The Thing of Stature

This post is just to tie down a one-word description of the moral import of “roused, readied, reaped.”  That word is “stature.”  This condensed approach that I intend to use is rooted in what is itself a condensation of “roused, readied, reaped”—which, as I have written, is a categorization of the events of Creation, from the momentary to the eons-long.  Those events occur in time and space, and while they must be linked in our temporal-spatial conceptions of the universe, similarly they share the distinctions of their own describable beginnings, middles, and ends—hence this blog’s title.

And so “roused, readied, reaped” has to do with time and space, although in any religious implications the particular designation of time or space or any other possible dimension must be understood as provisional—presumably there is that which transcends dimensions.  Of course, no human can understand that which is "hyper-dimensional” (or some other such silly term), but the attempt to recognize that which is sublimely outside of dimensions is perhaps best framed in terms of concepts that are familiar to us, and yet which can be understood routinely in terms of our limitations, rather than in terms of the exaggerations of “understanding” that we tend toward whenever we have satisfied ourselves that we have named something.

I suggest that, having distilled an approach to “roused, readied, reaped” into “time and space,” it behooves us to consider the still-simpler imagery of “stature.”  (I will not pretend that my attachment to “stature” is not based on what I understand to be Jesus’ emphasis of the concept.)  “Stature” seems to be one-dimensional, insofar as an entity’s stature can be described so when as few as a single criterion is being applied.  I contend that the proper religious application of “stature,” however, is not so simple.  For something to possess stature, it must exist in some dimension—be that dimension physical, social, or intellectual—and the very business of “possession” and “existence” must bear a description of the entity over time.  “Stature” can apply only to that which possesses some category of distinction to some extent, and over some span of time.

“Stature” is what something possesses in reference to some other thing, and over some time.  Something indistinguishable from something else is, inescapably, that something in itself.  Something that possesses some distinction and yet does not do so over some span of time is a thing that has never possessed that distinction at all.

Stature is that which every thing possesses, and for ourselves our stature is that which we presume to possess.  I will try in the future to illustrate how “stature” makes plain (or as plain as can be) that which Jesus requires of us.