Going to Try Writing Again

 Going to Try Writing Again

For the Father Seeketh Such

“And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him” (Mark 1:13, KJV).  That is the short version.  Luke’s ends with: “And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season” (4:13)—surely that is just Luke’s attempt to smooth the narrative, unless Jesus as a fully human person was at times unaccountably insulated from our kind’s constant bedevilment.  However, between the bare account of the temptation and the crafted narrative, there lies in the three temptation episodes a triad of closely-related insights about Jesus’ teachings on salvation. 

Notably, Satan is really an unnecessary character in the Jesus-Tempted-in-the-Desert-by-Satan narrative (though perhaps therein lies an element of his elusive genius.)  Jesus after forty days needs no prompting to wish that a stone might be a loaf; he scarcely needs reminding, especially in his depleted state, that he fears dangers such as precipitous falls; and he would be expected in his extremity to wish that the world that torments him would be instead in his control.  So much for hunger or other bodily requirements; for fear of harm; for desire for dominion rather than subjugation—these three are among the common lot of humanity.

 (Of course, the temptation narratives in Matthew and Luke include the taunts directed at Jesus by Satan—“If thou be the Son of God”—but their contest on that score would be fundamentally distinct from any in which mere mortals might participate.)

The all-important relevance of the temptation narratives in the Synoptic tradition is made clear by its comparison to John’s story (4:1-42) of the Woman at the Well.  The Samaritan woman dares not ask if she might provide—contrary to convention—for the wearied Jewish traveler in the heat of the day.  (“Cast thyself down,” said Satan, taunting Jesus about an unnecessary plunge; the Samaritan woman’s prospective plunge is not so unnecessary.)  And she forfeits thereby a chance to drink of the living water of which Jesus speaks: not the endlessly-discussed “living water” of the theologians, but the vital and accessible “living water” of a dusty teacher of harsh truths in a land of scarcity—the “living water” figuratively drunk by one who sacrifices a precious cupful to another.

 The water at the bottom of the Samaritan woman’s well is the analog of the desired loaf of Jesus’ temptation by Satan.  Jesus dared forego a chance to satisfy his hunger (and we would do violence to the story to assume that Jesus’ experience of hunger was just a momentary annoyance while he endured the devil’s prating, expecting any moment a feast borne by angels.)  Jesus was expected to refuse the bread, as was his duty.  The Samaritan woman is expected (by God) to defy convention and dare to see to another’s needs before her own—all the more her duty in the face of the perverse earthly “duty” to ignore a Jew, or to expect him to ignore her.  This would be to her “living water.”

 Do we need more proof that the Samaritan woman’s cupful—her duty to do the will of God—is to bring to mind the prospective stone-turned-loaf that Jesus desired to eat?  The disciples are off buying food while Jesus talks to the woman.  When they return they bid him to eat, but he refuses: “I have meat to eat that ye know not of . . . . My meat is to do the will of him that sent me.”

 We have dealt so far mostly with Jesus’ temptations by Satan over stones and loaves, on the one hand, and over Jesus throwing himself off the temple, on the other.  We have not touched so much on Satan’s offer to Jesus of the kingdoms of the earth—though the devilish offer is best seen in light of Jesus’ promise (while yet Satan claims a tenuous dominion) that Jesus’ followers “shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life” (Mark 10:30).  Apparently the believer who can drink of the water she gives away, and eat of the bread she denies herself, and find safety in daring the dangerous, can count herself lord of the earth—useful only as the setting to do God’s will—Satan or no Satan.

 Unfortunately the story of the woman at the well has been weighted down with theologians’ fascinations with her amorous life—three verses out of forty-two—which Jesus speaks of without condemnation, and which speaking establishes him as a prophet.  All that attention wasted on speculation—and worse—about marriage and cohabitation, such small parts of a story about ancestry, inheritance, tradition, dominion, localism, sectarianism, labor, wages—a cauldron of issues about the rancor of possessions that Satan would love to perpetuate.  And what does Jesus—the Jesus who declined the rule of the earth for the greater good of the worship and service of God—say to the Samaritan woman?  “Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father” and “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.”

The Greatest Lie Ever Lived

Jesus on the cross exclaims, “My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?”  It is usually taken to be that Jesus is expressing horror at the experience of being the sin offering for mankind.  Of course, the fact that Jesus is held (in most Christian circles) to be fully divine—coupled with the notion that God would not “forsake” a perfect and sufficient offering—makes Jesus’ exclamation difficult for Christians to square.

 

Jesus was not referring to being a sin offering (though a sin offering he was, and one who suffered most horribly.)  Rather Jesus, in the fullness of the divine, was expressing the most perfect sentiment to be held by one fully human: the inexplicable alienation of self from God—“My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?”  This alienation is intrinsic to man’s created nature, and is earlier than any notion of a Fall: “It is not good that the man should be alone.”  And God’s solution to Adam’s alienation is not a comprehensive one; God does not create anew a creature separate from Adam.  God spreads Adam’s essence over into another person from whom Adam could never be perfectly distinct.  “Man” in the ultimate sense is still a multi-bodied creature blamelessly separated from the God who created him.  Such is the toll of creation—the forsakenness of which Jesus, in the extremity of his torments, complains.

 

Jesus is therefore the perfect human: an embodiment of Man’s created nature come to grips with the tragic reality of that nature.  Here we uncover the great lie of Christianity, the lie that reduces Jesus’ essence into the perfect sin offering, when in reality Jesus’ essence properly understood is the perfect human being.  The sin offering role—though entirely necessary and performed perfectly by Jesus—is simply an inseparable element of Jesus’ nature.  Moreover, the proclivity to seek to be given over as a sin offering must be part of what we should seek to discover within ourselves: our true nature, part of a species of fleshly existence, an organic community separated from God.

 

It is the attraction of that community that most perpetuates our alienation from God, whether that alienation springs from our identification with the proximity of our species, or from our self-identification as individuals that is ratified by the distanced regard we receive from other so-called individuals.  Our common humanity, in most perverse fashion, afflicts us simultaneously with the malign elements both of tribalism and self-absorption.  It should be no surprise, then, that Jesus commands us to renounce particular ties while striving simultaneously to see all humanity—including our divine savior—in each person.  We must give up all to possess all.  In order to truly live we must give up our lives—at least, such must be the template for which we strive, not some formula for the “Christian life.”

 

Such is the only way we can exist in truth—or try to.  Ultimately we will fail, even if only because our very self-reference as individuals—individuals who do more or less well at pursuing truth—is fouled by the inherent self-deception of thinking of ourselves as individuals.  We are Jesus or we are nothing, and in Jesus we are naught but a benign version of nothing.  In either event our lives themselves are but a curse, as God’s own truth should tell us.  This, then, is the real lie, the most great lie that should concern us: the lie that says that falsehood is the enemy of truth.  Not so.  Life is the enemy of truth.  Falsehood can be discovered, but any falsehood of import can be discovered only by trading away part of our lives in the process.

Gates to Paths to Gates

Theologians seek to understand more and more about God.  Cosmologists seek to understand more and more about the universe.  Biologists seek to understand more and more about living things.  Cosmology and biology (along with virtually every other field of study) share a particular basis of legitimacy that theology cannot claim.  Fields other than theology can discover and incorporate new foundational theories without invalidating the substance of prior and less sweeping organizing principles; indeed it is often the case that the ability to explain and contextualize existing knowledge provides the most powerful testimony of a new theory’s value.

 

Biologists did not have to belatedly discover the undoubted phenomena of species and their categorical relationships in order to justify evolution as a legitimate subject of inquiry.  In regard to cosmology, the discoveries of gravity, relativity, and quantum mechanics did not obliterate the basic understandings of relationships between physical objects that have held since the first rocks got picked up and banged together.  Theology, on the other hand, rests on the presumption that the most fundamental ideas of God held by the observer can be expected to control—perhaps to entirely obliterate—every less sweeping idea about existence.

 

If God provides good things, then after this life he will provide for his own; such is the basis for Jesus’ assurance to his followers that he would prepare a place for them, and it is not surprising that his statement would seem to upbraid them for ever having wondered about the matter: “if it were not so, I would have told you.”  Similarly, the question about whose wife a woman would be in the hereafter is a question that Jesus said was obliterated by the power of God.

 

Nothing is left unencompassed by the sweep of Jesus’ teachings.  To lose all—family, possessions, stature, etc.—is not only to gain them in the life to come, but also to have cause to possess them conceptually in the here and now, as a co-heir of Jesus.  In time of drought, a last cup of water given away to a thirsty child remains not only effectually the possession of the giver, but is also the first-fruit of every good thing in heaven and earth, possessed by the giver in every way that really matters.

 

The matter of earthly possessions held as an actual, legitimate inheritance of a believer (think the Pentateuch) being subsequently denied the believer by a development in theology is but one example of what I describe here.  Foundational developments in theology are assumed to have the potential to sweep all before them.  (I trust the reader to know that a simplistic follow-God-to-get-good-things theology had been rejected long before Jesus, by Jews and by others.)

 

The important point, however, is that theology (or, more broadly, religious thought) cannot involve individual elements.  Broken down crudely into the concepts of the divine, the self, and the universe, it must still be said that a shift in the conceptualizing of any one of the elements must affect all the others.  Ostensibly concepts of God will be the drivers, but not even that much need be asserted; the important thing is that the elements cannot exist independently.

 

This is the most likely application of Jesus’ warning about new wine in old wineskins.  We cannot simply change in the universe; the universe—the kingdom—we inhabit must change as well, and change it does, though we might neither recognize nor allow the fact.  That is why Jesus speaks of gates and paths and the kingdom of heaven both nearby and already here.  The spiritual journey is rousings and readyings and reapings—a continual journey to the true kingdom.

The Myth about Mythicism

The most pivotal element of roused-readied-reaped is choice.  We are roused to innumerable instances in our lives, many of them overlapping.  All such instances—moments, episodes, fits, days, phases, careers, what-have-you—begin out of the haze of the past and tend to an uncertain future.  All we can do is choose how we will respond to what we already own.  Our duty of choice is ceaseless.

We would much prefer to experience some unique defining instance through which our future would be assured.  Some of us would probably opt for some imposed experience, such being informed that we have been chosen inalterably among the elect since the dawn of time.  Others of us might prefer some one-time task to accomplish.  Such differences in preference must not blind us to the inherent commonality of our desire to have our futures decided pleasantly once and for all.

The entire opposite of this is displayed in Jesus’ post-Resurrection questioning of Peter in the Gospel of John—the “Do you love me?” refrains that Peter found so agonizing in their repetition.  This was the remorse-ridden Peter who had floundered frantically to the shore ahead of his companions, obviously eager for some soothing reassurance.  Instead Peter was confronted with a future of endless demands, wrapped in uncertainty.

Is it any wonder that the Luke-Acts narrative has the disciples (apparently having forgotten all about going to Galilee) cowering in Jerusalem until they concoct a communal hysteria of mission, a once-for-all initiation that their Savior’s words and career had stinted to provide?

This, then, brings us to the central myth of the mythicism debate: the notion of the centrality of the “Did Jesus Exist?” question.  As regards the beginnings of Christianity, that question is overblown, and it leads to conjectures such as “Would people suffer and die for a myth?”  More to the point is the question, “Given a belief in a suffering and resurrected savior, would not believers be tempted to mythologize into existence some tension-resolving method ostensibly to serve that savior?”  That is where Christianity comes from.

On Entry to the Kingdom of Heaven

We are all to blame for every sin that has ever been committed, or that will ever be committed, by anyone.  This is the key to the great liberation that comes with the teachings of Jesus.  It is gibberish to speak of an accounting of sins; it is foolishness to think that our blame amounts to less than a conceptual eternity of damnation; and it is blasphemy to conceive of God not desiring our salvation.

This brings us to the gate of the kingdom of heaven, where we must simultaneously abandon our hope of earning entry and also assert our hopeful intention of passing through the entrance.  This is the point at which religion acts for good or ill.  We can stand at the gate and cultivate awe at some one or another concept of a salvation economy, or we can pass through the gate and leave all behind.

In the kingdom of heaven it is gibberish to speak of salvation economies, of theologies, of religions, of conceptions of God.  It is foolishness to speak of time or space, for they comprise only a frame over which we drape our caricature of the divine.  It is foolishness to speak of being saved once or being saved an infinity of times, or of being saved now or then or here or there by this means or that—nothing makes sense in the face of a God before whom, by definition, none of our conceits can stand.

The person with the best of theologies is, by definition, a damned idolater.  Such a person’s state might seem particularly lamentable, were it not essentially indistinguishable from every other person’s state.  There is only one state of mankind before God, and one predicament.  We must live, until the moment of our death, as though we had every cause to believe ourselves the most hopeless of sinners, and also as though we had every reason to hope for our salvation.  In the kingdom of heaven the two notions are one and the same.

It’s All In a Sneeze

When we sneeze we are overcome by an upwelling physiologic response-set: our bodies exert spasms, largely involuntary, to the effect of expelling irritants from the respiratory tract.  “Largely involuntary” is the key aspect of this discussion; we can, to some extent, suppress, delay, or hasten sneezes, and we can position, tense, or relax our bodies throughout the experience.  In short, we do not simply experience sneezes—in the typical instance, we join with the experience.

It should scarcely need to be said that what I just described about sneezes would apply, in general, to other (perhaps more intimate) physiological events.  To grope for an adequate phrase, we are “given over” to sneezes (and other things), though in truth—as regards our limited degree of voluntary control—we can be numbered among the agents that do the “giving.”

We can say, “I am going to sneeze now,” but we might also say that “My body is going to sneeze now,” or that “A sneeze is going to happen to me.”  The important thing here is the fact that a sneeze illustrates the mutable quality of “self.”  We typically attach the concept of volition to self, but to keep the matter (artificially) simple we employ the circular logic to the effect that we can decide to control our selves by simultaneously deciding that our “selves” are those things that we can control.  Other aspects of what perhaps we should call our “persons” (say, our bodies or our subconscious minds) are reckoned to be things with which our “selves” must contend.

The mutability of self exists at both frontiers of our existence as physical persons: the interface between our bodies and the world, and the interface between our “selves” and our bodies.  The first is easier to illustrate.  We sneeze to expel irritants; in the simplest example a fine dust particle (or usually a cloud of them) has elicited the response.  Any given particle might be either expelled or retained and incorporated into the tissues of the respiratory tract.  In either event (if only for an instant) those dust particles have more import and effect than many of the dead or near-dead skin cells hanging at the periphery of the body—indisputable (as we imagine) parts of the body one moment, household dust the next.

At the moment of a sneeze, in other words, our bodies and their irritants are one.  (Or we can consider molecules dissociated from absorbed dust particles and later employed in cellular processes, if we must flog the topic exhaustingly.)  Our bodies are systems within an encompassing world system; we distinguish between our bodies and the world because such distinctions suit our conceits of utility or of psychological necessity.

Similarly, the experience of a sneeze is the experience of a neurologic system of which we have limited knowledge and limited control.  There is a moment in which we know we are going to sneeze (and then sometimes we don’t sneeze—such is the character of our knowledge).  What is undeniable is the fact that either we encourage the sneeze reaction and then experience our success when we know one is going to happen, or we attempt to suppress a sneeze and then realize we are going to fail.  (Or we can try to ignore an incipient sneeze; good luck with that.)

We give ourselves over to the sneeze.  In that moment we are not independent actors; we are (such as we conceive of ourselves as “selves”) participants in a neurologic system.  Could we have successfully suppressed or delayed a sneeze?  (There are, conceivably, instances in which such things would really matter.)  Were we overwhelmed by a purely physiologic process, or did we give in to it?  Perhaps more to the point, why would we—all logic and evidence to the contrary—insist that we are (as we conceive of our “selves”) discrete creatures of thought, rather than shifting and ill-defined thought-collections near the conscious pole of a larger thought-system?

I will provide another example.  A person walks up to a car, pulls out a crowded key-ring, and inserts the proper key into the door.  I will dispense with the silly part first.  In keeping with the “sneeze” discussion, at the moment of employing the proper key, the key is as much a part of the person’s body as the finger bone that allows the person to insert the key into the lock.  Of course it can be objected that the bone is a piece of living tissue, but that fact does not need to detract from the discussion.  It is conceivable (if not already practical) for a compromised finger bone to be replaced by some manner of metal or ceramic.  Would that implanted implement be any more or less a part of the body than the firmly-clenched key?

I bring up the car key example for a specific reason.  It is usually not difficult to pick out the proper key, even from a crowded ring, and insert it into the lock.  But assume the person is suddenly operating under unusual stresses.  Suppose a beloved family member is in sudden danger, and the first person needs to drive somewhere in a hurry.  Suddenly the most mundane of tasks can seem impossibly complex.

Which key is it?  Usually I just pick it out by habit.  How long has it been since I really looked at it?  Should I just try to collect myself and start over, or did I try enough of them that it would make more sense to just plow through all the rest?  Am I really sure the last one didn’t work, or in my panic did I not turn it correctly?  I can do this when it doesn’t matter; why can’t I do it when a loved one is in danger?

What I am describing is the kind of thought event that is a transformative experience.  Reality is no longer what it was, and we are no longer what we believed ourselves to be a few moments previously.  It is not simply that we are confused in that the parts of our lives do not seem to fit together.  Rather, it is that we are so disjointed that our attachments and our viewpoints do not seem to belong to us anymore.  I am reminded of Wilfred Owen’s relation of mental state, warned of poison gas in the trenches of World War One, and presumably straightforwardly afraid and wanting to efficiently don a gas mask: “an ecstasy of fumbling.”

In such a state it is no fancy or hyperbole to say that we must “forget ourselves” and concentrate on the task at hand.  We can clutch the keys in our hand and hope previously-ignored sensations of touch or weight will give us a clue.  We can back up and take a few hopefully-normal steps to the car in hopes that the action will jog memories.  We can narrate our usual course of actions so as to give ourselves a fresh viewpoint.

In short, we can embrace elements of a thought-system to which we have not priorly addressed ourselves.  In an important sense, it does not matter if those elements exist of themselves in the universe, or exist unrecognized in us, or are provided by the divine.  What matters first and foremost is that we recognize (especially later, when presumably we are attempting to incorporate the experience into our belief systems) that we cannot expand our realm of experience in any meaningful way without giving ourselves over to a larger conception of self in the process.

It might be said that the examples of boundary-pushing (or boundary-blurring) I have provided are trivial or uncommon, but it is equally true that—for most people—religious (or other boundary-challenging) experiences comprise very small and very uncommon life experiences.  It is not at all untypical for people to grasp onto a rare event in their lives, and declare those events to be those that inform their views of the ultimate.  What is lacking, unfortunately, is recognition that the challenging of boundaries involves not an expansion of self, but an expansion of what constitutes self.  This true expansion leads to greater life, but the immediate experience of true expansion necessarily requires a “giving-over” to new experiences that smacks of death.

And, it should go without saying, we must be prepared for the notion that further duties of expansion—potentially unlimited—lie before us.