The Perfect Other

I ended my last post with:

“We are not creatures of thought saddled with the infirmities of bodily imperfection.  We are creatures who define our personal “we’s” as our consciousnesses, even as those consciousness-selves are but dependent and mutable components of our entireties—known but to God.”  I must attempt to explore the possibilities that rise into view when we are willing to consider that we do not really know where our edges are.

“Roused, Readied, Reaped” is all about viewpoints—or perhaps more accurately, about the limitations of viewpoints available to us in our finite creaturely experiences.  Or is it that we choose such limitations?  Are we really limited in our available viewpoints, or is it actually that the distractions and enticements of our creaturely experience draw us into arbitrarily confined notions of our viewpoints?

Or to put it another way: We have notions of ourselves, and in our grander moments we have notions of ourselves in communion with other beings, including—it is to be hoped—Jesus.  We also have notions of ourselves in larger settings and environments—The Universe, nature, time, place, community, any number of conceived identities—and our conceptions of ourselves therein are shaded by notions of ourselves possessing a greater or lesser share of belonging, either in settings and environments to which we aspire, or those we intend to avoid.  We define our experiences on a scale of belonging, belonging to ourselves and to larger entities, and considering that we do not belong to others.

That to which we do not belong we consider the “other.”  I gather I have even heard this phenomenon described as “othering,” and as I understand it, this use of a description is meant as part of a conscientious desire to question and possibly decrease the elements of alienation in our outlooks.

What I have described above is, I believe, pertinent to our lives—both individually and communally—but I am left to wonder if the notions we possess of things that we collect to ourselves, and of things that we understand as “others,” are applicable after all to notions of the divine.  What really are we willing to confront in the realm of our relationship to God?

Initially, one thing we must confront is the idea that there are other planes than our earthly experiences, and that our descriptors—rooted in our earthly experiences—are presumably lacking in some regards.  “Plane,” after all, is manifestly a sophomoric—though understandable—descriptor.  It is ironic that we would use one of the most basic elements of our understanding of creaturely geometry to attempt to evoke phenomena-realms that we imagine we can scarcely grasp at.

And it is important to note that there is a two-edged character to the understanding that the realm—or perhaps a terrain of multiple and overlapping realms—of the divine or of the supernatural is beyond our firm grasp: Such realms need not, virtually by definition, involve us being “grasped” by circumstances in the same way we see ourselves circumscribed by our bodies on this plane.

If there is a supernatural realm, or perhaps more importantly if there is a moral realm in which God’s sovereignty is more expressed than in our own, then it is entirely possible that our citizenship therein is pervasive—a rather sobering thought.  Certainly, Jesus does not think much of people citing the self/other distinction as being of import in matters of morals.  We are neighbors of all, we are kin of all, we are—if the gospels’ challenges of Abrahamic and other descent are taken to heart—ancestors of all and descendants of all.  Or perhaps it would be simpler to say that time and place mean nothing to what is right and wrong.

If time and place are meaningless—that is to say, if time and place simply do not necessarily “compute” in the realm of the divine—then it must be understood (if indeed we can “understand” it) that what is in play here is not some entertainment of science fiction that has us transported here or there or now or then.  What is in play is the dynamic of a realm in which we are always and everywhere.  This is a realm, for example, in which to claim ancestry from someone is to claim a similar origin and a shared effect—at least to some significant degree—such that the claimant shares an approximate locus with the ancestor and shares as well in the ever-diffusing and infinitely-complex effects of the forebear’s life.

When certain of the Jews told Jesus that they claimed descent from ancestors who had persecuted the prophets, and then claimed as well that they would have forborne from that persecution, they were thinking as the world thinks.  The world operates—or at least rationalizes—on self/other basis.  We will claim this, and we will disown that.  In the moral realm that Jesus describes, we all own everything.  For better or for worse, we partake of the evil and the good, and we shun the evil and the good.  If we emphasize some element of our ancestry, we do just that—we emphasize.  We can shift—or perhaps it might be more fitting to say that we can squirm about—within this larger moral realm, but we cannot “other” elements of that realm in any distinctive manner.

This is why the teachings of Jesus are a perpetual thumb in the eye of the “total depravity” and “basic goodness” camps—epitomized most explicitly in his assertion that we “who are evil” know how to give good things to our children.  The theologians do not get to have their neat bases for analysis, any more than all of us get to have neat bases for our lives.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the manifest difficulty of understanding our relationship to the evils of this world as a self/other dynamic.  Evil is what we attend to in its lesser degrees in our neighbors only after we have recognized it in its greater degrees in ourselves—the business of eyes and splinters and beams.

And, if it is true as I have maintained, that our viewpoints in any supernatural realm can be based anywhere and can come from any time (which is different from me saying that we display any skill in adopting those viewpoints) then the self/other mode of analysis must break down.  We do not need to collect to ourselves righteousness, and to shun others as evil, and to consider their evil deeds as “other-ly” (though such could in earthly terms be described as the effect.)  What we need to do is change what we consider to be the “other.”

What we need to do is change our idea of “other”-ness.  We are not God, and God is not us.  God made Adam, and Adam was not God.  We can talk all we want about how Adam was made in the image of God (and then some linguist, as I understand it, will come along and claim that “imaging” was maintaining in existence, not creating in similarity, but . . . whatever), yet the important point was that Adam was not satisfied—at least to a degree—until Eve was made in Adam’s image (“bone of my bones”.)  Adam rejected the perfect, benign “Other”—God—and clung to a facsimile of himself.  There is nothing wrong with Otherness.  In fact, there is really only one Other to us, and that is God.

All else that exists, all else but the totality and persons and potential manifestations of God, is to some extent evil, and is to some extent ours.  All that is evil is “self” to us, and it is the horror of millennia that religions have ever forgotten or neglected this.