The Travail of Stature

I am trying to present “roused, readied, reaped” in its simplest formulation, so as to demonstrate its application to the teachings of Jesus.  “Roused, readied, reaped” is an arc (really, innumerable arcs) in our existence, and so “roused, readied, reaped” is a temporal-spatial thing.  Jesus, in his totality, is of course not a temporal-spatial entity.

And so time and space—and we—must bow before Jesus.  This is a careful formulation, meant to be distinguishable from the notion that true piety can be exhibited in bowing before a Jesus who strides across time and space—as though it would be proper to confine the Creator of All on a stage of dimensions wrought by himself.

And so I intend to conceptualize our predicament as in part our being bound in our creaturely limitations—though it probably could go without saying that it is the refusal to acknowledge such limitations that is our crucial failing, not the limitations themselves.  Whether we pretend we are free of time and space, or we pretend that Jesus as God shares our confinement in time and space—in either event the result is the same.  I will even maintain—as I have tried to describe before—that our existences as persons can even be understood as ranging counter-intuitively across time and space (involving us in all horrid deeds always and everywhere) while yet we are—unlike Jesus—still within the larger temporal-spatial realm.

I call our predicament “the travail of stature.”  We suffer because we are.  We exist, yet we don’t know why we should exist.  We orient ourselves improperly, yet we don’t know why this should be so.  Jesus is not so limited, or so burdened—the Jesus of his divine nature, of course.  As a man he existed so as to wonder if God’s plan for him might not be God’s ultimate will (Gethsemane), and as a man he did not know how to square himself with his earthly fate (Calvary).  As the perfect divine Son of God, of course, he did not sin in his sufferings, but as a man he experienced what all persons will experience.

And so to return to us mortal persons.  By “travail of stature,” I refer to that predicament that binds together the active and passive elements of the existence that torments us.  We exist in time and space.  We are bedeviled in time and space.  “Travail of stature” is two words (linked with “of”) meant to encapsulate a single idea, yet each of those words includes both elements of that idea.  “Travail” indicates suffering, but (and I know I am flirting with word-games) “travail” shares a derivation with “travel”—we bear burdens, even if only our own weights of being, along the road we call time.  And “time,” as I have indicated before, is a necessary element of stature—we must be something across time if we are to be that “something” at all.

And as for “stature”: stature refers to how something “stands,” yet as I tried to describe in the previous post, for something to possess “standing” (or “stature”) it must possess that standing both in terms of some measure, and in terms of some passage of time.  Therefore “travail of stature” can be thought to apply simply to the burden of existence, yet a careful application of the phrase will be bound up with the intrinsically “bound-up” quality of our experiences.  We are the subjects of space and time.  In the potential of Adam’s communion with God there would have been no necessary elements of time or space.

Similarly the divine Jesus was never separated from God by time or space.  We are not so situated, and so we suffer the travail of stature.  Only in this realization can we grasp what Jesus requires of us (though ever and always in this life we will be lacking.)  Over and over again in the gospels Jesus directs us to consider our stature, and over and over again through the centuries we have busied ourselves about what we are—or are not—to undertake.  This seemingly laudable quest to undertake the right things, or to undertake the right thoughts, presumes of necessity that we grasp the stature from which we operate.  This grasping is always futile, and so our moral schemes have always tended to spiral toward futility.

Unsurprisingly, the moral progress of humanity (such as it is) is ever and always rooted in the difficult and draining process of humanity loosening its grasp on notions of stature (supremacy, overlordship, racial purity, ideological exceptionalism, to name a few).  Such progress does not nearly so much lie in us getting better, but rather in us getting a better view of how great, and how transcendent, must be the attributes of the divine—the Great Other who can awe us out of our pretensions to stature.