In Our Creator's Sight

In a recent post I maintained that our existence is understood best not as a duality of life and death, but rather as a duality of death and fruition--that which we would like to call "life" is a doomed and asymmetrically-minimal aspect of our existence that finds its logical end (when rarely enough we achieve even so much) in the meagre fruit borne in the midst of the wreckage and languishing that characterizes the bulk of our existence.

It is the "logical" aspect of any comprehensive analysis of our existence that concerns me here, precisely because any notion of humanity as beset by sinfulness ought to be a notion attended as well by the realization that this depressing reality necessitates the concomitant understanding that our existences are both asymmetric and devoid of graspable elements.  By "asymmetric," I refer to the inescapable fact that calling ourselves both good and evil is fatuous--our "evil" is evil and our "good" is both shot through with defects that we can imagine, and understandable by us as an affront to our perfect Judge.  By "devoid of graspable elements," I refer to the fact that it is only in our conceits that this or that "good" or "evil" thing is even so much as a "thing"--we can parcel up our existences into atoms and instants and thoughts and deeds and episodes and chapters, but we can never know if such demarcations are understood as such by God, or whether we muddle our understandings from the very start by our assuming that our existences consist of such quanta.

Moreover, in the Western World, the very conceit of "quanta" is so engrained in our philosophies that it is small wonder that we are tangled interminably in a fraternal wrestling-match between Science and Religion.  We render our existences into conceptualized bits with such determination that we can no more than feign surprise when we find ourselves acting like pedantic godlings on Earth--and of course the stereotypical cleric accuses the stereotypical scientist of staggering presumption, and the stereotypical scientist returns the favor.

And of course, given the thrust of this blog, I will concern myself most with the presumptions of the clerics--though it would be perhaps best to say that I am concerned with the presumptuousness (and illogic) of any Christian's avowal of the permeating sin-nature of humanity being attended by any Christian's conceit that the "merit" or "goodness" of some conceptualizable (that is, intellectually isolated and therefore "quantum"-considered) deed is of any relevance to understanding human existence.  We can set ourselves to doing "good" things, but do we really do good things?  Are we not truly "worthless servants?"  Is it really of any value to contend that we do both evil and good?  Do we really blunt the insipidity of such a statement by appending the notion that our evil vastly outweighs our good?  Do our existences really consist of good and evil?

I maintain that the existence-realm in which we must see ourselves is really just a realm in which there is "God" and "not-God," with us on the less favorable arm.  We can imagine that humility resides in reckoning that we are both good and evil--or more so in reckoning that we are more evil than good--and concern ourselves accordingly with the "sin" conceptuality implicit in our being confronted with an infinitude of analyzable events of good-versus-evil.  Or we can imagine that humility resides in reckoning that we are not God--and concern ourselves with the concomitant shame, both implicit or overt.  The latter imagining--for surely "imagining" is all we can do in any event--is manifestly the more morally prudent, and (in keeping with my present theme) the latter imagining exerts itself as an uninterrupted intellectual background, unchained to our fancied constellations of quanta, and unburdened by our ever-futile temptation to analyze our fallen natures in our fallen world in terms of this-or-that being "good" and therefore distinguishable from that which is evil and therefore shameful.

All of our existence is "therefore shameful," because we are not God.  Only thereby can we understand our existences, and only thereby can we understand such (possibly numerous) dualities as confront us--and confront us they will, what with our being saddled with the yes-or-no, zero-or-one basic expression  of our inescapable finitude.  What we cannot reasonably expect is that sort of symmetry which tempts us always in our analyses.  I have said that our existence is not one of life-and-death, but rather one of death-and-fruition.  I will present another example, a duality represented conventionally by the notion that we are either attracted or repelled by some other being who confronts us.

We can contend superficially that we are either buoyed up or dragged down by our interactions with others--and no one will doubt the sincerity of a person who recounts a described interpersonal event in such terms.  But we must ask ourselves how interpersonal interactions can be interpreted responsibly in such simple (though perhaps satisfying) terms.  Are not our sinful natures always at work in us, such that the almost-inescapable and almost-indispensable business of interacting with other people is not understood responsibly as lifting us up or as dragging us down?  Does not the burden or our sinfulness bear upon every aspect of our communal lives?  Or perhaps more pointedly--for I take no pleasure in being a "downer" for its own sake or my own sake--are we not bound to consider the burden of sinfulness as being un-quantifiably and inextricably entwined in the lives of beings-not-God?

We are not lifted up intrinsically by the good of good interpersonal interactions, though unquestionably we are dragged down by the evil of evil interpersonal interactions.  The lifted-up-versus-dragged-down ostensible duality (which we will have to struggle against at any rate when subsequent moods lead us to question whether we place too much emphasis on our worldly interactions) is not the correct duality.  The proper duality-understanding of human interactions might best be described as something like "hang-versus-hold."  We "hang" onto the souring impressions of evil interactions, and we "hold" onto the entrancing impressions of good interactions--and we are better at hanging than holding, such that the "hanging-episode" burden becomes the analog of inescapable death, and the "holding-episode" phenomenon (as asymmetrically-small and comparatively fragile as our sinful hearts make it) is the analog of the meagre fruit of our lives.

We do not do interpersonal interactions correctly--we never have.  As beings-not-God, we have never done interpersonal interactions perfectly.  Along came Jesus into the world of his earthly life.  Jesus knew everything he needed to know--and this can explain much of what conventional Christianity reduces to insipid blather.  In the Gospel of John, the first disciples cast about without the slightest hesitation the notion that some of their number have found the Messiah--as though the pursuit had been of particular import to them among a more complacent general population.  Little wonder Jesus made himself available to them--and yet the commentators have felt it necessary to say that Jesus had some sort of unimaginable charisma that attracted people to him.  If considering Jesus' appeal to (some of) the people, need we consider that the oft-described amazing attractive power of Jesus must be anything more than doing interpersonal interactions correctly, rather than clumsily as is our lot?

We are not God, and that is a shameful thing.  We are sinful, and that is a more shameful thing.  More shameful yet, however, is our incessant succumbing to the temptation to express our accord with the preceding two sentences, while yet we demand God-like sovereignty to impose our parcelings-out of our existences into scenery and scenarios populated by our self-conceived phantasms.  We know not of what our existences consist in our Creator's sight, and unless we accept that fact, we cannot hope to place ourselves in watchful anticipation of our Creator's graciously-supplied guidance.

My Clumsy Stumbling

As I described in my previous post, we do not observe--let alone understand--anything in its most basic elements.  We experience symptoms of disease, but we can say only with relative certainty what are the underlying diseases in question--and we can never expect to plumb to the ultimate depths the physical realities that reside within.  So also with our tendencies to sin.  We can understand ourselves to show symptoms of sinfulness, but--as I wrote before--we can no more understand the genesis of our sinfulness than we can understand the creation of evil, or indeed the creation of anything.

That our knowledge of anything is separated from that reality by the sensory and conceptualization limitations of our status as finite beings, is a truth kicked about often enough in religion-attendant debates.  It seems apparent that the most common responses to this materialism-implicit argument consist usually of people's positioning themselves on either side of the metaphorical toggle-switch of deciding either, one, that our limitations preclude determined faith in a perfect being or, two, that determined faith must be understood as directed toward a perfect being reckoned by definition to be un-understandable and always beyond the limits of our conceptualizations.

Or people can say simply that they believe in God and know not why--rendering moot questions about what might be understood (and placing such a believer liable to criticisms from all sides--if indeed critics exist who might wish to exercise themselves so.)  There is, however, an intrinsic element to "I believe in God and know not why" that might be of benefit to us all.  This benefit is the effectual immunity of such a believer to the temptation, one, to wield the above-mentioned materialism-implicit argument so as to discount religious belief or, two, to shunt aside considerations of that argument as being disingenuous or as being contentious for its own sake.  For indeed there are limitations to what we can know--or what we can even conceptualize--and once drawn across the threshold of the initial question of belief in God, these limitations are invaluable as considerations about how we can address such belief intelligibly.

As this blog must be directed, the very idea of humanity as prone to sin must be fleshed-out in a manner that considers always that the receding of our understandings toward this or that describable horizon is not to say that the underlying, perceptibly receding phenomenon actually conjoins with that horizon.  Our most pertinent example of this phenomenon is the conceit that Genesis shows the beginning of human sin.  "Sin," of course, is understood generally to be describable--a person commits this or that sin.  For this reason I have determined that "shame" (or perhaps the smaller-yet-undeniably-shameful notion of "proto-sin") is the best way to describe the most infinitesimal of human sins.

And so we are presented with the temptation to delineate when sinfulness showed itself in human beings.  Being unwilling or unable to contend with the idea of the human sin-state receding backwards into Adam's coalescing dust, the denominations comfort themselves with the notion that sin "entered history" or "entered the Garden" with the eating of the Forbidden Fruit.  Of course, Eve might have had previous scurrilous conversation with the snake for twenty seconds or twenty million years, and in any such event she would have sinned before she ate and therefore SINNED, as the conventional "Fall" notion of the Forbidden Fruit would have it.  What is more, both Adam and Eve were at every moment simultaneously limited in capacity and supplied with appetites.  By definition, sin could not have entered human beings with the eating of the fruit, because without sin they would not be understandable as human beings.

And the Book of Genesis, inasmuch as it might be considered a text to be read so as to gain understanding, is to be reckoned as directed to making things increasingly understandable.  That our sin-state, receding in any of our poor attempts at conceptualized retrospection, would arise at some incomprehensible time-nexus of a perfect Creation resulting in the course of an incomprehensibly-small time-increment to some incomprehensibly infinitesimal amount of sinfulness--that would be the business of God, and we would expect it to be scarcely understandable.  That the patience of God would have some limitation (the dimensions of which would escape us) is scarcely surprising, and that this limitation of patience would be presented in the Episode of the Forbidden Fruit is merely the outworking of God's business.  Certainly the idea of sin leading to punishment is being made blisteringly understandable.  Simultaneously the realization that Genesis is about God, and not about the millennia-irrelevant (or at least distant and un-addressable) fate of Adam and Eve, is made available to us.

For a vast and tragic reality hangs over the conventional ruminations of Christianity.  Believers in the Bible can scarcely deny that sin permeates human nature, and yet what we will permit or not in ourselves or in our fellow persons is a question that perversely we attach to the idea that people can do good or bad things.  Is there something about "sin permeates human nature" that we do not understand?  Jesus requires from us the levy of penitence and punishment befitting murderers because we think ill of our fellow humans.  Jesus attaches to us the stain of faithlessness because we cannot order mountains to leap into the sea.  Jesus demands of us that we see clearly the reality that surrounds us, and yet he extends to us no measure of tolerance as might be thought fitting considering our limitations as finite beings.  We must be perfect.

We are not perfect because we are not God.  We are permeated with shame because we are not God.  I am not sorry for my clumsy stumbling upon calling this blog "Shame Appears," because we can either content ourselves with notions that we can detect before ourselves things that appear good or appear true, or we can confront ourselves and our lives with the presupposition that, wherever we look, shame appears.

Our Underlying States are Unknown

Different people can have similar symptoms for still different diseases.  A symptom--assuming it is properly assessed--constitutes a condition for the person in question.  If the remedy applied in response to any given symptom happens to be an effective remedy for the underlying disease, then the actual--and ostensible--disease has been addressed.  And sometimes the disease just cured is never diagnosed, or is diagnosed incorrectly.

If we humans live in a state of--with the disease of--sin, then what we can experience about our sin is what we can experience as a set of conditions--a set of predilections to sinfulness, a set of predilections that is unique in its relative particulars for each of us.  We can say that we have the disease of sin, but we cannot claim to understand that disease.  We know nothing more about why we were created with the potential for sin, than we know about why God created evil.

Jesus just assumes that we are sinful, and then he tells us how to address the conditions of sinfulness in our lives.  Paul, on the other hand, seems compelled to act as though the underlying disease of sinfulness can be extracted in its explanation from the story of the Garden of Eden.  The notion of the "fall" into sinfulness at the eating of the Forbidden Fruit--that sophomoric contention of how persons capable of entertaining blasphemy about God can become "sinful" persons only upon the subsequent eating of a morsel--is put forward by Paul as though a divinely-provided "diagnosis" of our "disease" of sin is present in Genesis.  This is not so.  We were sinful from the start (or, as I have described about our "shame" in being ever proto-sinful, we have borne the pre-conceptual and pre-verbal shame of sinfulness from the very dawn of our creation.)

The upshot of all of this is simple.  We all have conditions that describe our physical states.  Those are the things we know about ourselves, and it is only provisionally that we can claim that any of our underlying disease states are known to us.  We all have conditions that describe our moral states.  Those are the things we know about ourselves, and it is only provisionally that we can claim that our underlying sinful-states are known to us.

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.