Our Steps Slip Away

There is a conceit embedded in the fact of Jesus' teachings having been taken up by the Western World, that bastion of self-professed logical thinking.  Logical thinking is pregnant with the premise that proper thought is step-wise and defensible at every such step, such that any postulate of logic is premised ostensibly on the simple and the unquestionable.  This contention is attended, of course, by the irony of the necessary insistence that "life"--that into which we are thrown in the mid-stream tumble of the infant's burgeoning consciousness--is analyzable in terms of pristine starting-points.

This is the realm of the philosophy of the Hellenic-enchanted Paul, not the realm of Jesus.  If the teachings of Jesus are ever "simple"--such as our ever-overburdened minds typically desire--they are simple in that they lay out the predicament of human life in straightforward expressions of bewilderment that would follow "logically" from honest assessment of the primordial confusion-state of finite creatures (such confusion being only compounded by the overarching prospect of humanity's position before the ineffable God.)  The "logic" of Jesus is the drawing-up of our scooped-together and shakily-held conceits into manifestly imperfect self-awarenesses who struggle forward with the simplicity intrinsic to our plodding through steps--and through simplistic dimensions known roughly by us--even as we are unsettlingly aware that infinities of unappreciated considerations have escaped us.

And then there are the teachings of Paul, with their assiduously-enshrined premises of certainty.  So will Paul in Romans tell us that--independent of this or that version of assiduously-transported "gospel"--"that which may be known of God is manifest to them" (that is, to the distant heathen.)  And thus, according to Paul--who wields the clumsy cudgel of maintaining that "that which may be known of God" is known by natural expression through Creation--every ascertainable quality of God with its logically-derivable duties of the believer has ever been known, making the dissemination of the Gospel superfluous, and the imperfections of the evangelists sources merely of potential error and confusion.

Jesus brings the simplicity of straightforwardly and repeatedly describing the confusion-state of our predicament before our Creator.  Even before Jesus, and especially in the regions distant to any message or even echo of the Bible or Bible-adjacent philosophies, our common human experience tells us that our existence is beyond our grasp--we can never receive too many reminders of our unsettled state.  And we as a species have never suffered any lack of "simple and straightforward" (and presumptuous and poisonous) pontifications about ultimate reality and our place in it--whether these pontifications arrive with animal-headed statues and temple prostitutes, or arrive with ancient-Greek-logic-spouting missionaries espousing this or that version of the Cause of Christ.

And, of course, Paul's insistence on basing an expression of Jesus' teachings upon Western logic-loving postulations about what "may be known of God" (rather than upon a more humanly-basic appreciation of the infinity of what may not be known of God) betrays Paul in the end.  In that very Book of Romans Paul is driven, as if by the very torturous "goads" of his internalized experiences, to spit out, "To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life.  But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath."  It has perhaps been fortunate for "faith alone" Protestantism, that the preceding King James quotation (to modern ears) can only with hovering hesitation be parsed out in its true implications--to do well it to gain eternal life, to "obey unrighteousness" is to gain the horrible alternative to eternal life.  In Paul's much-celebrated practice of "simple logic," the above quote must stand alone both in its sufficiency, and in its inescapable implications.

And so Paul's ministry is thrice-bedeviled by his enthrallment with the progressions of logic from pristine (and unreal) postulates, rather than from the messy and organic experience-lives that Jesus ratifies in his listeners.  "Faith-alone" Protestantism, which finds (more or less) substantial support elsewhere in Paul's writings, is devastated when his simple references to acts deserving damnation are confronted roundly.  Jesus' ministry itself, once digested through the maw of Paul's conjured thought-creature of disembodied logic, is rendered lifeless.  And lastly Paul's artifices of logic show themselves to be renderings of his own experiences, rather than representations of what a fair observer might believe portray the comprehensive compass of God's eye.

Thus Paul reels off a litany of sinful humanity's misdeeds, "Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful."  "Full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity?"  In a world of rape, murder, torture, abuse, and the slaughter of conquest, who brackets murder with "envy" and "debate"?  One might almost detect in Paul a frantic and implacable urge to measure his history of sending innocents off to be killed as merely a prior overblown enthusiasm with theological wrangling.  Indeed, it is amazing how many of the listed misdeeds above can represent irritants to self-righteous and self-centered (to say nothing of self-interested) participants in debate.  These listed irritants, along with more than a few very general references ("without understanding," "without natural affection," and the like) come across as more representative of Paul's dismay at the louts with which he had to argue, than of God's observations in Scripture of humanity's depravity.

And there is yet more to consider.  These complaints from Paul are preceded in his Romans with the infamous imprecations, ". . . God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly . . ."  This is not supposed to be an Acts-type story of Paul stumbling into some real-life milieu in which he was confronted by displays of what he would be bound to consider "unseemly"--this is supposed to be an inspiration-prompted condemnation of how humanity really is.  How much might the lot of history have been lightened if the Holy Bible, armed with the voice of Paul, had called out sexual misdeeds as might the voice of God?  How many children might have been spared, or others unable to give consent, or yet others--slaves, and oppressed persons and the poor, and disempowered spouses?

Yet what we have, in Paul's celebrated dissection of the morals of a humanity that has disregarded its Maker, not a God's-eye revulsion with the panoply of our evils, but precisely what we would expect from a Paul disgusted--and I say not that he had no reasons to be disgusted--but a Paul disgusted with the persons and classes with which he clashed--with people who had worked out for themselves their own internally-defensible belief systems, and who had fashioned for themselves justifications of whatever they came to believe themselves entitled to lay their hands to.  People--or at least many of them--who had nice, simple, defensible-on-their-own-terms logical schemes likely as impressive as those of Paul.

Next we must compare those schemes with the utterly different approach of Jesus--the approach in which it is understood that logic itself is a product of an insubstantial scheme--the approach wherein our steps slip away beneath us even as our premises disappear behind us.

Who Strives Without Shame

There is always, with us, the element of imperfection, and there has always been.  Accordingly, if "meaning" is taken to be a representation of reality, then both meaning and reality escape us, and have always done so.

If meaning is of an extent of substance, then it is truthful to that extent.  If a contention of truth is of substance, then it corresponds to reality to that extent.  This final consummation of the thought-train is valueless--it is of no moral import that something is true, for no element of consideration would exist between something being in fact and that same thing being appreciated as factual by some postulated observer.

Only the consideration of some observer, some appreciator, as being imperfect makes the notions of truth or meaning of moral import, since the qualities of morality or immorality hinge upon the relative attentions or efforts of the observer-appreciator.  We always gather our attentions too late, and we always flag in the application of our efforts, and we have always done so as a species--or else we have possessed some one or another quality of being "like us" (the divine majesty overlooking Creation) that makes mock of the idea of what it is to be a created thing distinct from the Maker.

We can say that we do something "naturally" or without artifice, but that is intrinsically untrue.  An athlete striving to complete some task will always be a split-second behind any stimulus of the developing task, and an athlete attempting to devote full efforts will always fall some perhaps immeasurable degree short of that determination--to say nothing of being able to sustain a full measure of that determination.  A pristine Adam leaping automatically or guilelessly to do the will of his Father would put us to shame by comparison, but we would shame ourselves exponentially if we proclaimed in false modesty that such an imagined paragon of creaturely virtue makes us look bad by comparison, if in that very exclamation we were assigning to our forebear not the relative godliness of a near-perfect state, but rather an untrammeled stake in godhood itself.

Adam was never perfect, and he never grasped his existence perfectly.  Adam felt (to use the two common concepts abroad in the Western World conceit-trap into which the Genesis-anchored belief skein subsided so many irretrievable centuries ago) shame and guilt.  We usually say "guilt and shame," and the apparent logical primacy we accord to "being guilty" of something before "feeling shame" for it is perhaps reflected in that word-order preference, but we have no warrant for such an assumption about human existence overall.  As I have written, humanity's decline from the easily-said "innocence" of newborn "little ones" (a notion of limited utility, since we cannot know when that innocent state ends) is a decline best understood in terms of shame-inducing reproof to the child before there can be any guilt-inducing explanation offered the child.

So also goes the story of the first couple, whose described guilt of the fruit-eating trespass (an awkwardly step-wise progression to a conventionally-described moment of instantaneous sinfulness) is preceded by the assertion either that in their nakedness before each other they felt no shame, or that they were not shamed.  The distinction between the two shame-conceits is immaterial, since--as with the conceptualized child--any time-regression analysis leads to feeling ashamed because of having done something shameful, while yet this must have been preceded by some earlier episode of felt shame, presumably precipitated by some lesser (and less agency-filled) prior episode of doing something shameful, and on backwards into the unintelligible.

And I have not forgotten that I said that Adam and Eve are described either as having felt no shame, or as not having been shamed--when the King James insistence is on saying that Adam and Eve were not "ashamed."  Here we are confronted, to state it in simplest terms, with the intrinsic interplay of sublime quality and ridiculousness that must attend any creation-story.  We will always think of the beginning of our world as something coming from nothing, no matter how any story of the start of our world might be attended by contrary echoes.  "In the beginning" starts Genesis, and then the narration does not start from the beginning.  Even the inescapable packaging of a narrative into words can break up its flow, and obscure its indecipherable (to us) gradations.

If sin (and therefore, with sin, the damnable implications of guilt) is the fulcrum of humanity's discomfiture in the Genesis account, why mention "shame" at all?  What is it to the narrative, to describe a lack of shame to a man being naked before his wife (or, by less definitive extension, before a God who had not proscribed nakedness), when nakedness was not a moral failing?  What is it to the narrative, to describe a lack of shame in a sinless person, if such simply-described sinlessness is present?

Standing "sinless" and naked in the Garden in the morning of that fateful day was a woman who could carry on a conversation with a snake, a conversation in which she failed shamefully to stop her ears and flee when first hearing "Ye shall not surely die."  Standing "sinful" and naked in the Garden in the evening of that fateful day was a man whose first response to his God's accusation was to place implicit blame on Eve (and, by extension, on God himself) by describing her as "the woman whom thou gavest to be with me."  Are we to imagine an Adam in all those blessed preceding days as being perfectly disposed to turn his gaze from Eve in an instant of divinely-immeasurable brevity, when beckoned by his Maker?

If Adam and Eve were never shamed or made to feel shame in their "sinless" state, then they were preserved so by an artifice of God, an artifice yet to be elucidated by the preachers.  Adam and Eve, before the Fall, are held by the denominations to have been successful in resisting temptation.  If they wrestled with a temptation for any experienceable instant, then either they threw themselves against their own latent though unprevailing shameful tendencies, or they were as godlings, as alien to us as any pagan idol, and as unimaginable to us as any blessed angel.

As I said above, only the consideration of some observer, some appreciator, as being imperfect makes the notions of truth or meaning of moral import, since the qualities of morality or immorality hinge upon the relative attentions or efforts of the observer-appreciator.  Next I will attempt to show how a proper understanding of morality must entail an organic interplay between shame and guilt.

Each Face of the Inversion

After Jesus speaks to the "Daughters of Jerusalem" in Luke 23, he is led along with the two "malefactors" to Calvary and crucified.  It is at this point that Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  It is possible to contend that Jesus means this "forgive them" statement as applicable only to the soldiers under orders (though the text is quick to include the presence of "the people" and the "rulers," with their loud derision of Jesus), although the grim overall theme of the Roman soldiers in the Gospels shows them willing to embellish their mere task of crucifixion with elaborate and unnecessary cruelty.  Moreover, this very chapter of Luke has the centurion's concluding admission about Jesus ("Certainly this was a righteous man") to be taken along with the statement that the centurion "glorified God."  Certainly, if the "forgive them" utterance of Jesus was meant exclusively about the soldiers, it was within the means of the Lukan Gospel to explain that limited application as well.

There is an important underlying theme included in, and bracketed by, the space between "forgive them, for they know not what they do" and "Certainly this was a righteous man."  This is the theme of the crucial difference between guilt and shame, a difference not merely of definition, but of efficacy in determining the fate of us all--which is where this blog is going.  The difference between guilt and shame is the difference between proper and improper understanding of the plight of humanity since the instant of Creation.  Choose a "guilt" notion, and the story of existence goes one way.  Choose a "shame" notion, and the story goes another way.  It would be tempting to say that those two "ways" are opposites, but that directional duality would scarcely be the equal of the import of the distinction.

The distinction between guilt and shame is a distinction of totalities of moral existence.  It would seem unquestionable that guilt and shame must be attendant upon one another, but that notion of their closeness exists only because--in contravention of the ostensible focus of religion upon the troubled relationship of the human to the divine--religion tends instead to conjure entire universes of irrelevancies.  There is the heart that cries out in guilt, and there is the heart that cries out in shame--and there is a gigantic, warped world that cries out in neither, or--worse yet--pronounces loudly upon any number of religious ideas that are both unnecessary and harmful.  I will leave to the reader, or at least to the further development of this blog, to discern whether it is an emphasis on "guilt" that leads to more deleterious acts on the part of humanity, or an emphasis on "shame."

More important than discrete deleterious acts (or, worse yet, rationalization-frameworks institutionalizing such acts) is the estrangement of humanity in our most basic and simple aspects from the potential immediacy of the Creator.  We can reach out to God, but we can reach out in guilt, or we can reach out in shame--and in either event we must consider such attempted contacts as all-encompassing.  All else of our existence must fall away.  We must give up our lives, but when we reach out in guilt, we carry with ourselves our self-ratified appreciations--grim though they be--of the nature and severity of our transgressions.  When we reach out in shame, we drop all else but shame.

Guilt and shame are oppositional inversions--one against the other--in our existences, and the experience-realm of each face of the inversion is an experience-realm of totality.  The inversion is the totality.

To Hide Us Too Late

I am pursuing still my ambition to work through the Bible according to the mode of interpretation I think most apt.  It has not gone well--or at least smoothly--before.

Since my last post dealt with the notion that death-and-fruition is the proper overall theme of earthly existence, I will take the opportunity to apply this theme to a unique, particular part of Scripture that it brings to mind--and from there I will begin again.

In Luke 23, Jesus is followed on the Way of the Cross not merely by the cross-bar carrying Simon of Cyrene, but also by a crowd within which is mentioned particularly women lamenting and weeping over Jesus.  Jesus then confronts the women with this fantastic passage,

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.  For behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.  Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.  For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?

Notably, the image of Jesus-incarnate suffering beyond human imagination is absent.  Absent also, of course, is any notion of Jesus offering the women "comfort."  I contend that the idea of Jesus as the divine Son of God suffering for his Creation is implicit in Jesus' invocation of the overarching green-to-dry imagery he presents--and against this backdrop is to be seen his representation to the women of how the fate of humanity is to be worked out.

The course of any person's life is played out against the twinned elements of fruition and death.  Little, of course, do any of us really produce in terms of fruit, but this lack of production (to say nothing of outright bearing evil fruit) is to be ascribed to us in the end as revealing shame.  We usually think of our lacks and of our proclivities for evil acts as "sinful," and of course that is true.  What is not true is humanity's fixation on the notion of "guilt"--the burden of unabsolved sin--as that which marks our estrangement from God.

God's ceaseless mercy--for which we return to him the easily-spoken adjective "ever-merciful"--is never in doubt.  Within a few ensuing sentences in Luke, Jesus is going to offer the unqualified intercession, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  This was no small statement, considering the plenitude of mentionings in the Gospels of various ways in which the most informed and therefore culpable of powerful persons knew--at least as far as the mere prospect of condemning the innocent goes--exactly what they were doing.

Between the immediacy of the women's horror and grief for Jesus' sufferings, and the backdrop of a withering and dying Creation, is the arena of the challenge with which Jesus confronts the women.  All of us exist in the unceasing procession of Creation withering and dying--all of us must understand our lives as devolving, less-and-less-living resolutions of happenings that will pass away from us.  The fruition of child-bearing (to focus here on Jesus' words in this passage) will drop away from women, as will any possession they know of children as parts of themselves.  We must choose either to understand Jesus' words to them as unspeakably cruel, or to understand those "Daughters of Jerusalem" as unimaginably privileged figures so as to represent to humanity its communal fate.

The sorrowful imagery of the blessedness-of-barrenness is echoed in Matthew 24, in which a succession of future cataclysms is described by Jesus as especially hard on the pregnant or nursing.  That apocalyptic section of Matthew presents a particular problem for commentators who must contend that it begins and ends with the Time of the End and is parted unaccountably in the middle with supposed particular references to the first-century fall of Jerusalem, but we need not countenance such silliness.  

The "Woe unto them that are with child" and "Blessed are the barren" imageries refer, as I mentioned above, to the communal fate of humanity.  We are all to know the looming reality of death, and we are all to know the shrinking of every conceit we have about the fruitfulness of our lives.  Our lives will end with little enough to show for them, and we can expect very dismal showings of how little.  We can expect concomitant shame, and unfortunately--and no thanks to Christianity--we can expect our fixation on sin and guilt to be revealed to us as a psychological indulgence, as a playing-about in the face of our true responsibilities, a playing-about for which we ought to be ashamed.  We all are to know this, that our sins and guilt can be (or we can plead for them to be) forgiven, but our shame will abide.  Our shame is ours forever.

We go about our lives as our urges and our conceits bid us, for that riding-upon and being ridden by our states as elements of Creation are what we know from moment to moment.  If our true selves--or, rather, those contracted loci of truth-seeking that we would like to present to God as ourselves--concentrate themselves for any fleeting moments, they (that is, we) would do well to concentrate upon our shame.  We will say "Hills, cover us" either to hide us in our shame, or to hide us too late from God's wrath.

In the Throes of Our Demise

There is a certain silliness that the Western World is exposed to every year.  Clergy will celebrate the coming of spring with signs that say some version of "The flowers are blooming.  The birds are singing.  Spring is here.  God did it again."  One would hope, of course, that children attending such church schools, or passing by to attend others, would learn that the death and decay theme of the end of the preceding year was part and parcel of the cycle of the seasons.  One would hope, additionally, that such children would be taught that humanity's inescapable assessment--dictated by the realities of thermodynamics--is that death will win out in the end.  Such an end, of course (and its understanding of earthly death being asymmetrically superior to earthly life) is not entirely alien to most of those clergy, after all.

These notions present us, however, with other--more ponderous--considerations.  Christianity has wrestled through the ages with Jesus' demand that his followers give up their lives in order to attain eternal life.  The impact of this demand is, of course, contingent upon the prevailing idea of "life," and of how it relates to the forsaking thereof.  How are we to know what it is like to live while having given up life, for surely that is the type of phraseology that comes closest to the immediacy of Jesus' demand?

There might be innumerable approaches to the preceding question, but inescapably this observation is suspended (if we are to be honestly introspective) above the more fundamental problem of the definition of life itself.  Is it really "life" that Jesus requires us to abandon, or is it rather our conceit that we are "alive" in a definitive sense within the scope of God's sovereignty?  We are, after all, the "dead while living" offspring of the "dead while living" post-Eden Adam and Eve.  Is it not our attachments to our conceits of "life" (and our concomitant attachments to things we think our lives entail) that Jesus asks us to abandon?

We cannot proceed upon this score without stating a fundamental reality evident in Scripture.  Our existence does not consist, either in whole or in part, on a duality of life and death.  Ours is not a universe of life and death.  Our universe was born in the life-effulgence of Jesus as the Creator and the medium of Creation--and this entails the unimaginable consideration of Jesus' creative participation being, in part, the Sufferer of every searing permutation of every action-reaction cataclysm, as well as being the Sufferer of every subset-element of the universe's contortions that we can relate to creaturely pain.  To entertain the possibility of the preceding sentence, and--once having considered it--to discard it, would seem to me to be the height of impiety.

I have thought it reasonable--or at least I have written in my flaccid, passing conceits--that the "light" of original Creation might have emitted from water-submerged volcanic activity.  Or are there other, equally silly, "rational" explanations of the first words of Genesis?  What cannot be escaped, however, is the implication that a "formless and void" Earth is an unimaginable potentiality.  As I have also written before, the preface to John says--in an incredible potency--that the "life" of Jesus was the "light" of humanity, when the prating of the commentators hews almost exclusively to the notion that the "light" of Jesus' teaching gives "life" to human beings.  Did not Jesus impart life to the universe through its spectrum of potentialities, and did not Jesus experience the throes of suffering and death in each particle's resolution to some depleted energy state?

More particularly for our purposes, is it not really the case that the original life of the universe is tending toward its inevitable death, while yet we allow ourselves to be distracted by the fancied "cycles" of life and death, growth and decay?  Jesus, after all, assailed his followers with the challenge of seeing the world not as "four months and then the harvest," but as being, rather, "white" unto that very harvest.  And this leads us to where our train of thought must arrive--the universe is not an arena of life and death, but is rather an arena of fruition and death.  Fruition and death are the twin (though hardly equal or compatible) emanations of the life-impetus of Creation.

The world is autumn more and more.  The world is--by stages and by haltings and by distracting pulses of momentary growth--tending toward the harvest-paradigm of piling and twisting of dry and spent limbs bearing such fruit as presents itself.  The world is fruit nested in death, and the world is the result of the only life it has ever really known, the life of Jesus.

The bones of the ever-dying Earth are the rocks that coalesced from the churning, energy-laden "void," and the death embedded in those bones pre-dates and bears as only a small fraction that which the paleontologist scrapes up and calls "fossil."  The dry land emerging from the waters was dying and death-laden from the first, decaying into that substrate from which arose the creatures.  In our daily experiences, and in those of our predecessor generations, the cleansing of water and the refreshing of wind--each of those media being "life-giving" only insofar as they carry or are infused into the grimy reality of eventually-degrading biochemical reactions--are the abiding biblical metaphors of "life," a supreme though inescapable irony.

We must understand "life" not as something that happens or that can be properly possessed, but rather as something that surges still through all of Creation, something that presses upon us and that imbues us with the sensations and felt potentialities that give us at once the opportunity to do good things, and at the same time the unfortunate proclivity to attempt to enfold and thereby possess such surging energy, as though we were ourselves properly living things.  We are not living things--we are dying things exuding in the throes of our demise droplet-like, fragile, meagre fruit.

To Which We Lower Ourselves

On 8/20/2026 I wrote,

"No degree of rebellion or impiety or whatever can be possibly rendered into a necessary conceptuality of smallness really imaginable by humans, on the one hand, and really representative of truth on the other hand.  What we see in the story of the Fall, and in the story of Adam's misalignment with his Creator beforehand, is God's placement of form upon a pre-function, ineffable state--the state of humanity's possible alienation from God that is a state receding backwards in time to the inconceivable . . . . This regression has no end-point we can understand, for alienation from God has no smallness that can be ever reached or postulated . . . . The crucial nature of our sinfulness, and the pervasiveness of our sin-nature, ought to impose upon us the realization that our affinity for evil is not to be understood as a phenomenon, but as a state--and that state is as simple and as undeniable as the fact that We Are Not God.  We are not God--and all else is sequelae.  The story of those sequelae is understood by us as the expression of phenomena, but every phenomenon that we believe we can understand about God is something we always understand too late."

"State," of course, is a poor substitute for some type of word that might describe a condition that exists--in this case, as our conceptualizations "work backwards"--as a condition understood as disappearing into the infinite while yet we must attach to "existence" that time-and-place conceit-mode that entraps us.  We were created as Not God--and all else is sequelae.  And all such sequelae spill forth from still prior states, impossible for us to pursue to the source.

We were created as God-not-God.  In our conceit-frameworks, we are impossibilities fashioned by The Impossible.  The Genesis use of the ancient term we translate as "image" cannot be subdued and dissected by us so that the latent-or-more-so implications of us either as "imaged" by God or as "images" of God can be established.  That we would be "like" God is ridiculous, and that we would be "unlike" anything referenced originally to God is ridiculous.

The anger, for example, of God is real--but we must reference it to the "workings-out" of actions of God that we can never work out.  The God who "discovers" sinfulness on the earth is not like some apoplectic householder who--having thought to have dispensed orders and responsibilities in accordance with some free-floating, third-party-authored prescription of labor-management relations--is outraged to discover afresh miscreance among his underlings.  No, the God who comes down to Earth to discover the carryings-on at Babel is a God related to us in a literary convention--the story is not "true," rather it is real in that it is addressed to us in accordance with our real limitations at understanding that which in regard to God is true.

We are God-not-God.  We were created like God with the propensity to be not so--what followed was a story without plot or timeline or setting, if only because the moment-state of us becoming "not so" was a moment of unimaginably infinitesimal dimension.  The only story was us created as God-not-God, the story of us created in the image of God.  The Bible describes us as created by and through Jesus--the only end of the story can be Creation vanquished in all its injustices by Jesus and incarnated in all its sufferings by Jesus.  It is the grinding duty of every follower of Jesus to tread toward the consummation of that unplottable story, even as every inclination of humanity is to grasp toward the times and places and reasonings-out of a human-pronounced "world" that we cherish even in its manifold faults--that we cherish even as Adam cherished his.  As the story of humanity goes, we and Adam have God at hand, and we and Adam will (have we but time and means) put our hands to anything else.

If in our first moments of existence, or if in any other moments, we would do what Jesus asks of us, we would indeed exhibit the perfection that Jesus requires of us--even as our Heavenly Father is perfect.  Before we were in a state of sinfulness, we were in a sinless state in accordance with our being created in the image of God.  That this blessed state passed in an immeasurably small moment, and occurred across immeasurably small spaces, is merely to restate the very initial conundrum--that we are impossibilities created by The Impossible.  All else, in connection with our trying to understand our predicament, is consummate silliness.

In Christianity, the great starting-point of this silliness is the singular fascination with The Fall.  No more sublime comedy exists in literature than the story of the talking snake, and no story casts abroad with more vigor the farcical nature of its ironic point.  The man and his arranged bride have been fretting and tromping about on the terrain of their burgeoning appetites for days or decades or millennia beyond counting, and sooner or later (like all of us, lest anyone should boast) they were going to eat of the Forbidden Fruit.  Humanity's access to the omnipresent divine has never been enough for humanity, and to join conventional Christianity in pronouncing humanity irredeemably sinful, we cannot but conclude that every attachment to existence serves to sunder a human being's relationship not merely with God, but also with that human being's birthright as being like God--like God, that is, until the first impulse or sensation of "existence" intrudes.

We were created to be like God.  When we exist we are not like God.  One would almost think that we would have to give up our very existences to be saved.  Actually, it is inescapable that we have to give up our very existences to be saved--but we are not going to do that, even though in his insistence that we must "give up our lives," Jesus requires that very thing.  No, instead we are going to make metaphorical and ceremonial and humility-gilded expressions of being subsumed into the crucified person of Christ.  The process of being "subsumed" is proper, but inevitably every element of humanly-lived "process" attaches us to the existence that surrounds us.

I offer no original prescription for this--I am scarcely able to process the diagnosis, and then only because Jesus provides it.  The problem is not that we sin in our existences, but rather that we attach sinfulness to failures of operation within perceived "good" or at least "neutral" existences.  No, the very fact that we exist is what separates us from God.  Neither the enticements nor the goods of existence are our essential banes--that role is reserved for existence itself.  That is why Jesus requires the perfection that we cannot claim individually to have always lacked--for we were created in the "image of God," and we debase both ourselves and God to try to figure out--or delimit--the implications of that phrase.  We will never live up to the image of God, but neither will we understand the nature and extent of our lack if we do not reckon that the totality of our lived existences stands between us and our Maker.

Neither our duties, nor even our understanding of our duties, stand between us and what Jesus requires of us--only us as distracted by the temptations of existence to which we lower ourselves.  Jesus, after all, does not say that our lack of faith prevents us from being able to ask God to move mountains--our lack of faith prevents us from being able to order mountains about ourselves.  We should be able to do such things--we were made in the image of God.

And yet for us we know only the image of God through our existence-riddled selves.  Sundered from our intended selves--ourselves basking in the "this day you will be with me in Paradise" availability of God in every circumstance--we can scarcely wend our way through an onrushing procession of false images, false images presented to us and created by us.  In our existence, we are the image of God, our temptations are the image of God, our Tempter is the image of God.

Our comfort is in the Jesus who wept, and who cried out to his God.  There is no comfort else.

In This Supplanting

There is a certain jibe against conventional Christianity that--one would hope--is in most applications quite unfair.  This is the objection to Christian morality to the effect that the name "morality" is scarcely deserved by a system of rules that serves merely as an exchange of behaviors against future rewards (or punishments--though it is the "reward" aspect that receives the most scorn.)

How is it truly "moral," one might say, to forego pleasures in this finite life in order to gain (presumably greater) pleasures in a future, infinite life?  Of course, two millennia of Christian moral thought has been anything but neglectful on this point.  It is the transformation of the person, the realignment of the person so as to do the will of God for its own sake, that is held to be the core of Christian moral striving.

Yet no one will doubt that the purported transactional nature of Christian morality is seen in frequent cases to float to the surface of many of the morasses of human thought and behavior that seep throughout our experience-realms, religion included.  Often we do what we are "supposed" to do, yet it cannot be denied that nearly as often it is obvious that we are not feeling particularly attached to the possible elevated inspirations of our actions.  And then again, do we not possibly place ourselves in "daily grinds" of ethical frameworks that obviously we find taxing, while yet it might be imagined that original selfless motivations have led us to undertaken such larger enterprises?

And so, of course, such questions can wend on and on.  There are, to us humans, no really clean scenarios of moral behavior.  Largely, it is left to us to try to clean up any of these messy situations to the extent we are able--and the attempted removal of the most unnecessary accretions to moral behavior would be at the top of the list.  In terms of Christianity's aspiration to foster the realignment of persons so as to desire the will of God, it would be best that followers of Jesus renounce two of conventional Christianity's oft-cherished conceits--that true religion involves conceptualization of an anticipated afterlife, and that true religion brings relief from shame.

The first score is easiest to address.  The notion of a conceptualizable afterlife is ridiculous.  The broken nature of humanity--a concept rehearsed ceaselessly by Christianity--must be understood first (as I have written almost ceaselessly) as a breaking of communion between Creator and created from the conceptualizable first.  There is no "going back to Eden" or the like--the bliss of Adam and Eve blissing on each other and sharing late afternoon chats with their Maker is not a true conceit of our existence's broken linkage being fixed.  The anticipated place of "going back" to "how it ought to be" is properly an anticipation of communion with the divine that we cannot imagine.

It is for this reason, apparently, that Jesus dismisses out of hand conjectures about who will be married to whom in the afterlife.  Jesus does not declare simply that God by his sovereign will can assign properly marriages in disputed cases (taking humanity back to the realm of "help-meets), nor does Jesus say that humans will be understandably human though no longer having any use for marriage.  No, Jesus throws in even the essentially unassimilable notion that people (or the saved among people, at least) will be "like the angels," whatever that means.  Of all the things that make us human, we cannot even know what--if anything--will persist in the afterlife of our social affinities.

We will die, and we will be confronted with many things that we did not understand, and we will be confronted presumably with many things that we did not understand for no other reason that it did not please us to consider them.  We do not know ourselves, and in our (fascinating, really) predisposition to imagine ourselves willing to be surprised about ourselves after death, we prance through our daily lives with nary a thought for the (undeniable, really) fact that this postulating about our undiscovered selves emanates from our "selves" as we package them for our personal possession each.  It is intrinsically perverse for us to imagine that we will learn merely many things about the consciousnesses that frame our moment-by-moment self-conceptions--while yet we have no warrant to deny that our essential selves might be constellations of memories and forgettings and impulses and whatnot though which our mutable momentary conceits of "I am" are mere wanderers.

We can imagine ourselves saying to Jesus on that dreadful day, "When did we give you drink (or not), comfort (or not)?", but we cannot imagine the divine perception that will scour possible levels and extents of our persons--and rarely (we should presume) to our credit.  To say that we might understand the process of Final Judgment would be as ridiculous as for us to maintain that we can parse out the Story of the Sheep and the Goats.  Would a collection of bereft souls wailing to be spared punishment really call out to the King, "When did 'we' not give you something to eat?"  And would it really be profitable to assign anything more than a diffuse, multi-faceted, generalized warning to a story that--if taken literally--will dissolve itself, since Jesus has made sure the surprised "sheep" and "goats" know the punchline already?

A "diffuse, multi-faceted, generalized warning" would be appropriate for us pitiful humans, especially as we are understood properly to be deserving of that to which I alluded above--shame.  A religion that purports to take away shame, or that--worse still--contends that a proper earthly orientation to the Savior can take away shame, is a religion that accords to itself an understanding of human beings that only God can know.  What we do not know about ourselves ought ever to make us invite the propensity--rare enough as a commodity--for shame.  It is shame that can pervade us, can pervade even the selves that we do not know or only fitfully know, while that manipulatable and socially-bargainable notion of "guilt" can be assuaged by infinite means, even as "guilt" presents itself to us as something bounded and finite--even as we maintain that guilt can be seen in its defined qualities to spread to those defined boundaries of our self-conceptions.

Shame, when lived with, can serve to supplant (even if flaccidly) those self-conceptions we would rather live with.  And in this supplanting of the self is to be found the only joy that Jesus says we can have.  We give up our lives for the joy of giving up our lives for Jesus.  This is the moral equation of salvation--not doing things or forgoing things merely to gain the desired opposite in a bargained afterlife, but rather enjoying faint and partial subsuming of self in the present, in exchange for enjoying inestimable and unimaginable subsuming of self in eternity.