and we might feel ourselves to be worthless, but for us to tell God that we are worthless does not constitute any attempt--however feeble--to demonstrate humility.  Speaking so to God is arrogance, and it makes our religion a whoredom--selling the most precious elements of our desire for God's mercy as the commodities of a transactional salvation economy.

Fallen Long Before the Fall

Immediately after the pronouncement in Genesis that man and wife "shall be one flesh," the text launches into the narrative of what is inaccurately called the Fall.  "The Fall" starts with Adam and Eve not being ashamed of their nakedness before each other, and it ends with them cast out of Eden, with the first recorded instance of sexual relations, and with Eve acknowledging the assistance of God (not so much Adam) in the bearing of Cain.  (And we know how that turned out.)

Conventionally, the Fall is described in terms of man's alienation from God.  Absent an agenda on the part of the interpreters, the "Fall" narrative is really a description of the growing alienation of Adam and Eve from each other.  Just read it.

Conservative Christian commentators have read it, and have been only too willing to throw out notions such as "Why wasn't Adam tending to his husbandly duties to protect Eve when she was accosted by the serpent?" (tacitly admitting that Adam was sinning before The Sin, by the way) or "Why didn't Adam speak up for Eve when God was delivering the judgments at the end?"  The commentators have not failed to note the dissonance between the first couple's behaviors in the garden, and the supposedly biblical notions of the divinely-inspired institution of the family.  The story of the garden only makes sense, however, when it is recognized that the family was not the invention of God, but rather the outworking of the conceits of man.

We should all be in communion with God, not reckoning our stature by how we deal with our fellow humans.  As Jesus will tell us, fundamentally there is no functional difference between how we should view our how fellow humans and how we should view God--we should submit to all as their being manifestations of the divine.  Absent such considerations on our part, we as a species crumble into our contesting fragments--tribes, nations, families, estranged individuals--as was inevitably going to happen to Adam and Eve: "Fallen" long before the ; "the Fall."

The Family Cursed Before the Fall

None of the animals or birds could serve as "an help meet" for Adam.  So God put Adam to sleep, and roused him later.  God removed one of Adam's ribs, a part which--assuming an uncomplicated excision--a person needs scarcely more than the foreskin routinely removed from males.  Adam neither participated in any sacrificial aspect of the rib removal, nor did it cost him anything noticeable.  Yet it is the fact of Eve being the bone of Adam's bones and the flesh of his flesh that is most seized upon by Adam upon his arousal--not the fact that she is a glorious individual creature, as much the property of herself as Adam was the property of himself.

God should have been "an help meet" for Adam; any of the incredible creatures of the natural world should have been "an help meet" for Adam.  Adam, however, would not be so easily satisfied, and the cycles of "roused, readied, reaped" that he had already undergone lead to him (and Eve) reaping a formidable harvest: Mankind was to be confronted by the innumerable challenges of family life, a burden thrust upon humanity by the conceits of man, not by the foundational design of God.

"And Adam said, This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man" (Genesis 2:23, KJV).  We must not forget at this moment the grinding contrast between the "Christian family life" prattle of the denominations, and the shocking disdain for family life shown by Jesus.  This passage from Genesis would seem to be at the root of this contrast.  Adam, in an awful episode scarcely discernable from the arrogance of Lucifer, arrogates unto himself not only the role of pronouncing selfishly on the suitability of Eve, but also the role of naming Eve's kind ("Woman") almost as though she were just another animal, and certainly as though her stature was to be measured merely by her relationship to "Man."

Only now can we absorb the full, unsettling import of the ensuing verse, usually attributed as a quote from God, but even worse if it came from Adam: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."  The notion, sometimes kicked around, that this verse is transmitting something about matrilocal unions is scarcely worth serious consideration; from Cain building a city through to the patriarchs fetching brides from afar, the notion of parent-in-law location seems to matter little, if at all.

No, the part about "leave his father and his mother" is as sad as it sounds--the progress of individual development throughout life consists of making some bonds, and breaking others.  For all its blessings, family life--as Jesus relates exhaustively--is a curse.  A family is what we participate in when such participation--as we have decided or absorbed--is denied to other people in the world, either entirely or in proportion to how we form or breed new bonds.  We have people who are our family because other people are not--it is a curse.

And then there are the myriad complications that arise because of the reproductive function--the "cleaving" and the "one-fleshing"--how it both pervades and drags down the nobler aspects of human interactions.  Don't even get me started on it; or perhaps I should say: Don't even get Jesus started on it.

My Profile Extended

I was born six decades ago.  That is of little matter, but I was born into a Christian family in a Christian culture.  I did not have real terrors of any other faith; just of the faith of my fathers.  No surprise.  I also, unfortunately, did not really see examination of belief systems overall as substantially other than questioning the premises of Christianity.  No surprise here, either.  In this way I wasted, more or less, six decades, more or less.

A few years ago, on a drowsy, achy morning, as I recall, I had what for me seemed like a vision of the suffering of Jesus.  To me the suffering mattered most in that I felt that Jesus' suffering was best understood as an outpouring of his mercy.  Mercilessness, I decided, must be the great evil of the universe, and the property of mercy--or the lack thereof--was to be the key to rightly understanding religion and everything.

So I set out to view existence through a lens of mercy, as a way of understanding and organizing all the other elements of existence I had ever known.  The single element of mercy was to be the one thing that mattered.  What followed for me was an amazing series of vision-like understandings about existence.  Suddenly, one by one, concepts that I had long viewed in a conventional way seemed surprisingly different.  Time didn't matter so much; space didn't matter so much; order and orderly progression didn't matter so much; logic, of course, didn't matter so much.

I was drawn time and again to the imagery of the Garden of Gethsemane, and--surprise, surprise--to the parallels so many have noted to the other Garden, Eden.  Yet something utterly surprising seemed to be rising up to me out of all my wonderings--an organizing principle that seems now so logical yet which it did not seem logic itself would provide for me.  This utterly surprising thing was the phrase (four-syllable, like the other mnemonics I employed to track my vision-y quest): Roused, Readied, Reaped.

I had "visions"--most notably one of humans being "roused".  I recall looking into the darkness of one night and thinking of the disciples roused--unwillingly, as is usually the case with us--to Jesus' warning of the coming crowd.  In time I came to include the rousings in the Garden of Eden.  Roused, Readied, Reaped--the notion of a cycle or an arc kept coming back to me.

It took me a few years to understand the most basic impact that "roused, readied, reaped" had on me.  As I have tried to write in this blog, the "roused, readied, reaped" progression describes not reality--not really--but rather that "reality" formed by the limitations of our viewpoints and understandings.  For example, we cannot view time as something independent of the fragmented, ever-changing, intrinsically organic and participatory glimpses we experience.  The notion of "Time" as an infinite, linear property is an abstraction--effectively, a non-reality.

It is no great feat to deny definitive existence to those great principles and dimensions that we imagine can frame our understandings of the universe.  Things like time, and space, and the ostensible distinction between the real and the (ostensibly existing) supernatural are things we experience only through the organic fits and spasms of our existences.  It is no element of vision that would allow us (allow me, as I fancied) to see a universe devoid of some one or another supposedly indispensable property, some property that we had been taught must surely be there.  All we need do is allow our imagination to run up against our inherently imaginary grasp of the great principles that daily we take for granted.

So I had to admit to myself that I was having no visions; I was having their opposite--"de-visions," if you will.  I was taking successive turns at seeing existence as though this or that conceptual presupposition did not matter.  Since I cannot see something like time in its entirety or in all its manifestations, then it is no more a vision to imagine time as non-existent than it is to imagine time as infinite.

Neither was I subsuming all reality under some new or newly-discovered organizing principle.  My attachment to "mercy," I think I must admit, really came from me having a visceral attachment to mercy--maybe someday I will make some discovery about what that means to me.  Maybe I will write it in a blog that will be read only by me.

What I was really doing was developing--most imperfectly--a way to read the only books that I will ever care most about: the canonical Gospels.  Surely by now you will not expect me to launch into some description of those writings as being sublimely superior to all other sacred texts.  That is something about which I have no idea.  What I have discovered, somewhat, is what it is to read and examine the teachings of Jesus in light of the flickering light we see as we slumber, are roused, are readied by experience, and are reaped in our exhaustions, our failures, and our meager offered accomplishments.

Could Jesus Not Cry Out in Despair

There is an important observation to be made if, as I have said, God is the determinative cause of everything.  Inescapably, then, everything is miraculous--although that does not rule out the possibility that any given moment's or situation's miraculousness might reside in it being entirely "normal."  What we must really remember is that nothing that ever happens is separated from the unbounded potentiality of the miraculous.  Only then can we understand or begin to deal with Jesus' maddening, persistent refusal to frame the world as a single, coherent arena with a single timeline.

"Elias truly shall first come...," "Elias is come already...," "this generation will certainly not pass away...."  This incoherence woven through the Gospels reflects, in a way unsurprisingly, the impossibility of anything of divine import being describable in logical terms.

"Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say?  Father save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.  Father, glorify thy name.  Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" (John 12:27-28, KJV).

We cannot glorify God's name; we can only try to.  Such we might also say of Jesus, except that our belief tells us otherwise--that Jesus really did glorify God's name.  Yet saddled with human nature, did not Jesus experience hopeless despair at ever having been able to fulfill his mission?  Did Jesus not reckon, as John's gospel portends, that Jesus mission was--incomprehensibly--the omnipotent divine's choice, rather than necessity?  Has not God always been glorified, and able to save?

Can we imagine other than that the crucified Jesus would cry out in hopeless despair?

Running the Cycles of Discomfort

There is an extremely important conclusion to be drawn from the observation that our lives consist of innumerable courses--large and small, long and short--through the roused-readied-reaped cycle: life is a tale of never-ending discomfiture.  We die, in the sense of what really makes us human, knowing nothing more than we did when we were born.  The newborn who squirms toward a mother's comfort is reaching for that which our basal selves seek all our lives; the little child who learns the importance of being nice knows all that matters in life.  Adulthood, on the other hand, consists largely of learning perverse lessons supposedly about how life should be.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the notion that a successful life consists of balance and smooth, graceful handling of life's stages, changes, and rhythms.  That is not the way of Jesus, or of life as it exists to be observed.  For ourselves as individuals, successful life consists of unpredictable and jarring cycles of recognizing challenges, of developing experience with those challenges--large or small, long or short--and of exhausting ourselves against those challenges; roused, readied, and reaped.

The Son of Man has no place to lay his head, says Jesus, and the prevailing modern versions of "the Christian Life" devote themselves to responsible home ownership.  Are Jesus' words metaphorical?  Of course they are--Jesus means them to apply not only to us forsaking the material security of our households, but all other sources of material (and psychological) security as well.  Do not worry about tomorrow, Jesus says--because today is filled with enough challenges to the effect that we must do right even if it causes us to be tortured to death; that is the comfort of Jesus, and anyone who unflinchingly embraces the Gospel knows this.

Even the soft torture of everyday life is not to be escaped.  Is hunger to be satisfied?  Are gentle rhythms to be sought in life?  Of course they are--for other people than our individual selves.  Such is the vision of the dutiful servant that Jesus propagates: a person who sees to it that the household is typified by sleep and work and leisure--for everyone else.  The dutiful servant never really sleeps or rests.

The follower of Jesus, the person who tries to emulate Jesus and is often miserable in the process, has no predictable comfort in life other than to be a miserable follower of Jesus.  When we are caressed momentarily by those unexpected, rare moments of true, wholesome comfort emanating from others, it is because--perhaps only in a place, perhaps only in a moment--those persons are following Jesus.

We Act and Surrender Simultaneously

If all causes and effects--all things that happen, including everything done by us--are ultimately determined by God, then just what is it that we ourselves do?  The difficulty that we have had in answering that question arises from our failure to account for the fact that nothing we do involves a discrete instant.  We make a decision not because we have accounted for every factor, but because our accounting for factors has run a course which--for better or worse--has involved the exhausting of every means that we have to bring to bear on the situation.  We feel time pressing on us, or the competing claims of other matters on us, or the feeling of being ridiculous in working a situation beyond its importance.  At some point we decide, but that involves both an action on our part and a surrender on our part.  We exhaust ourselves, and we determine to let our determination ride.

We have, as described above, experienced the arc of roused-readied-reaped.  The experience is the key--or perhaps we should say the experiences collectively are the key--because we have known ourselves in the moment of decision to act and surrender simultaneously: reaped.  This sort of thing is described to us--to the extent that the Gospels can relate it--in some of the most harrowing experiences of Jesus.  In the Garden Jesus prays both for release from the awaiting agony and for God's will to be done--Jesus surrendering to the agony.  Jesus decides to stop asking.  In Luke an angel appears to give Jesus strength, and Jesus prays still harder.  If the repetition of Jesus' prayers in Matthew and Mark are to hold here, then the angel's appearance put Jesus through the agonizing cycle all over again.  Yet Jesus surrendered to the decision before him.

Then there is the final moment on the cross.  The accounts are blurred in that Jesus, who told his disciples at the Last Supper that he would not drink wine until after the Resurrection, apparently succumbs to the desire at the last in John to drink sour wine.  Who wouldn't, if that person were really dying in agony?  And then we have Jesus, who we might imagine would extend his suffering to the inevitable exhaustion of his body, crying out loudly and behaving at that moment as though that draining action would precipitate his demise.  Was Jesus, after all he had suffered for the glory of God, committing suicide?  Or was he not, for all his perfect divinity, embodying how human experience really works--cycles and repeating courses and arcs that end not with our decisions or definitive actions, but rather with the inevitable, innumerable surrenders of our existence?

The Miracle is Being Able to Do a Miracle

As I have said, the testing of Adam began from the first.  This business culminates, in the view of conventional Christianity, with the Fall--the eating of the forbidden fruit--but there is ample evidence that from the first Adam was experiencing negative results from what we can only understand as negative attributes or behaviors that he displayed.  Adam had placed before him the reality that actions have consequences.

We should not forget, however, that those consequences were determined by God.  Ultimately, we must remember that all causes and effects are determined by God.  This all goes hand in hand with the consideration, that I have mentioned before, that there is fundamental conflict between regarding God as the first cause--supposedly provable because empirically all effects are caused--and regarding God as well as a miracle-doer--supposedly littering human history with empirically uncaused effects that undercut the neat logic of the First Cause proposition.

In reality, God is the determinative cause of everything.  There is nothing that happens that cannot be either a natural occurrence, a miracle, or both.  In an unstinting theistic world-view there is no difference.  This, apparently, was the approach of Jesus.  We can call him a miracle-doer because he calmed the waters, but the real miracle was Jesus acting as though there is no essential difference--no special-case rending of the universe's fabric--in either a wave swamping a boat or the occupants of the boat flattening the wave just by the asking.