Examining the Machine

Last, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The refinement of aspirations beyond instrumentalities and language leads to what I will call urges.  It will be jarring to some to have a recounting of the progresses of religion end with “urges.”  Religion is not supposed to end with something so base as an “urge” to this or that.  Then again, Jesus’ mortal life was not supposed to end with “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Jesus’ cry of agony has been endlessly recounted over the centuries in varying modes of analysis, but it has not typically been the case that Jesus’ piteous question has been called less than genuine.  Indeed, “genuine” is the key word—“genuine” is truthful, irrespective of the objective validity of an utterance or of a speaker’s understanding.  In John’s gospel, Nathanael (whose credulity Jesus seems to find amusing) is granted one of Jesus’ greatest compliments: “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”

Jesus’ plea for an understanding about his agonizing fate is rivalled in intensity by his plea to his listeners throughout his ministry to forsake willful blindness.  A lack of understanding is bad, but a disinclination to understand is damnable.  Or as I wrote in the previous post:

“Much might be said about the pursuit of truth—it is perhaps the noblest of aspirations.  It must always be remembered, however, that truth can never be more than its progressively more perfect iterations.  Truthfulness, on the other hand, might at any moment or any place—in any person, God willing—be the greatest it has ever been, or greater than it ever will be.  Truthfulness might—in any time or place—be so great that only the reality of the Ultimate abuts it.”

Conversely, truthfulness—in contrast to any relative merit that might be assigned to a person’s accomplishments in establishing truth—is not properly treated as a relative matter.  In religion especially, truthfulness must be pursued without compromise.  As an incredible counterpoint, however, the essential nature of religious thought is—unlike the firmer and firmer understandings we expect in worldly knowledge—liable to be thoroughly re-cast by an addition or a change in one foundational premise.

It is entirely to be expected, then, that the experiences of religion are not cumulative nor gradual (the less so as they are the most crucial) but rather unsettling by their nature.  Only in this mode of understanding can we begin to grasp the importance, say, of Peter’s wild vacillations of experience before his Master.  At one moment in Matthew, Peter, having identified Jesus as “the Christ,” is responded to with, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona.”

However, at the next point in the flow of the narrative, Peter responds inappropriately to Jesus’ prediction of the Crucifixion, and Jesus says, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”  It is terrifying to think that our existence might be fundamentally shaken at any moment, yet the very notion of attempting to grasp a worldview presumes that the greatest of our presumptions might be as fragile as the least.  The Machine of our existence—the ceaseless progress of time, the ceaseless press of necessity, the innumerable cycles of cause and effect, the innumerable layers of complexity—is a Machine that we can simultaneously find amazing in its interactions and awesome in its intolerance for aberration.

More awesome still is the fact that we can run afoul of the Machine in the most fundamental ways with the least of warnings.  Of course, we resist that fact.  As regarding our earthly fate, for example, we want to take Jesus’ admonishments not to worry about tomorrow as admonishments not to worry.  That, of course, is not what Jesus tells us.  He tells us not to worry about tomorrow because today we might suffer the most horrible of fates.  And he tells us not to worry about how we will answer our tormentors, but his assurance that we will be given at that moment what we must say should impress upon us foremost that we must concentrate on ever being truthful—not on possessing the truth.  What we might understand to be the truth could change in the most fundamental ways in a moment.

The unfortunate extent to which we bow to the progress of the Machine is revealed in our tendencies to take for granted just about everything about ourselves and everything about our world.  We have no reason to imagine that those tendencies were less apparent in Jesus’ followers than in us.  As I wrote about Jesus and his ministry in the preceding post, “it is incontrovertible that he intended both to accomplish an end, and also to relate to his disciples beforehand what that end was.  In this latter task (getting through to his disciples) Jesus was—by the estimation of virtually every critic—spectacularly unsuccessful.  Jesus’ description to his disciples of what lay before him was uncomfortable, but it would be simply untrue to contend that it was too fantastic to be grasped in its particulars.  The Twelve—grown men by any reasonable assessment—had lived their entire lives in the company of stories about heroic witnesses, martyred prophets, tortured innocents and—in the ‘ferment’ so often used to describe their era—resurrected gods.”

That is what the Twelve had lived: “lives in the company of stories.”  Jesus’ disciples, like us, were foremost children--not of God, nor of Adam, nor of Abraham, nor of their countless ancestors or their parents.  They were children of the stories they told themselves.  Jesus seems to refer carelessly to the Scriptures of the Jews—now recognizing this or that writing as if “canonical,” now saying of this or that writing, “Ye have heard that it hath been said.”  Jesus’ emphasis is on how his audience has absorbed ideas about the world, and absorbing ideas about the world without questioning their apparently-necessary validity merely sets the person on a course of establishing a larger and larger story-set, until that story-set engulfs the person’s conception of God.

Like us, Jesus’ listeners made their stories about God into machines—or worse yet, into subfunctions of the Machine.  Stories about God have become perhaps the most horrid machines of all—the machines of Inquisitions and witch-hunters and heretic-burners, making the curse-hurling, hung-over Noah seem small.  Like us, Jesus’ listeners were children of time and place—of dimension.  Like us (at least as we unfortunately tend to be) they were children not of God but of God’s world.

As they were creatures of time and place, creatures (as I have said) of stories about “heroic witnesses, martyred prophets, tortured innocents,” it seems odd that Jesus’ followers were so obtuse about Jesus’ descriptions of his execution and his resurrection.  Our assessment, however, might reveal more about ourselves than about them.  Do any of us know what it is to live a life that is constantly questioned in every regard?  For that is what was happening to Jesus’ disciples, though the retrospective accounts of the Gospels—and even more the distanced appraisals of commentators—would scarcely seem to so indicate.

Jesus told them that eating wasn’t what they thought it was; that digesting wasn’t was they thought it was; that working wasn’t what they thought it was; that charity wasn’t what they thought it was; that oppression wasn’t what they thought it was; that heritage wasn’t what they thought it was; that parentage wasn’t what they thought it was; that scripture wasn’t what they thought it was; that prophecy wasn’t what they thought it was; that murder wasn’t what they thought it was; that marriage wasn’t what they thought it was; that adultery wasn’t what they thought it was; that ritual wasn’t what they thought it was; that wealth wasn’t what they thought it was; that authority wasn’t what they thought it was, that life wasn’t what they thought it was, that death wasn’t what they thought it was.

This all can just seem like a list of minutiae, particularly if the idea of a prescription of “saving faith” is brandished and pronounced upon as “what really matters.”  This prescription—to use a “machine” analogy—can then be fed into a person’s life like a perforated roll might be fed into a player piano, and indeed such a thing is practiced.  In the last half of the twentieth century, when the established churches were trying to decide what to do about the (sometimes biting) criticism from “the kids,” it became a trend for mainstream clergy to eagerly talk about the “radical” requirements of Christian morality.  Several times a year, comfortable middle-class church-goers would leave comfortable homes in comfortable cars, to be told for part of an hour how their faith stood out from all others in the “radical” requirements of morality that were entailed.  Then the church-goers would get back into their comfortable cars and proceed to live lives that were predicated upon nothing more strongly than their expectations of comfort and security.

It would be difficult enough to imagine how the issue of material security would sit with us if we had Jesus looking us in the face, and by the list of other concerns (the wasn’t-what-they-thought-it-was’s), we can see that Jesus’ disciples were not being asked by him to understand his prophesied end while they lived their lives.  Jesus was asking them to understand his prophesied end while they were careening through existences that they could scarcely understand as their lives.  They would scarcely have known how to live from moment to moment, and they would probably have learned very quickly that Jesus could hit them with some other unexpected idea at any of those moments.

This is why the one thing on Earth that ought to matter to us is truthfulness.  Truth is the province of God, and our contention that God is a loving God can be a well-intended contention, but it can scarcely be a well-informed one.  What do we know of love?  We can, however, throw ourselves into the pursuit of truth—into the practice of truthfulness—and there is no better way to show God that we believe he loves us.

This is what brings us back to the subject of “urges.”  The urge to pursue truth is of one piece with the infant’s urge to pursue comfort.  Like the infant’s self-centered yet un-self-conscious desire for comfort, our own desire for truth cannot claim to be selfless, and in religious terms that is not the point.  When we pursue truthfulness we direct the greatest of our worships toward a God we presume to be a loving parent, even when all of our other presumptions waver or fall--even when they waver or fall in the face of our own inquiries.