We Cannot Think Ourselves

We were all created like Adam.  The idea of our being in communion with God is the greatest idea that we might try to hold, yet everything about ourselves stands in opposition to that idea.  And I mean everything.  This is indeed an important point—so much of Christian history has been focused on the notion of a pervasive “sin nature” that pollutes our (apparently, according to the theologians) entirely satisfactory states in other regards.  In other words, there is nothing wrong (other than forgivable limitations) with our minds and our bodies—there is only something wrong with our moral natures.

This contention stands in utter opposition to Jesus’ formulation of the matter.  He tells us that anything can be achieved by the person who believes.  The flesh may be weak, and yet anything is possible for the person who believes.  Inescapably, then, our limitations in terms of physicality and mentality are as much our moral failings as anything we would imperiously decree to be “moral failings.”

This is why Jesus, at the point of the Crucifixion, says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”—leaving theologians to contend about who might be innocently ignorant (the pagan soldiers?) and included in Jesus’ statement, though the statement’s presentation in the gospel is on its face generally directed.  The statement is indeed generally directed, in the largest sense.  None of us knows what we do—none of us knows anything—and the reason for this, according to Jesus, is that we do not ask for knowledge.

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do” is not an exculpatory statement.  Ignorance is no excuse for sin, for ignorance is a sin.  We could know everything, if we would only ask for such knowledge.  It is not, unfortunately, in our nature to ask sincerely.  Jesus is highlighting the sin of ignorance, and asking the Father to forgive that sin.  Jesus is not arguing away the Father’s rightful wrath against those who—in any capacity—participated in the torture of his son.

Only when we realize that sin is not that unsettling “doing nasty things” that we pretend it is, and realize that all of our limitations (as against the Father’s original intention for us) is a complex of sin, can we begin to address our real moral condition before God.  We sin when we do horrible things, and we sin when we fail to do good things, and we sin when we fail to think good things.  In all of our doings and thinkings we are limited, and Jesus says that is our fault.

This now has let me understand what Jesus meant when he described the Sheep and the Goats.  It seems illogical—as I have written before—that Jesus would tell how people at the final judgment would ask “when did we do (or not do) thus and such to thee”—illogical, that is, once Jesus has told the story in advance.  Would not his hearers and succeeding generations know the “punch line,” and therefore refrain from saying it?  The answer is that we will always think in the us-versus-them fashion that causes us not to see our Savior in our fellows.  We will always fail in our thoughts, and at the point of judgment that set of mental failings which is really part of our set of sins will be with us still.

Even at the end, we will think in terms of “Lord, when did we see you hungry, and not feed you?”  Such is our sin nature, and we cannot think ourselves out of it.

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.

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.

The Existence of Jesus

In my last post I wrote:

“The great moment of humanity’s fate was not the apple-story Fall, but the primordial moment in which God decided of Adam, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone’—when the element of ‘alone’ reflected the dispositions of Adam, not the dispositions of the Creator who for eons has lamented a broken communion with the man and his progeny.”

Against this I placed a description of Adam’s savior:

“This is the Jesus who could never stop moving toward God, who could never stop reaching out toward God, who could never stop yearning for God.  Between us and Jesus, of course (as between us and God) is a chasm.  Across the chasm come the dwindling strains of the screams and of the laughter, all of which—even together with every breath of Jesus—were bought for us at an inestimable price.”

Jesus could never be alone in the universe of God—even in the totality of totalities of God.  Adam (and his offspring) could be alone.  Jesus is the Adam who cannot be without God.  Jesus is the Adam who cannot exist—who cannot be conceived to exist—without God.

In his incarnation, Jesus—the eternal Son of God—was a man like any other, except in the aspect of humanity’s alienation from God.  It is a fool’s errand to attempt to pick out the particulars of how Jesus’ divinity would have informed him as a man, or have affected his ability to do things as a man, or have colored and defined his expression of himself to his fellow humans.  When “God” and when “man”?  When “God-like” and when “human”?  It suffices to say that he was a man, and it ought to suffice, to observe that untying the mysteries of his “dual” nature is no more to be achieved than untying the mystery of God’s existence itself.

Indeed, it might be more apt to observe that the mortal human, created in the image of God and yet capable of desecrating that image, is the one with a “dual” nature.  Adam lacked nothing when he was created—the horrible mystery is why Adam (and all of us) could find existence in God’s Creation to be an unfulfilling state.  (This, by the way, can clean up any concern about God in Genesis described as creating them “male” and “female” in his image.  There is no reason to imagine that Eve was created less pristinely than Adam and—like Adam—her first narrative description has to do with a proclivity to find something lacking in existence.)

As I wrote above, it is a fool’s errand to attempt to pick out the particulars of how Jesus’ divinity would have informed him as a man, or have affected his ability to do things as a man, or have colored and defined his expression of himself to his fellow humans.  This is no small consideration.  The depictions of Jesus in the Gospels dance back and forth, for example, between Jesus being described as knowing all that was in the minds of people around him, and Jesus being described as asking honest questions and reacting to the answers as though he had to digest them in real time.  Such things are puzzles only to commentators who insist on pulling apart mysteries, and all that is to be found within is more mystery.

No one has to read three-quarters of the way through the Bible, arriving at last at what we generally call the “New Testament,” to be confronted by such mysteries.  Does God need to ask Adam where he is?  Does God have such a body as to enjoy “the cool of the day?”  Could Adam have imagined that he could evade God’s gaze?  Such things are stories, meant to illustrate truths, and it is conceit indeed to imagine that we can grasp more than a fraction of those truths in any event.  In the gospels we are confronted by stories.  Sometimes we like to call them “accounts”—as though that altered the fact that we are presented merely with ideas, and—like the limited viewpoints of stories—such ideas are in essence merely voices thrown against ineffable mysteries, voices the echoes of which are the moments when we think we have a greater understanding, to be followed hard upon by other moments when the illumination—was it real or not?—fades from us.

What is really lamentable about our attempts to understand the mysteries of religion is our tendency to try to answer the wrong types of questions.  No casual reader of Church history has to be told of the incredibly virulent disputes about the Incarnation.  That the general answer arrived at after centuries is that the incarnate Jesus was “all God and all man” is scarcely surprising—in that (apart from it being a truth understandable to us when we are exhausted from postulating otherwise), it is so general an answer as to swamp other, more particularistic, contentions.

But what have we achieved when we declare that the incarnate Jesus was “all God and all man,” when we apply such an idea so as to undercut the manifest import of gospel stories?  I am thinking most particularly of Jesus’ cry of despair on the Cross.  “All God and all man” at that point means little if Jesus is thought to be suffering all the pains of a mortal, yet denied by our analysis one of the greatest pains of death—the pain of uncertainty that must always attend a mortal’s limited understanding.  It is contended sometimes that Jesus was simply praying from the psalms—an unprovable contention that would scarcely explain why such a Jesus, possessed at that moment of a divinely-unquestioning human comportment, would choose to burden untold generations with such a choice among so many in the psalms.

Or as I wrote of Jesus in the last post but one:

“When his mortal mind was burdened—and in the horrifying instance violently beset—with the human-intellect-defying question of God’s justice, he cried out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’  For Jesus—reckoned to have set aside his divinity for this episode—to have understood as a man the totality of what was happening to him, would have been as unnatural for him as it would have been for him to be able to hang there and suffer as a man until the crack of doom.”

And yet we seem to be perennially unable to shake the imagery of “all God and all man” as being “man on the outside and God on the inside.”  I am thinking of the debate about the “historicity” of Jesus, wherein it is claimed by some (often leaving the idea of the supernatural aside) that the Jesus of the early Church must have been based on a real figure, while it is claimed by others that the early Church believed first in an otherworldly crucifixion—a supernatural rather than earthly phenomenon—that was only later imagined to have occurred on Earth to a real man.

In one mode of analysis, it might be granted that each side (the “historicist” and the “mythicist”) has its points, but that question itself is tangential to another, which we are unlikely to notice.  If it is maintained that Jesus could not have failed to know always of the justice of God (that is, if Jesus’ cry of despair was mere display) or even if it is maintained that Jesus could not have failed to know the names of every member of every first-century Amazonian tribe—he’s “all God,” after all—what then is the distinction between a “supernatural” crucifixion and an “earthly” one?

That is—and I am addressing the question as it would exist for believers—if the humanity of Jesus did not permeate his existence in the Incarnation, so as to extend even to his most basic thoughts during the Crucifixion and otherwise, what point then is there in attempting to defend the existence of an historical Jesus versus a “supernatural” myth?  In every substance of belief—if not in the eyes of an unsympathetic secular “world”—a Jesus existing and suffering on a supernatural plane would differ in no discernable respect from an always-encyclopedically-right-thinking (and therefore in no respect doubting) flesh-and-blood Jesus hanging on a real Cross.  This never-doubting Jesus (whose divinity could not by definition be confined to a physical plane) would be simply a supernatural entity before whom was being paraded the tangible trappings of a series of events.  Calling such a supernatural procession “real” in the historical sense would be to claim for that Crucifixion no more substance than the Crucifixion as described by the mythicists.

The incarnate Jesus was divine.  How that might work out in particulars does not seem likely to be understandable to us this side of the grave.  In trying to work out how we should address the Gospels—and therefore our limited understanding of the Incarnation—it makes all the difference, whether we view humanity’s predicament as one stemming from the “Fall” (so-called) or—as I maintain—as a predicament stemming from Adam's original estrangement from God.  In the former conceptualization, that of the “Fall,” the operative notion is the sin of transgression, and therefore we try to look at the Gospels in terms of who was right and who was wrong—a somewhat problematic quest in the service of a Savior who counsels us against passing judgment.  Moreover, there are times when Jesus accords to the tantalizingly-described “Son of Man” prerogatives that frustrate (to say the least) any attempts to define Jesus’ acts as “right or wrong” according to some set of rules.

In the latter conceptualization—conceiving of humanity’s separation from God as being an ineffable mystery—“sinlessness” (if we could even hope to get our minds around all its permutations) is subservient to affinity.  Jesus, being divine, was never separated from God.  Of course, in a generalized mode of analysis, it might be said that Adam never had to be separated from God.  What was paramount, of course, in the case of Adam was his tendency to direct his attentions elsewhere, to look—unsurprisingly, we would say—for a counterpart to himself in the creaturely realm.  To call that “sinful” would be a stretching of our understanding of the word, and much less might we understand why Adam was created as he was by a God who loved him.

God loved Jesus as a man in the world, and God loved Adam as a man in the world.  We can analyze Jesus and Adam in terms of sinfulness, and we can analyze Jesus and Adam in terms of merit.  Or we can analyze the humanity shared by them in terms of the great element that the Scriptures declares to separate them in the narrative—the element of affinity with God.  Adam lost that affinity in the paradise of the Garden.  Jesus retained that affinity in the agonies of the Cross.  The Garden, for Adam, was not without its toil.  The Cross, for Jesus, was short-lived enough to surprise Pilate.  None of that matters—any more than do our puerile declarations about righteousness—in the face of the question of affinity with our Maker.

The Price of Laughter

In my last post I wrote:

“Jesus’ divinity, in the agonies of his death, was not represented by his ‘understanding’ of what was happening to him, but rather by his unrequited yet unceasing reaching-out to God—'Why?’ he cried out.  Jesus could not fail to embrace God, even from the experiential distance of the Cross.  And this, in the finite scale of our own existences, is what is demanded from us as well . . . . We are not in this world engaged in a self/other conflict with elements of evil, whilst permitted to anticipate an eternity with a magnified, omnipotent figuration of ourselves called God . . . The great Other in this scenario is God . . . If we are to confront the mystery of our relationship with God, then let it be done in this basic sense, and let it be done—as I have described before—in terms of Adam’s initial forsaking of the Great Other who created him.  It is this seemingly hopeless fracture that Jesus was sent to mend.”

This “hopeless fracture” is the mystery of existence itself.  Things exist, and there is no discernable reason why this ought to be so.  On the other hand, of course, there is no discernable reason why the existence of things ought not to be so.  Things exist.  Moreover, if they were the creation of a God who exists independently of any concept we can grasp, then neither the things themselves nor any of the properties by which existence is gauged can be thought to possess existence in themselves.  Let God look away, and all else is nothing.

“Existence,” then, is a thing of times and places.  Let time stop and motions cease, and “existence”—conceived of as that which can be experienced—ceases as well, and the “ceasing” as far as we are concerned is the same as non-existence.  Or let everything happen at once, and it would be the same as if nothing ever happened.  And yet to God everything happens all at once, and takes forever to happen—or is there some other, more defensible version of God available to us mortals?

For want of better examples, existence for us is an ever-shifting playing field on which there are no rules.  Something, we are convinced, is supposed to happen, but the happenings of the game are indistinguishable from the administering of the game.  We have sensations and impulses that play upon us, yet they are only momentary and localized, while the venue of the game extends beyond our view and the timekeeper hoards a clock away from us.

This is not meant to be silly, for the playing-field of our experiences is littered with tragedies enough.  What I mean to describe is an experience-field that ranges from the most trivial to the most tragic in a proceeding that, to us, is alternately mundane and chaotic.  Authors enough have spoken of the ridiculous to the sublime.  It is unfortunate that theologians have not usually explored the matter in a similar vein.  Jesus begins his ministry making fun of the first disciples’ tendencies to believe, and he ends his ministry with the agony of experienced futility.  As critics have noted that the tragic—though deprived of the levity of the comic—is usually granted the final mercy of resolution, so the tragedy of Jesus’ despairing death ushers in the possibility of resolution to the—forgive me—“human comedy” that would be sad if it weren’t so funny, and funny if it weren’t so sad.

I know I have gone from the playing-field to the stage, and from the game to the play, but neither type of metaphor will suffice, yet each hints at the abiding informative quality of Jesus’ ministry, and of the scriptures that frame our understanding of that ministry.  

The form of Jesus’ ministry is satire.  There is no other way to put it.  The very idea of translating the existence of God into a testament of the existence of God is an idea of irreverence—once that testament is understood as a presentation to us mere mortals.  This hearkens back to the very beginning of the testimonies to Jesus, to the very beginning of Genesis, where the groundwork of the rationale for famine and fire and eternal damnation is littered with sophomoric word-play.

God made everything from nothing in an instant.  Or perhaps he did not, yet there is no other intellectual template available to us.  To us, something exists or it doesn’t, hence the “everything from nothing in an instant.”  This is also, as I have indicated, ridiculous—there is no other intellectual template available to us.  Everything comes from something else, and that original “something” must be bounded by the self-same framework of properties that bounds its product.  This, then, is the intellectual distance between us and “God made everything from nothing in an instant.”

Yet Genesis does not inflict that distance upon us.  “Creation” in its raw state is a pre-existing character in the narrative of Genesis, and the particulars of Creation are drawn out over a week.  At the end of the week God, who does not need rest, rests from the week-long process that would not take him the smallest part of a week.  This might seem an odd way for God to present Creation to mortals, but “God made everything from nothing in an instant” is a postulate, not a presentation.

So, we can take Jesus’ ministry (including those scriptures he treats as part of his ministry) as statement, or as satire.  Character after character in the gospels offers this or that statement, and is responded to by Jesus with question, puzzle, paradox, retort—while it is the small, scattered cohort of sincere people who stand before Jesus while trembling in conflict over the glib statements of theology who gain his praise.  In our exploration of this matter we must go back to the start of scripture—to its probing, piercing, sardonic, satirical bent—to understand the basics of what we call “faith.”

It takes a leap of faith for us to put ourselves in the place of Adam, simultaneously confronted and comforted by the God who made him, by the God who must be the ultimate Other to all else that exists (the confronter) and also the ultimate Understander of all else that exists (the comforter.)  The great moment of humanity’s fate was not the apple-story Fall, but the primordial moment in which God decided of Adam, “It is not good for the man to be alone”—when the element of “alone” reflected the dispositions of Adam, not the dispositions of the Creator who for eons has lamented a broken communion with the man and his progeny.

“Statement” cannot encapsulate for us—the children of the man—the sorrow of our distance from God.  “Satire” might seem, alternatively, to be irreverent, but it is entirely appropriate to the ridiculousness of Creation, and also to the ridiculousness of our attachment to the grime of Creation—in preference to the sublime aspirations with which we are haunted and which we cannot deny.  The drama of satire—the structure of Jesus’ gesticulations, for which both kin and stranger branded him mad—is also the drama of searing experience.  Satire is our method of holding onto otherwise unmanageable lessons and memories.  Satire is the essence of our life-long, moment-by-moment undertaking of remembering the unthinkable and of clinging to the repellent—the essence of the faith that soothes even as it burns, and that continues to soothe only because it continues to burn.

Faith is not believing in something despite a lack of evidence, and faith is not believing in something because of the presence of evidence.  Faith is believing in something as the chasm of the momentary experience yawns—as the initially-undeniable, say, tolling of a bell fades into waning echoes, and as the memory of the experience fades into the disappearing recesses of our recollections.  Faith is an experience of motion—even so little as tensing ourselves to raise up half-forgotten sensations.  Faith is an experience of motion—even as we quiver or dart or plod along—and we decide (or succumb to welling impulses) about motion, about what we will go toward or reach out for.  This is what the great satire of Jesus’ ministry was always heading for.  I do not mean the Jesus of calm Sermon-on-the-Mount imagery, or the Jesus of flaring and disappearing anger in the Temple, or the Jesus of the endlessly-reenacted Passion.  These are merely set-pieces, placed before the believer by theologians like oil-paintings (even by the Masters) with explanatory placards below.

The Jesus of the Great Satire is the Jesus whose derisive laughter echoes still—all the more chilling in that his scream on the Cross echoes as well.  This is the Jesus who could never stop moving toward God, who could never stop reaching out toward God, who could never stop yearning for God.  Between us and Jesus, of course (as between us and God) is a chasm.  Across the chasm come the dwindling strains of the screams and of the laughter, all of which—even together with every breath of Jesus—were bought for us at an inestimable price.

The First Asymmetry

Our existence, understood in its rawest form, is a cascade of asymmetries.  What we try to understand is greater than we are, or more profound than we are, or—something.  In any event, it is our conception of ourselves that we draw upon in order to try to understand our surroundings, or ourselves, or ourselves in our surroundings, or—as is my present fascination—ourselves as fading by imperceptible gradations into our surroundings.  Or maybe we simply cannot see where we leave off and where our surroundings begin.

Or maybe we cannot even see across the expanse of ourselves.  This is what I was getting at in the previous post, where I mentioned my “attempt to explore the possibilities that rise into view when we are willing to consider that we do not really know where our edges are.”  Descartes said of himself, “I think, therefore I am,” though it would have been more fundamental—though paradoxically longer—for Descartes to admit, “Something of which I am a part thinks, and I am the actualized locus of that process.”

This, then, is also the source of our first experiential asymmetry.  We cannot claim so much as a fundamental challenge from the self/other dichotomy—for in our perceivable existence, our “selves” are as outside of our conceptions as are any elements of those things we consider “others” in our environment.  Only the writhing mind-worm of our struggling knot of thoughts constitutes the self of conscious existence.

And so, we can learn things, or come to understand things, or perhaps misperceive or misapprehend things, and in each instance there is presumably alteration of the “self” of which we are partly cognizant and partly not.  This is not an interplay of symmetries, but rather of commingled interactions.  It is only by unsupported conceit that we can consider anything as “other” when any such “other” is only part of the whole of unbounded surroundings that washes against and intermittently inundates our thought processes.

And therefore, our notion of “self” as against “other” is an artificial construct if “self” is equated with consciousness and is held to be limited within the bounds of that consciousness.  No more pitiful creature exists, than the human being who considers himself or herself to be a coherent conglomeration of consciousness inhabiting a body and—if moral considerations are in view—battling against (or ratifying in detachment) emotions arising from that body.  Such a person is a godling, and is as much to be pitied as any prophet’s sardonic picture of a worthless idol.

In reality, human beings are selves who discover their own boundaries even as they probe the boundaries of their environments.  Moreover, the individual selves of human beings are as likely to frustrate their self-perceptions as they are to be frustrated by faltering and wavering understandings of their environments.  We (that is) are as unable to carry around conceptions of ourselves and our environments as we would be unable to carry our own individual weights and the weight of all Creation.  That is the only symmetry in our understandings: the realization that we are as unable to comprehend ourselves as we are to comprehend our surroundings.

And so we are led to conclude that the person who is the dispassionate driver of himself or herself (or the morally-laudable, philosophically-rational driver of the same “self” though it quiver at times with emotion) is a myth.  The “self” is a much a living thing as the body into which it imperceptibly disappears, and the thoughts and conceits of the self falter at the extremities of intellectual exertion even as the self will falter at the extremities of physical exertion.  This is the state of the human being, and a fair assessment of that state will inform our understanding of Jesus as God experiencing the personhood of a human being.  A conceptualized Jesus who rode around in the body of a first-century Levantine would be a moral grotesque—a godling play-acting in the husk of a man.

Jesus, when not exerting divinity, was the divine experiencing humanity.  When his mortal body faltered, it faltered.  When his mortal mind was burdened—and in the horrifying instance violently beset—with the human-intellect-defying question of God’s justice, he cried out, “Why have you forsaken me?”  For Jesus—reckoned to have set aside his divinity for this episode—to have understood as a man the totality of what was happening to him, would have been as unnatural for him as it would have been for him to be able to hang there and suffer as a man until the crack of doom.

Jesus’ divinity, in the agonies of his death, was not represented by his “understanding” of what was happening to him, but rather by his unrequited yet unceasing reaching-out to God—“Why?” he cried out.  Jesus could not fail to embrace God, even from the experiential distance of the Cross.  And this, in the finite scale of our own existences, is what is demanded from us as well.

We, on the other hand, prefer our neat notions of symmetry, of a nearly-equal battle between good and evil that is decided for us by the sovereign grace of a God who we can think of in terms of a familiarity, and who bought for us a neat supplanting of evil by good, thanks to Jesus.  Jesus will not allow us such a simplistic scenario, and in the light of moral scrutiny it is apparent that such a scenario would be illegitimate.  We are not in this world engaged in a self/other conflict with elements of evil, whilst permitted to anticipate an eternity with a magnified, omnipotent figuration of ourselves called God.  Rather, we are called to minister to the suffering of a larger self than us (a “self” in which we see Jesus) and to combat evil in a Creation we share with fallen creatures in which we must see our fallen selves.

The great Other in this scenario is God.  This must be so.  A God who is limited is not God.  A God who is unlimited shares nothing with us.  A God who exists in a framework of our conceptions is not God.  A God who defies all of our conceptions shares nothing with us.  If we are to confront the mystery of our relationship with God, then let it be done in this basic sense, and let it be done—as I have described before—in terms of Adam’s initial forsaking of the Great Other who created him.  It is this seemingly hopeless fracture that Jesus was sent to mend.

The Perfect Other

I ended my last post with:

“We are not creatures of thought saddled with the infirmities of bodily imperfection.  We are creatures who define our personal “we’s” as our consciousnesses, even as those consciousness-selves are but dependent and mutable components of our entireties—known but to God.”  I must attempt to explore the possibilities that rise into view when we are willing to consider that we do not really know where our edges are.

“Roused, Readied, Reaped” is all about viewpoints—or perhaps more accurately, about the limitations of viewpoints available to us in our finite creaturely experiences.  Or is it that we choose such limitations?  Are we really limited in our available viewpoints, or is it actually that the distractions and enticements of our creaturely experience draw us into arbitrarily confined notions of our viewpoints?

Or to put it another way: We have notions of ourselves, and in our grander moments we have notions of ourselves in communion with other beings, including—it is to be hoped—Jesus.  We also have notions of ourselves in larger settings and environments—The Universe, nature, time, place, community, any number of conceived identities—and our conceptions of ourselves therein are shaded by notions of ourselves possessing a greater or lesser share of belonging, either in settings and environments to which we aspire, or those we intend to avoid.  We define our experiences on a scale of belonging, belonging to ourselves and to larger entities, and considering that we do not belong to others.

That to which we do not belong we consider the “other.”  I gather I have even heard this phenomenon described as “othering,” and as I understand it, this use of a description is meant as part of a conscientious desire to question and possibly decrease the elements of alienation in our outlooks.

What I have described above is, I believe, pertinent to our lives—both individually and communally—but I am left to wonder if the notions we possess of things that we collect to ourselves, and of things that we understand as “others,” are applicable after all to notions of the divine.  What really are we willing to confront in the realm of our relationship to God?

Initially, one thing we must confront is the idea that there are other planes than our earthly experiences, and that our descriptors—rooted in our earthly experiences—are presumably lacking in some regards.  “Plane,” after all, is manifestly a sophomoric—though understandable—descriptor.  It is ironic that we would use one of the most basic elements of our understanding of creaturely geometry to attempt to evoke phenomena-realms that we imagine we can scarcely grasp at.

And it is important to note that there is a two-edged character to the understanding that the realm—or perhaps a terrain of multiple and overlapping realms—of the divine or of the supernatural is beyond our firm grasp: Such realms need not, virtually by definition, involve us being “grasped” by circumstances in the same way we see ourselves circumscribed by our bodies on this plane.

If there is a supernatural realm, or perhaps more importantly if there is a moral realm in which God’s sovereignty is more expressed than in our own, then it is entirely possible that our citizenship therein is pervasive—a rather sobering thought.  Certainly, Jesus does not think much of people citing the self/other distinction as being of import in matters of morals.  We are neighbors of all, we are kin of all, we are—if the gospels’ challenges of Abrahamic and other descent are taken to heart—ancestors of all and descendants of all.  Or perhaps it would be simpler to say that time and place mean nothing to what is right and wrong.

If time and place are meaningless—that is to say, if time and place simply do not necessarily “compute” in the realm of the divine—then it must be understood (if indeed we can “understand” it) that what is in play here is not some entertainment of science fiction that has us transported here or there or now or then.  What is in play is the dynamic of a realm in which we are always and everywhere.  This is a realm, for example, in which to claim ancestry from someone is to claim a similar origin and a shared effect—at least to some significant degree—such that the claimant shares an approximate locus with the ancestor and shares as well in the ever-diffusing and infinitely-complex effects of the forebear’s life.

When certain of the Jews told Jesus that they claimed descent from ancestors who had persecuted the prophets, and then claimed as well that they would have forborne from that persecution, they were thinking as the world thinks.  The world operates—or at least rationalizes—on self/other basis.  We will claim this, and we will disown that.  In the moral realm that Jesus describes, we all own everything.  For better or for worse, we partake of the evil and the good, and we shun the evil and the good.  If we emphasize some element of our ancestry, we do just that—we emphasize.  We can shift—or perhaps it might be more fitting to say that we can squirm about—within this larger moral realm, but we cannot “other” elements of that realm in any distinctive manner.

This is why the teachings of Jesus are a perpetual thumb in the eye of the “total depravity” and “basic goodness” camps—epitomized most explicitly in his assertion that we “who are evil” know how to give good things to our children.  The theologians do not get to have their neat bases for analysis, any more than all of us get to have neat bases for our lives.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the manifest difficulty of understanding our relationship to the evils of this world as a self/other dynamic.  Evil is what we attend to in its lesser degrees in our neighbors only after we have recognized it in its greater degrees in ourselves—the business of eyes and splinters and beams.

And, if it is true as I have maintained, that our viewpoints in any supernatural realm can be based anywhere and can come from any time (which is different from me saying that we display any skill in adopting those viewpoints) then the self/other mode of analysis must break down.  We do not need to collect to ourselves righteousness, and to shun others as evil, and to consider their evil deeds as “other-ly” (though such could in earthly terms be described as the effect.)  What we need to do is change what we consider to be the “other.”

What we need to do is change our idea of “other”-ness.  We are not God, and God is not us.  God made Adam, and Adam was not God.  We can talk all we want about how Adam was made in the image of God (and then some linguist, as I understand it, will come along and claim that “imaging” was maintaining in existence, not creating in similarity, but . . . whatever), yet the important point was that Adam was not satisfied—at least to a degree—until Eve was made in Adam’s image (“bone of my bones”.)  Adam rejected the perfect, benign “Other”—God—and clung to a facsimile of himself.  There is nothing wrong with Otherness.  In fact, there is really only one Other to us, and that is God.

All else that exists, all else but the totality and persons and potential manifestations of God, is to some extent evil, and is to some extent ours.  All that is evil is “self” to us, and it is the horror of millennia that religions have ever forgotten or neglected this.