A Life is a World

In my last post I wrote:

“ . . . we must reject the notion that God is meant to be understandable to humans if only humans will allow his sovereignty to be appreciated in transcendence across concepts common to our experience.  Concepts are not the way we bridge the chasm between ourselves and God.  Concepts are the way we bridge the gap between our not thinking of God and our thinking of God.

“Concepts are the way we can remind ourselves that God cannot be conceptualized.  God is the Perfect Other, not the Perfect Thing, not the Perfect Things, not the Perfect Infinitude of Things.”

This truth can be found in the Lord’s Prayer, usually related as in Matthew:

“. . . Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:  For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.  Amen” (Matthew 6:9-11, KJV).

In light of this blog’s insistence on God being beyond conception (The Great Other), the following can be revealed:

“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name”: Our heavenly father resides in a plane or state or whatever that we cannot conceptualize, and Jesus is dismissive of our attempts to understand any particulars of the heavenly.  Of course there will be provision for us there, but Jesus assumes that we will take that for granted as well, and not dwell on it.  Of course we might hope to reside there, but we will exist “like the angels”—whatever that might mean.  There may even be graded honors associated with the “hereafter,” but Jesus is neither concerned about that nor even—apparently—privy to its particulars.

As far as the word “name”: There is no place here for the sophomoric notion than a literal name means something in itself.  Jesus says in Matthew 18 “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  Many twos or threes or throngs have “gathered together” in the literal name of Jesus and wished or done the greatest of horrors—neither the name of Jesus nor of the Father are expressed in letters or sounds, but in renown associated with reverence.  “Hallowed” in the context of the Lord’s Prayer must refer to conceptualization, not naming, and it is as foolish to imagine that we can conceptualize God as it would be to imagine that we can ever process a “name” sufficient for the divine.  God’s name is hallowed ground—believed to exist, but drawn back from in prudence.

“Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven”:  Once analysis of the prayer is properly begun, the rest follows naturally.  The supplicant is looking to a re-establishment of existence as the realm of God’s incomprehensible sovereignty, such as had at first confronted Adam.  The world of Adam’s conceit—the place of familiarity and identification for which he and all his progeny have yearned—must be supplanted by the alien—the alien, that is, of God’s sovereignty.  Asking God to do godly things in the world of mankind’s conceit is both ridiculous and impious.  We must ask only for a new world such as existed when creation was new.

Indeed, it is inescapable—and intrinsic to the logic of Jesus’ teaching—that to have a “life” is necessarily to have a “world.”  To “lose one’s life” is to allow one’s world to go with it, and for it to be supplanted by the world of God’s design—a world of unfamiliarity being supplanted endlessly by unfamiliarity.  We have no place of residence to which we can properly claim title, and no legitimate notion of inviting others to our place of residence unless they be the unwashed, the unruly, the dangerous—people who cannot repay hospitality and are as like to repay it with hostility.  That’s what Jesus says.  That would be for us a world with which we might never be comfortable.  Small wonder that the denominations preach the tidy householder’s security and spout about such hideous things as a “Christian worldview.”

“Give us this day our daily bread”: Supplication for what we believe we need in the world we believe to exist is rendered in the Prayer with as short shrift as possible.  Indeed, given Jesus’ disdain for bread alone and his insistence that God knows what we need before we do, the business of our asking for what we think we need borders on satire.  Why would we not rather simply ask to never be hungry?  Jesus’ description of what we might do with faith as small as a mustard seed would dwarf the filling of our stomachs.

“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”: Once driven through the bottleneck of “daily bread,” the prayer broadens out again to exploration of the unimaginable world for which we must ask.  “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors?”  To paraphrase the young Hamlet, who then shall escape damnation?  The emphasis of this portion of the prayer—as indeed in any aspect of our attachment to the divine—must be the effectual dis-attachment we feel when faced with the impossibility of satisfying God’s requirements of us.  We might harbor fantasies—fantasies, that is, in terms of our understanding of our Adamic worlds—of being told, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” but Jesus rather places in our mouths, “we are worthless servants.”  If only our actual existences were such as would allow us to grasp for the former praise, when in actuality we deserve only the latter condemnation.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”: Yet, as regards the above paragraph, need the situation be so dire?  Does not Jesus promise whatever we might ask?  Unfortunately, we cannot ask for some “thing”—that is, some aspect of our existence to be added, or removed, or altered—and expect any real improvement in our state.  As long as our world exists—as long, that is, as our life exists—we will always find advancement in any aspect to curl back upon itself with a vengeance.  Drive out one devil, and seven others will accompany it back.  “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” is asking for a new world—a new universe, a new existence—in which we are neither tempted nor faced with the prospect of testing.  The phrase is asking for the world that Adam rejected—the world that we all might be expect to reject, Adam or no Adam.

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever”: This is the world—the kingdom—to which we must draw ourselves.  This is the world in which all that is estimable is estimable because it is of God, not because we find in ourselves affinity for it.  As I quoted myself above, “God is the Perfect Other, not the Perfect Thing, not the Perfect Things, not the Perfect Infinitude of Things.”  To say, of course, that we can “draw ourselves” toward the kingdom of God is next to meaningless.  Salvation will always be a mystery.  What is important about the Lord’s Prayer as regards salvation is the fact that is supplies a (usually missed) insight into the quandary of salvation.  A person who strives for salvation is really asking to be overtaken by mercy—striving being insufficient.  A person who understands properly the Lord’s Prayer is simply approaching the matter in the larger view.  We cannot ask for salvation as reward for what we do in our lives and in our worlds (which are really the same things).  We can, however, ask to be made offspring of the world of God—that is, to be overtaken by mercy working out across experiences alien and unasked-for, experiences that will drive us away from the familiar and from our tendency to find our gods in what is like us.  Whatever else might be said, the God of the Lord’s Prayer is not like us.