Ashamed as We Ought

Abram married his half-sister.  Abram whored his half-sister out more than once.  Abram defended himself against the accusation of lying--fantastically, considering the circumstances--by maintaining that the wife he had pimped out as his sister was not merely his wife but also his "sister."

Jacob, a grandson of Abram (become Abraham), set himself off to the East, seeking refuge from his brother's wrath among the extended family of Abraham.  Jacob, on his way, declared his intention to accept the Lord of the Universe as his God if this God would look with favor on Jacob's journey.

It is a wonder that Jacob, in his transactional impiety, was not vaporized with a thunderbolt.  It is a wonder that his grandfather was not vaporized with a thunderbolt.  In the larger view, however, there was an episode --revolving around Isaac, who was Abraham's son and Jacob's father--that would seem to be more thunderbolt-worthy still.

This horrific episode curdles and bubbles in the very marrow of the "Judeo-Christian" consciousness--although the episode of which I speak has come down through the ages dressed up in a veritable wedding-gown of preacherly approbation.  In between Abraham's emergence from the East with his wife-sister in tow, and Jacob's twenty-year sojourn in that realm, was a visit by Abraham's most eminent servant to that eastern land of Aram in search of a wife for Isaac.

The logic of that wife-search--instigated by Abraham with seemingly no warrant from God--was for that venerable servant (usually held to be Eliezer of Damascus) to go to Abraham's kin in pursuit of a mate for Isaac.  As though there had not been in-breeding enough.

What is most striking is the fact that, though Abraham cannot bear the thought of Isaac marrying among the Canaanites, there is no warrant to assume that the only alternative source of a bride would be the family-clan in the East.  Abraham (at least when it mattered most, in warfare) was truly a king of kings.  Surely Abraham could have sent far and wide for a suitable wife for Isaac--even as Joseph years later was given a perfectly serviceable wife from among Egypt's priestly caste.

No, instead Abraham insisted on marrying a proto-Hebrew yet again with a close relative--a blood relative.  Abraham's household--in effect, his larger family--consisted presumably of numerous retainers, both capable and trustworthy (and able to sire daughters to Isaac's satisfaction), and the "sires" among Abraham's echelons were all circumcised.  Unavoidably, the insistence of the proto-Hebrew Abraham on a blood-match for Isaac carries the taint of proto-racism.

And so Abraham draws into his Holy Land orbit a daughter of the pagan family of Laban, this daughter (Rebecca) sharing presumably the idol-toting proclivities of her clan--a clan shot through with deviousness, polygamy, strife, and a fixation on worldly gain.  In the course of time, it becomes difficult to say which vaunted patriarch (Abraham or Isaac) is most disgraced by Rebecca's horrid maneuverings in the service of her favored son, Jacob.  In this context the urge-driven, unfavored Esau, with his straightforward though unelevated motivations, seems almost heroic--and we are not deprived later of seeing Esau greet in manly fashion his itinerant, cringing brother Jacob.

These are the sort of scriptural episodes that I will marshal to the notion that shame is the great unplumbed cavern at the center of Christian thought.  It would be difficult to say that definite, definable sin is at the root of any of this (and more difficult to say that we sinful types are in any position to so pronounce), and neither would it make sense to speak of "remorse."  How are we to be remorseful for events three or four thousand years ago?  Yet, as for "shame"--is not the element of shame as lively as ever, regardless of who commits acts, or when, if we are connected at all with larger humanity?  Or if we will connect ourselves to belief systems that insist on dragging themselves endlessly (and with undiminished immediacy) through circumstances that will bring shame to any enlivened conscience?

The "Judeo-Christian" heritage finds such true life as it does in shame.  Shame is what pulls the treasures of faith traditions out of the inevitable dross that coats any humanly-appreciated notions of belief.  Indeed, the very application of any "Judeo-Christian" sensibility entails of necessity the shame of unwarranted assumptions and unmet obligations.  The notion of an unbroken, uncomplicated heritage of belief since Eden?  It would be correctly called "Hebrew-Christian," confining as it does the Jewish contribution to the Old Testament and the ostensible prophecies of the coming Christ.

The notions of the triumphs of God's people, and the preoccupation with the End Times?  Herein it would be proper to speak of "Israeli-Christian."  But as to "Judeo-Christian," understood as the undeniably disjointed corpus of unsparing thought and time-battered considerations confronted by people of conscience?  Such can only be thought through with shame, and lived through with shame.

It is from the seed-beds of shame that we obtain the true values of faith.  The seed-beds are sown with our presumptions thrust at God, and what we reap is a bounty so great that we are--in lesser turn--knocked back with amazement at our undeserved fortune, and--in greater turn--liable to ignore the blessings of God, or to not even realize that we have received them.  This is the story of humanity, and the story is shown to us in the Scriptures in terms of the staggering arrogance with which we make great demands of God, and also in terms of the unaccountable gentleness and accommodation with which God responds.  We can try to be as thankful as we should, but first we must try to be as ashamed as we ought.

Gifts to All Else

I need to find some sort of relevance--if indeed such relevance exists--in my "Shame Appears" approach to the teachings of Jesus.  Just about everything I have written finds it foundation in the original or near-original experiences of humanity, whether the "humanity" in question is the entire species personified in the first man Adam, or whether that "humanity" is the universalized experience-capacity that we all possess--at least in the newborn state, and then (hopefully) later on.

"Roused, Readied, Reaped" is the shell of our experience-lives, lived as they are through countless, overlapping arcs of our callings-forth to the challenges of our existences.  "Aware, Away, Awry" is the marrow of our experience-lives, each pulsing within us as graspings of our circumstances and--inevitably--twistings by us of what we ought to do into what we deem proper to do.

By the phrase "deem proper to do" I mean to draw as closely as I can to what I think is the true lesson about humanity's woeful behaviors, behaviors which--if examined at all--result in a state in which "Shame Appears," and moreover result in the conclusion that shame is the foundation-stone of our perceived alienation from God.  Shame, as I have written, is the precursor to sinfulness, and shame is also the result of sinfulness.

That shame would seem to be properly always the result of sin, rather than ever the precursor to sin, is a misconception (or perhaps I might say, "disorientation") that comes in the Western World in a twin denial, firstly, of the indisputable fact that the infant learns first of having done something wrong (as a prerequisite of learning right from wrong) and experiences therefore shame before guilt, and, secondly, that the priority of shame is implicit in the Eden story, with its description of "knowing good and evil" as a result of shameful behavior preceding sinful behavior--though then as ever it would behoove us limited creatures to conceive of a spectrum of shame leading into sinfulness.

That sinfulness leads to still more shame (or, more ominously, to a state of acquired shamelessness) is a rolling convolution of snowballing burdens upon each person's soul.  This is the moral outworking of each person's tumbling experience-life--as would be expected without surprise for us imperfect creatures.  What is all the more lamentable (and which we see all around us in humanity's jostling and inflexible contentions about "right and wrong") is the fact that our refusal to understand shame as the foundation of our experience-lives is a concomitant refusal to scrape away in simple prudence our conceits about what I foreshadowed above, that is, our conceits about what we can "deem proper to do."

Adam had the God of the universe at hand, and Adam chose instead to put his hand to imposing--in hideous imitation of God--design upon the universe.  This was Adam from the start, and this is us from the start.  The "tree" episode came later, and it occurs over and over for us, as we squirm ever away from falling Eden-like--or Gethsemane-like--in the dust of our creation, and we seek instead to shake off the shame of our original inadequacy and substitute for it our conceits of morality, our conceits for which we will sin ever more vigorously, and ever more shamelessly.

We choose not to understand sin, just as we choose to ignore the genesis of sin in shame.  Adam was given a world to which he might give himself--a world to which he might lay claim thereby in gentleness and self-abnegation.  Jesus taught us the same thing, telling us that more fields and houses and communities and relationships than we could count would fall into our possession merely at the giving-over of our lives.  We need only embrace the shame of our inadequacy before the Creator God.

The sin that exacerbates our alienation from God is the sin of withholding ourselves from the panorama of the God-is-behind-the-miracle-of existence miracle.  Instead the preachers want to tell us that our sin is originally one of pride, or that our sin is rooted most basically in our yielding to the temptations of world, flesh, and devil.  If we remember our shame--the simple and undeniable shame of being less than God--then we can understand sin correctly.  Sin at base is not pride, nor is it weakness before temptation.  Sin at base is us presuming upon the design of Creation, and reckoning therefore that we can hold out our hands to the plumping, seemingly proffered benefits that align with our conceits, while simultaneously we can ignore or swat aside those elements of Creation that we reckon of less concern.  Perhaps needless to say, this "ignoring or swatting aside" is exacerbated by our ample opportunities to say our means are limited, and our attentions are overburdened.

Adam did not rejoice in that he was bone of Eve's bone, or flesh of Eve's flesh.  Adam did not rejoice in what he could give Eve (nor in what companionship--instead of just names--he could give his fellow creatures), Adam just rejoiced in the benevolence at hand, and disregarded shamelessly what benevolence he himself might bestow.  Adam did not rejoice in the fact that all of humanity would be of one flesh.  The first description of human relationships--relationships occasioned by the fact that Adam would be satisfied neither with his God nor with his God's Creation--is presented as the sundering of some bonds in favor of others.  The preachers, in their insipid cant about The Institution of the Covenant of Marriage, act like it was some good thing--while yet there was neither occasion nor need for humans to think of copulations or incest or aging generations--that some persons would be preferentially related to some few others.  One would think that the anti-family agitator from Nazareth had never arrived.

This is the great shame of sin, the great shame that precedes and spawns sin.  We do not stand shaking our defiant fists at God, and we do not cast ourselves lustfully at the temptations of the world--at least, these descriptions are fit only for the extremes of depravation, and they are branded by the world as being all the more "shameful" precisely because the world has no use for shame as the tool and explanation that properly it is.  What we do most usually when we sin, and what we do almost without exception in our first formative years, is put out our hands to receive from a world of more or less great generosity.  We might become jaded, and we might reckon the world to be the less generous as our growing, adult-approaching existence is thrust upon us (quite often too soon), but we would never be able to grow to adult responsibility without having known the provisions of God's Creation.

And so the defiant fist thrust at God, or the rapacious hand grasping at ill-gotten goods or pleasures, are metaphors that--no matter how convenient they are for the preachers--do not explain the moral difficulties that entwine us characteristically in our lives.  For much, too much, of our lives, we know of an existence that is passably generous to us, and for which we are passably thankful.  Only when our experiences of such at worst indifferent satisfaction are threatened do we become defiant or rapacious.  Deprived, however, of a healthy understanding of shame--shame as the state of the created being, shame as the indispensable, whispering caution against our seemingly sober and pious gratitude for designs that we, without warrant, attribute to God--we waste great lifetimes that otherwise we might devote to the teachings of Jesus in their true substance.

I have tried to probe these ideas in my blogs, faint and embarrassing though they are.  Roused, Readied, Reaped--to be cast into persistent, overlapping cycles and arcs of experience and effort that serve as much by collapsing into futility and exhaustion as anything else.  Aware, Away, Awry--to become cognizant of issues, to try to do something about them, and in the process to construct those issues incorrectly, and to address them more incorrectly still.  And then Shame Appears--shame that, if it be not the first gift of God, is undeniably--upon reflection--an absolute necessity in that it reminds us that the gifting we received first from God is expressible by us in presenting ourselves as gifts to all else.

Our Smoky and Devouring Flame

I have written about how concepts in themselves are shameful things.  For all that "concepts" can encapsulate what little we can know about reality, and for all that the creation and promulgation of concepts can represent the best we can do about thinking and speaking truth--still "concepts" are but pieces of reality.  A pure and comprehensive representation of reality is the only pure and comprehensive representation of reality, and is therefore the only truth.  God only knows the truth.

Additionally, we can never address concepts without tainting them with our impure predispositions.  We do not really know the truth, we cannot really express the truth, and we cannot do either without behaving, thinking, feeling, or reacting other than how we should.  This is what it is to be not God, and to be not God is a shameful thing.  We might call such a judgment unfair, and yet the actualized "we" who would be thus in operation would be an imperfect "we."  We might as well accept the fact that, while "sin" might be too strong a word to describe our original inadequacy (especially as "sin" is described usually in terms of some discrete offense), nonetheless shame--even if infinitesimal beyond our grasp of "smallness"--is ever present in us.

When we entertain concepts we behave shamefully, even if this source of shame is the frustration we feel in finding ourselves less than perfect in thus addressing the subjects of thought--and even if this frustration is what we can find in some way laudable insofar as it goads us to further explorations.  Similar to this is the frustration (and perhaps innumerable other less-than-perfect mental states) involved in meditating upon things we think we know, or upon puzzles we think we can crack.

Such shameful imperfection trails behind us in everything we have done and experienced in life.  Concepts (and meditations thereon), and impressions, and inklings, and feelings, and responses, and urges--all of the elements of our experience-lives burrowing back into the unremembered depths of our existences from the first--are in some manner shameful.  Only the inestimable and unrecoverable mystery of our origin might claim to be free of shame, and the very collecting-together of a consciousness by which to claim innocence would extinguish by its imperfect assembly any vestige of that claim.

The teaching from Jesus, to become like the little child, is instructive rather than directive.  We cannot become like the little child, in some comforting sacerdotal or declarative sense, any more than we can possess faith in that immeasurably small way that by Jesus' definition would be immeasurably powerful.  We can only reckon, when considering the "little child" directive, that we must consider ourselves as unmoored from our lost birthright as innocent children as we are unmoored from our contentions that we understand reality or our place in reality.  Jesus, when he directed Nicodemus to be "born again," did not provide him with a new parentage--Jesus told Nicodemus that he did not even understand the earthly things of which Jesus spoke, to say nothing of heavenly things.  We, as Nicodemus, are not properly-oriented children of the earth, and we are not properly-oriented children of heaven--we are shameful creatures given as our true patrimony continual life-chances to cry out in our shame.

Of course, to live a life and to "cry out in our shame" is really to live out that cry in innumerable fashions and in every possible instance.  We will always make something shameful of every fashion and instance--for such it is to be human, and the living with and processing of shame is what we must do beyond everything else.  From the ground up, from first infantile urges to the most rarified of meditations, we must live with shame, for that is the only way to live.  When told, "Go and learn what this means, I require mercy and not sacrifice," we are set upon a course of assimilation of that idea that is a course dragged inevitably through the dross of our shameful natures.  When the young man responds correctly to the notion that God values mercy over sacrifice, the young man can be no closer than not far from the kingdom of heaven--for shame will always (as we might understand the matter) stand in our way.

And, as I have written, shame and not sin is what bedeviled our first ancestor from the start--shame arising from the insensible, rather than sin describable as this or that act.  This is the story of Genesis, and this is the story that finds its resolution in the Passion of Christ.  The redemptive history of humanity did not begin with The Fall and the ejection from the Garden, any more than our possibility of redemption was consummated in the shadows of Gethsemane.  This is an important point, for nothing shows better how off-kilter is the course of conventional Christianity than the commentators' fascination with the two Gardens.

Adam did not arise in a Garden, and Jesus did not die in a Garden.  Adam arose from among soil and rock, as Jesus died on a patch of earth that was not permitted to bring forth life.  Adam was given a garden to tend--a garden given by a God who saw Adam as a creature of need--and Jesus was torn from the garden of his petitions to God.  Adam was set to bending the boughs of Eden to his fancies of design, and Jesus was hung on a twisted tree designed for the essence of torment.  Adam was given other human beings to keep him company, and Jesus saw the company of his followers disperse in shame and despair.

Adam, before ever he could speak it or conceptualize it, had his incomplete, needy, and shameful nature seen by God and addressed.  Jesus, after all else he had done to reach out across the chasm between God and the shameful Creatures Who Are Not God, cried out more acutely than ever we might, in the pain of our pain and the shame of our shame--and in our absolute inability to understand alienation from our Creator as different from abandonment by our Creator.

We were shameful from the first, and we will be shameful to the last.  This is really no more dismal than the theologians' assertions that we of the post-"Fall" race are originally sinful, and that we of the post-"Fall" race will carry sinfulness to our graves.  Shame, however, must be lived with, while sin--as the innumerable "salvation economies" make implicit--can be bought, or sold, or wiped clean from this or that conceptualized slate.  The "sin" conceptuality makes a shadow-play of Scripture's descriptions of humanity's ill-adjustment to existence from the start, and substitutes between Redemption's incomprehensible beginning and Redemption's incomprehensible end a devised drama of sin as committed and conquered.  Spread out the full scope of Jesus' story concerning us, however, and it becomes plain that our alienation from God began before ever humanity was aware of it, and the end of our alienation from God awaits a moment when our smoky and devouring flame of life is extinguished.

Littered with Shameful Things

As I recall from about 50 years ago, the movie version of The Late, Great Planet Earth began with a scene of an Old-Testament-Bible-time false prophet being pursued to death upon being found out.  This filmed notion of the expected fate of a false prophet--intended obviously to attach the intimation that the uttering of prophecies was taken with utmost seriousness--has seemed to me always puzzling in the context of the bulk of prophecies warning of the end of our Late, Great Planet.  After all, no "Bible times" prophet could expect to be found out--if the prophecy in question was either vague enough, or removed enough in time.  One does not expect that the utterance of the prophecy of the Jews being held in Babylon 70 years was greeted with, "We'll see about that."

In our own day, when the End Times prophecies persist as ever, the most revealing questions about the matter are not about what developments are "obviously" fulfillments of this or that prophecy (to be supplanted in turn by subsequent developments which are really "obviously" such fulfillments, and then others which are really, really obvious), but rather what developments in human society can inform our understanding of prophecy in the Bible (and, indeed, our understanding of the whole of the Bible.)

To linger for a moment on the matter of prophecy, it is illustrative to glimpse a hint of the realities of human society as expressed in the ancient texts.  In Deuteronomy is a passage condemning the occult practices of the other peoples of the land, followed by a prophecy of the future appearance of prophets--who would do well to speak truthfully, lest they meet an end like in the movie.  To the obvious follow-up question (and one can almost hear it coming from some precocious adolescent), "How can we know if a prophet is truthful?", the Deuteronomic answer is that a prophet will be found truthful if his prophecy comes to pass.  Unfortunately, the text does not include a prohibition against prophecies of shelf-lives of more than decades, and so we are stuck still with Antichrists and Marks of the Beast.

It is something more than completely childish for a person to ask, "How can we know if a prophet is truthful?", but to sit silently while given an answer that pertains obviously to a mere subset (short-term predictions) is a reaction that cannot be called completely adult.  For all that Paul wants to talk about being a child and then--overnight, it would seem--being an adult, it is on the contrary true that human society (especially as it can include people living long lives of--one would hope--unending development) must involve the notion that adulthood is a continuous unfolding.

And so we must ask ourselves, if we are to hold that the Bible (or parts thereof) can be taken to have true and abiding application, whether the Bible has ever been directed toward, or widely assimilated by, the humanity that the Bible must surely have foreseen.  Are we--that is, this collection of humans of this spate of generations--not the humanity to which the Bible speaks?  Sheer numbers, both of human lives and of increments of human life-spans, weigh in favor of the notion that the Bible, as a potential source of inspired teaching, is only now being read for real.

The numbers are crushing--the graph of human global population rockets upwards so that if (for example) the experience of living in an age in which the apocalypse might be approximated by the push of a button is taken as a collective identifier, most of humanity since the advent of agriculture would be included (or soon will be.)  I used to muse on the misfortune I experienced (particularly acute as a child) in living in an age of potential nuclear annihilation, until it dawned on me how the realities of human life-expectancy and population growth had deprived me of the claim to be among an unfortunate few to be born in my time.

And are we of the modern life-expectancies and population sizes not the preponderant audience of the Bible prophets?  Or, indeed, of the Bible as a whole?  How few people really lived in previous centuries, and of those few, what a slender portion were in any position to "have their feet under them," so to speak, when called to answer to the Bible's pronouncements!  So much of those postulated past populations were children doomed to die or, as they grew, doomed to the intellectual cloudings of slavery or crushing labor.  The modern notion of people being born and--with the exception of misadventures truly understood as "exceptions"--living full and well-filled lifetimes, is paradoxically both a new thing upon the earth, and an extremely common thing overall, if the paucity of prior population-sizes be considered.

That this modern "notion" is often just that--a perception of modern, "civilized," "developed" societies--that is not represented in reality, is not something that I have forgotten.  Many millions, in our earth of billions, are deprived routinely of the chance of fruitful self-development.  What I am driving at here is an appreciation that a long life of continual development, as an ideal if not a perfect reality, is the conceptuality abroad in our modern world.  "Continual development," however, can take two chief forms.  We can choose either to challenge ourselves continually, or to imagine that our lives are step-wise accumulations of accomplishments.  The latter choice is a horrid one, and it is manifested by, among other things, people seizing upon and filing away ideological sureties, and people seizing upon the things of this world in the form of possessions and retirements.

It does not take much--if adulthood is taken merely as the movement past childhood and the movement to ever greater accomplishment--for the "Bible-believer" to squat in wealth and squat in indolence, but this is only because the continual development afforded as a prospect for we moderns (we of the burgeoning bulk to whom the Bible really speaks) is squashed down by us into layers of self-satisfactions each upon the others.  In reality, every moment in which we live is but another moment (perhaps a wasted moment) in which we might realize that our lives must be shaken to the foundations.

And so we are presented with opportunities in our lives to examine the writings of ancients who were "ancients" in their own times at forty, and who wrote in the immediacy for audiences of adolescents.  The staid sages of the Bible eras were old men too soon, always one cold wind or one scurrying rat from death, and they herded populations of teenagers and young adults whose chief milestones of life were watching children die, or convulsing in anguish at the first sign of their youngsters' maladies.

Only by drawing ourselves up to the challenge of imagining those past years can we begin to imbue our understandings with vitality, and it can be a frightening prospect indeed.  When the Israelites returned from defeating Midian, they brought with them captured women and children--only to be told that the women and boys were to be killed.  The New Jerusalem Bible has the stomach to title this section of Numbers as a "slaughter," and indeed it was.  The Midian episode is scarcely imaginable, and a person of any developing and lively conscience would do well in brief intellectual forays to squint and wince at the thought--and to consider that there are abroad in the "religious" world divines of this or that sect who will imagine that one might "meditate" upon this episode.

It gets worse--at least as the notion of serene meditation is concerned.  The virgin girls were to be spared, if "spared" is a word applicable to seeing one's mother, aunts, or brothers butchered like cattle.  And of course, like any other females (that is, girl-children) found desirable to their captors, they could expect forced marriages (or concubinage) and forced bearing of their enemy's children.

The hideous nature of what happened to Midian is wasted upon us--again, as the Bible's preponderant audience--if we refuse to understand how truncated was life in those days.  The "elders" of Israel had to herd into battle, and herd into obedience, male populations who were both painfully young and painfully deprived of opportunities for elevated self-development in their young years.  Maturity meant becoming hardened brutes--who else would hack apart a six-year-old boy?  Or could fail to become a hardened brute in the process?  And as for the power-rape of the girls?  Do we really think young men (that is, teenagers) would be denied that outlet?

And do we really think that we are going to be spared the duty of enduring--again and again and without promised ceasing--self-examination throughout our lives?  Just as an example, there is the challenge of the Christian to find some way--other than besmirching the Holy Bible--to maintain that the slaughter of Midian should not have been ordered (for surely that is what was ordered by the unchanging and authoritative Scripture), when yet there is dangled before the Christian the fascinating yet nebulous fact that Jesus states that Moses' command to allow divorce was a sop to the hardened brutality of the Israelites, and not the will of God.  Allowing divorce, according to Jesus, was inserted (how, in theological terms, we are not told) into the Scriptures, yet the slaughter of non-combatants by the Israelites is to be taken as God's will?

The history of humanity, and of humanity's relationship to God, is littered with shameful things.  The accretion of human inventions upon the core of truly inspired Scriptures would be only indifferently comparable to other shameful things.  The collection of myriad perverse readings of Scripture, and the collection of myriad rationales for not unsparingly examining Scripture, would fit into that shameful mix.

And then there is the twin shame of our failure to understand the inchoate and stunted experience-lives of our ancient forebears, on the one hand, and of our failure on the other hand to accept that growth is the response to shame, and that the result of the response is still more shame, and more challenge to grow.

My Bad 05142026

Yesterday I posted Shame Appears: Design on Our Existences, and I began it with a quotation from me from "May 9" (when I posted not at all.)  I should have written "March 9" (Shame Appears: The Embodiment of Alienation).

My bad.

Design on Our Existences

On May 9, I wrote:

"The tragedy of Genesis is not foremost a tragedy of sin, but a tragedy of design practiced by humanity.  Or call it a tragedy of conceit.  Or call it--if the language serves best--a tragedy of the sin (for the man is never understood in Genesis to be sinless) actualized in humanity attempting to recapitulate the creation process--the conjuring from the recesses of humanity's murky selves satisfying designs of the world we conceptualize around us.

"In reality, the shame of limitation spawns the shameful creation on our part of inherently limited conceptions of reality--or what we like to think of as reality.  Indeed, the very act of conceptualizing something--gathering the available parts of what we have decided is 'something' into an analyzable and communicable conceit--is inherently limiting."

And for some aspect of ourselves to be inherently limiting is a two-fold assessment.  First, by definition, is the fact that our entire selves are limited (and therefore of a shameful quality before a God who exists supremely above every good quality) and, second, is the fact that an actualization--particularly a conscious actualization--of any one of our qualities is an affront to God.

To put it bluntly, an embracing by us of any conceptuality is an affront to God--as I quoted myself above, "a tragedy of design practiced by humanity."  We do not know the universe in which we sin, and when we ascribe to ourselves any knowledge of that universe we sin yet again.

Of course, we must pursue "knowing," but our collecting of instances of experience with individual things (which experience-processings by us are less than perfect at any rate) into masses of observations from which we extract concepts is at least a thrice-doomed prospect.  We experience imperfectly, we collect experiences imperfectly, and we order experiences imperfectly into concepts.

Much of the difficulty in Christianity on this score springs from Christianity's admixed heritage in classical thought.  The Hellenistic fascination with the "idea" of (for example) "the horse" is a similarly-deformed cousin of some more overtly pagan worship of a horse-god.

Any creation of God is first and foremost a thing in itself--and on this score I must insist on revisiting the Prologue-to-John description of a Creation indescribable other than as mediated by Jesus in every intimacy.  As the "tragedy of design practiced by humanity" begins, Adam is set by God to ordering, in part, the growth of the Garden.  Every bough that Adam twisted to accommodate some design was a living thing disordered thereby from its own inclinations--and every wrenching away from such inclinations was felt by Jesus.

Scarcely could any poet describe a more infinitesimal manifestation of sin's burgeoning--though of course burgeon it did.  In a universe of infinite scale--or, more properly, a prospect of infinite universes that might comprise the Creation of Jesus--there can be reckoning neither that Adam's bough-twistings were little things nor that Adam's bough-twistings were big things.  They simply happened, and in some measure they were not of God.

And the most important realization is the fact that such "happenings"--entwined as they were with Adam's developing capacity to render for himself conceits about existence's designs--were not enough for Adam.  The first man's skein of conceits was growing, and it was growing toward the ordering not merely of the foliage at his fingertips, but the ordering of perceivable existence into a proximity of like beings, of creatures like Adam at least insofar as they might participate with him as agents within a larger perceived milieu.

And so Genesis says that God made out of the earth the animals and the birds.  Notably, this is the same text that makes so much later of Noah's thronging menagerie consisting of animals according to their kinds.  This earlier presentation of animals and birds to Adam in the Garden makes no mention of "kinds" (though presumably there were at least two of every species), yet centuries of commentators have assumed that Adam's process of naming every creature (which is the described functionality wherein their respective "helper" unsuitabilities is revealed) is unquestionably associated with the assessment of "kinds."  Of this assumption there is no scriptural warrant--Adam might have been naming each creature individually, and such a process would have been the more suitable, the more that the original reality of Jesus' mediation of every intricacy of Creation was respected.

Every creature is different, every conceivable existing thing is different--because the ineffable ministration of Jesus to his Creation is ever-present and (at least simple prudence would so dictate to us) every such ministration of Jesus to his Creation has manifold potentialities of which we cannot even guess.  To collect impressions of such creatures and things into "concepts," regardless of the utility therein, is inherently sinful.  And to proclaim, in the frothing theologians' determination to pronounce upon the things of God, that concepts and dogmas and doctrines distill the things of God into "Gospel Truths" is a mountain of sin.  Of course, we all live within a scheme of concepts usually somewhere between the most minute parsings-out of conceits being perhaps overstated, on the one hand, and the propagating of vast, convenient, and oppressive overstatements, on the other.

What is important here is to see the grip that the human propensity for design obtains over people in Genesis.  Adam wakes up and calls Eve "woman" ("taken out of man") not because she is an inimitable, unique creation of God, but because Adam, delighted with her because the she is "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh," references her according to the organizing principle of his own conceits.

Eve has a set of experiences of her own that bears upon this same reality of conceits.  In a moment of inexplicable wonder (following an ordeal of unimaginable torment), Eve exclaims, "I have gotten a man from the Lord."  How might history have been different if Adam had shown such wonder--rather than fascination with relationship-design--upon being presented with Eve.

Yet it is Eve, in the earlier Tree episode, who sets herself upon a course of design that changes history.  What is most fascinating about the conventional approach to "The Fall" is the realization (as the sceptics never tire of rehearsing) that the devil tells the truth, and that God--if one is to fault God for showing mercy--supposedly does not.  Indeed, as the devil goads Eve into conceptualizing, "the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise," and of course, the tree does make Adam and Eve "like God" in a way.

That a fruit tempting to the eye would be good for food is in line with a certain conceit about reality.  That a store of knowledge would be of value is another conceit about reality.  What was going on with Eve as she reached for the fruit was not so much overt sin (and on this score the sceptics have at the ready the old "how could she know right from wrong before she ate from that tree?" line.)  What was going on with Eve was that sin--or, as I would say, that shameful-created-nature-proto-sin--of effectively lying to herself.  Concepts are intrinsically (and no matter how infinitesimally) sinful.

The shame that goes with being created rather than being God.  The shame that goes with being rebuffed as a child before being mature enough to understand having committed an offense.  The shame that goes with every moment of generalization--that type of convenience of thought upon which we rely even as we detest the notion that our thought-lives are things of convenience.  This is what explains human nature from the very first, and it makes mock of that convention that sin came from the Fall--or that sin can be compartmentalized or understood in discrete terms.

As we trace the development of humanity backward, sin gives way to proto-sin which gives way to shame--and we stumble over the idea that the reverse, that shame-morphing-into-sin, is a smooth spectrum because we seek always to organize and categorize things.  We fall from the bloom of original innocence--from those shocking and design-defying initial experiences we can scarcely remember--and we can never puzzle our way back again.  Like Eve, we can know an initial trauma and blurt out such as her delight in Cain "gotten from the Lord," while yet later we can impose design on our existences, like Eve rationalizing the birth of the precious, unique Seth as "another seed instead of Abel."

The Bewilderment of Shame

We are going to have to decide whether existence arises in an impenetrable question and is expressed in thin yet coherent terms in the Bible, or if existence is held properly to be wonderfully logical and is drawn out for us in a marvelous scriptural tapestry displaying the mind of God.  This latter course is held to most usually by the theologians, who exercise themselves in explaining how this or that thing in God's intended scheme for humanity can be pinned down by appeal to Scriptures arranged arduously in purported "salvation plans."

If, as the theologians claim, God's intentions for humanity ought to be imagined as expressed in terms of a "salvation economy"--that is, some weighing of humankind's moral burden against God's proffered method of exoneration--then it is no surprise that the assessable (or at least rank-orderable) concepts of sin and sin-types would be the seized-upon manifestations of our debts.  Necessarily, an "economy" is founded upon some baseline of measure, and for the purposes of the theologian there is the handy benchmark of "The Fall."

Somehow (in this preponderant set of salvation theories), Eve's scurrilous entertainment of unseemly conversation with the devil differs qualitatively from the "first sin" of eating from the forbidden tree.  How this qualitative distinction is to be justified is a doomed enterprise, but this viper in the nest of the theologians' conceits is a price that is thought worth paying in order to establish the baseline of "The Fall."  The man was innocent, and then the man sinned--this must be so.

Of course it is the premise of this blog that the foundational aspect of humanity's dissociation from God is not sin, but shame.  The concepts of sin and shame can be thought of as disappearing into the miniscule (and disappearing into each other) as we trace the story of humanity back to the source, but it is intrinsic to our operative understandings that "sin" is parsed out into particulars, whereas "shame" is less describable in terms of type or quantity.  We sin by doing this or that--we encounter shame merely by existing.

Humanity was always humanity, and humanity was sinful always and most importantly shameful always.

And Jesus encountered shame merely by being the medium of all that exists in the Creation as described by John.  We pursue salvation properly by allowing ourselves to be subsumed into the shame that is intrinsic to our Jesus-created selves, and we look to Jesus' willing collection of Creation's shame to himself as the offered means of our salvation.

The committing of sin is the increase of proper shame to ourselves, and the poison of sin is our refusal to own the concomitant shame.  Shame, in the accepting or the disavowing, is the fulcrum of the relationship between us and God.  Our shame, properly understood, is unquantifiable and inextinguishable--and howls in our consciences warnings greater than can any prohibition of described sin.  Next to this consideration, the notion of sin is child's play, and the notion that the dread punishment of eternal damnation is somehow commensurate with a finite lifetime of finite sin is enough to fool only a child, a child abused from earliest memory with religion at its toxic worst.

A child can be presented, in a psychologically supportive manner, with notions about sin that are humane and understandable, but the unquantifiable element of shame in any person's life is present in the child from the very beginning, and shame is something that the child needs to learn to manage, not to attempt to stamp out as one would sin.  It was shame that accompanied Adam and Eve out of the garden, for they had already endured the punishment for their sin (and it is surely fatuous to contend that they--who knew nothing of "death"--got off lightly in that their sovereign God relented in their threat to kill them.  To say nothing of the fact that they had not been promised immortality at any rate.)

It is the unquantifiable notion of shame that equates most suitably with the notion of damnation, and we see this demonstrated in Luke.  The ancient notion was that "the wages of sin is death."  In ancient Judaism, and dating back to Noah, the punishment of a murderer was to be executed.  It is the theologians' conceit--and the foundation of innumerable "salvation economies"--that "sin" in its force survives any earthly punishment, even that inevitable death that all humanity has earned.  On the contrary, as I have mentioned, is the story of the Good Thief in Luke.

The Good Thief is being punished, and punished horribly.  Even as he is upbraiding his fellow "thief" for mocking Jesus (and it is usually accepted that the guilty pair bracketing Jesus were more than "thieves"), the so-called "Good Thief" is contending that he is being punished for what he himself did.  The account-book is being balanced, and yet the Good Thief knows there is something more.  Contrasted against the shameless non-God-fearing behavior of his fellow criminal, the Good Thief lays his shame out before a figure whom he equates (with questionable theological insight, it must be imagined) with God.  Sin is being expiated, and yet there is something more to do.

Living with shame, and dying with shame, is that "something more to do"--always.  Endlessly it is contended that Jesus bore a "shameful" death, yet that purported shame (as any that is imputed to anyone without cause) is a "shame" only if the recipient allows it to be so.  And the Jesus who deserved no shame in his earthly life would not lie, either to himself or to others.  No, Jesus did not die a "shameful death," as the theologians imagine mistakenly that he did, and to compound the shame of this mistake with a concomitant neglect of the absolutely-other-than-shameful Jewish regard for the Suffering Servant, is shameful conduct indeed.

No, the living with shame and dying with shame that is the lot of every creature, and that persists in much more volatile and enduring form than sinfulness, is the "lot" of Jesus only in that his overarching sacrifice for humanity--indeed for all Creation of which he is author and medium--is the sacrifice of enduring all shame undeservingly.  The Thief paid his price, and then cried for succor in his unextinguished shame.  Jesus paid the price for all, and then cried out to his father in a pure form of the bewilderment of shame that besets us all, from newborn to the grave.