To Cast Ourselves

I ended my last post with:

“What is really happening overall—if we are courageous enough to accept it, if we are courageous enough to conceptualize human ‘belief’ in a manner such as Jesus attributes to us—is a continual recapitulation of the belief-experience.  We reach out to the unknown.  We draw back.  We reach out to the alien.  We draw back.

“We have belief-experiences that we undergo through suffering and perhaps sacrifice, and we never want to face again the prospect of the journey to those belief-experiences.  And then we have to take again the journey to those belief-experiences.  That is what belief is, if we are ever to know it in truth.”

That is what belief is—the last thing (as I suspect for most of us) that we want belief to be.  Of course, the aspiring believer will usually declare his or her willingness to suffer anything in exchange for the possession of a satisfying belief scheme.  And then (as I would hope for all of us) we discover that one of the least likely things to experience in a valid belief system is satisfaction.

On the other hand, a person who claims to possess a satisfying belief system is a person for whom the sting of all questions has been soothed.  I say “sting,” since there is nothing about a satisfying belief system that requires all questions to be answered—the believer has merely to be assured that God (or whatever conceptualization of divinity) will take care of everything of substance.  For the believer, questions are either answered or rendered innocuous.

The conceptual realm—however “awe-inspiring” or “mysterious” or even “scary”—that the believer inhabits is really the world of the believer.  As a parallel example, the most determined materialist can maintain that the universe is purely physical (while yet, of course, entertaining the notion of “ideas” and such as subjective manifestations of that physicality), but in the experiences of living, “the world” of the materialist exists as a set of ideas.  The concept of the world-globe is real to the materialist, as is the experience of occupying an infinitesimal portion of its surface, but “the world” as a whole cannot be encompassed by the materialist’s vision nor spanned by his or her grasp.  “The world” of human experience is an idea.

Similarly, the believer in a religion exists in a world of concepts.  For the believer, it may be God and not some notion of curling space-time (or some such) that exists as the periphery of everything that can be conceptualized, but the upshot is the same.  A satisfying belief system is a “world.”  I say this as something extremely important, because—as I have written before—the totality of one’s experiences in a world is really nothing more than a life.  We are “roused, readied, reaped.”  We are born to a set of experiences that surround us—and their impenetrability is coterminous in our experience with any notions we might have of “infinity” or of “the extent of the universe”—the verbalized meta-horizon of our world.

So much for “roused.”  To be “readied” is to affect, and to be affected by, our circumstances (though, sad to say, there is no guarantee that we are being “readied” in what we might term proper fashion.)  And then we are “reaped”—tossed into some hereafter realm not merely as ourselves but as ourselves refined or degraded by our experiences here.  It is small wonder that we might want all of this to “make sense”—and indeed it is no great sin to want all of this to “make sense”—but this is all of a piece: our life in our world.

Jesus will deny us our lives.  Jesus will deny us our worlds.  “Life” is dying to what the world knows as life.  And the world that we know is to be supplanted by the Kingdom of God.

But how?  The question remains, “How?”

We exist, and we are surrounded by what we think of as “not us.”  That which—in our estimation—constitutes our “selves” is defined by us in contradistinction to whatever is not our “selves.”  We are alive in the world, and we are not the world.

It has been the common human approach to religion, as far as being alive in the world is concerned, to consider that we must do good things, and not do evil things.  The history of Christian doctrine, however (“Christian” being inclusively defined) has ranged from blunt assertions that “good” people go to Heaven, all the way to assertions that no observable (nor indeed internally ratified) “good” aspects need be seen in an Elect to whom are attributed the boundless goodness of the Savior.

And so, despite the vast differences in theology, the denominations share what I described just above.  To repeat myself, we exist, and we are surrounded by what we think of as “not us.”  That which—in our estimation—constitutes our “selves” is defined by us in contradistinction to whatever is not our “selves.”  We are alive in the world, and we are not the world.

But Jesus says we are to give up our lives for the kingdom of God.  Jesus says we are not to live in “this world,” but in the kingdom of God.  How then can we attempt to follow the dictates of Jesus without merely going about throwing up quotation marks all over the place?  For that is really all that theologians do—saying that we need to give up “our lives” for “life in Christ,” that we need to forsake “the world” for “the kingdom of God.”  Actually, that is not all that theologians do.  Having started off with quotation marks, they graduate to capital letters, and we must read of Truth and Freedom, or worse yet, of Real Truth and Real Freedom.

Yet still the question remains.  In the conceptual framework of the challenges leveled at us by Jesus, what are we to make of the persistent question of how to act in the context of what we find facing us?  We are roused to our individual existences, and we must face the passing of time, and we must face the passing of ourselves from the realm that we detect around us.  How can Jesus be presenting a graspable challenge, when he tells us to give up our worldly lives for lives in another world?

I contend that Jesus makes no demands of us that are not implicit yet inescapable “in the beginning” to which he refers repeatedly.  A persistent thread in Jesus’ teaching is for us to be responsible for telling right from wrong, while yet he assumes that our lives will be governed largely by religious dictates that we could scarcely begin in our individual lives to sort out, or to examine in minute detail, or to discard as necessary.

He asks which of us will not lift an animal out of a pit on the Sabbath.  He is not telling us to decide that all religious rules are wrong.  He is not telling us to be Jews, or not to be Jews.  He is telling us that our lives in the world are analyzable in terms that defy the boundaries of our existences.  Our existences, as our inclinations will naturally direct us, are understood by us as the placing of our attentions to what is right and what is wrong.  In the world of Jesus, in the kingdom of God, right and wrong, good and evil, are all that exist.  Nothing changes but the notion of what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.

Adam and Eve were not thrown into a world of despair because they were given the ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  They were thrown into a world of despair because they were thrust into the realm of the challenge that Jesus has for us—our eyes were opened, the eyes of our race were opened, to know good and evil, not to know WHAT is good or WHAT is evil.

Our lives are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  Our worlds are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  We are angels and devils moment by moment.  When Jesus called Peter “Satan,” it was because no more powerful word was available, not because he was “trying to make a point.”  When Jesus told a crowd that they were children of the devil, he would have known full well, if he was “trying to make a point,” that some people might have misunderstood or some might have only half-heard him.  In our usual mind-set, we would be troubled that some people might mistakenly really assume that they had truly been equated with the devil.  Yet what ought that to be to us?  A thousand times a day we deserve to be called “the Devil,” and we know it.

A thousand times a day we face the quandary I opened with:

“We have belief-experiences that we undergo through suffering and perhaps sacrifice, and we never want to face again the prospect of the journey to those belief-experiences.  And then we have to take again the journey to those belief-experiences.  That is what belief is, if we are ever to know it in truth.”

To be born again, to be born from above, is to throw ourselves at what is good.  None of this has to do with any life-experiences necessarily translatable into things done by us as individuals in the world—as though we as individuals mattered, or as though the world mattered.  When Jesus glorified God, Jesus was throwing himself at what is good.  When Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, Jesus was throwing himself at what is good.

Our duty is to cast ourselves at the Perfect Other who is the Perfect God.  The only commonality we might have with God is a sense of good rather than evil, and that sense is the only abiding torment that we face.  This is the architecture of the life that we must find in the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.  How this will happen for us is unsurprising.  As I quoted myself above:

“We reach out to the unknown.  We draw back.  We reach out to the alien.  We draw back.”