Things Might Impede Us

When God commanded the waters of the earth to be gathered to one place, a process of concentration was being described.  Indeed the "one"-ness of the "place" or "mass" of water is of course approximate in terms of location, given the sinuous layout of the seas, but it is the process of concentration that is important here, not any geography that we as observers would number as the "seas" or "oceans."

Similarly, the collection of a mass of light--or, presumably, light-emitting particles--would seem to be the crux of God commanding into being the "greater light to rule the day."  The sun is a "thing," of course, just as the surrounding space is a "thing."  "Thing-ness," however, is chiefly a matter of human conceit--and no human being can say with authority where ends the sun, with its atmosphere, emissions, radiation, and influence upon its surroundings, and where begins the enveloping space (to say nothing of whether we can say with authority that space is a "thing.")

We as a species conceptualize things.  We divide up our existences, and we find the memory of our origins in a collection of divisions that represents a vastly complicated internal life.  The infant that grasps only for reciprocating touch is as alien to us in a peer-representation sense as is to us the newborn of any mammal--while yet all such creatures evoke in us a hope for their innocent satisfaction.  The present fussing about individual, presumably-empowered citizens choosing pronouns and gender identities, and such persons being admonished that all are born and must be identified as male or female, meets an age-old rejoinder here.

Babies for centuries have been called "it" in English, and those that were born dead or perished in the process of birth have been considered--as asserted by the prophets of old--to be creatures spared the tribulations of life.  That babies grow to become human beings--or, more revealingly, that common human usages have acted accordingly in many respects--is one of the echoing elements of our communal perception that a "human being" (and, more importantly, a person in need of salvation) is of necessity a being infused--and beset--with the complexities of life, complexities that accord in general with our ages of personal memory.

We, tragically, are not as simple as babies, and even more tragically we are not disposed to cling babe-like to the simple, gracious love of our Father.  We are creatures of complexity, and the next-to-most basic underpinning of this complexity is our insistence upon viewing existence as a collection of things.  And the most basic underpinning of this complexity is our intellectual predisposition to view existence as a collection of things.  That these two underpinnings would seem to be infinitely interlaced is a mere reflection of the agonizing state of persons-who-are-not-God.

Whatever else they might have been, Adam and Eve were adult persons-who-are-not-God.  They were infused with all of our complexities when they stood before God in judgment, they were infused with all of our complexities when they ate of the forbidden fruit, and--though the theologians might thrash and howl upon this point--Adam and Eve were infused with all of our complexities in the moments and perhaps days and perhaps eons when they were impaired in righteousness such as to be fertile receptors of the snake's wiles.

We think of existence as things, and we divide experiences into things, and we have experiences that cause us to separate our lives into things, and we invent things that are not there.  To be alive is to have a life, and a life is a collection of things--a collection that becomes usually more complex even as we yearn for some simple illuminating principle.  This is the architecture of our predicament before God, and I have found that the progression of blogs through which I have stumbled--writing, often mistakenly, in greater or lesser attention to the teachings of Jesus--has been a tracing of this architecture.

"Roused, Readied, Reaped" is a general description of our subjection in our existences to persistent, overlapping patterns of cycles and arcs.  Our lives consist of starts, and stops, and repeatings, and experiences that resemble each other more-or-less, and in the process we have the elements of our existences hammered into things that we cannot imagine existence without (such as the comforts of interpersonal relationships), and we have those experiences themselves hammered into memories and lessons (both potentially false or misleading) that we cannot imagine our self-narrated "lives" without.  These aspects of our "roused, readied, reaped" lives stand in defiant opposition to the teachings of Jesus, in which the only relationship that matters is that of us to our Savior, and the only moment that matters is the calendar-and-clock-defying Now of attention to Jesus, forsaking all else.

"Aware, Away, Awry" is a general description of the tenacious hold of our developing consciousnesses upon us.  To become aware of any "thing" is also for us to invest ourselves in the possession of that thing, whether in practicality or in contemplation.  Of course, the first awareness of the newborn is an awareness of some part of overall reality, and--as has ever been the case with human beings--we will never know at what stage (perhaps unique to each individual) a person has become a full-fledged entrant in the great arena of humanity's disputation with God.  This disputation has for eons been described in terms of possession, and into this milieu--a milieu of time and space that dwarfs and drowns the oft-described "sliver" that is the Levant in the mere millennia of its fame--comes the record of Jesus in the Gospels.  This is the Jesus who claims that one part is a great as the whole, that a little leavens the great mass, and that all of life is to be surrendered for a treasure that the world accounts as nothing.  Most importantly, this is the Jesus who tells us that the remedy for going awry as an individual is--as the most direct and wrenching counterpoint to our awareness of "things"--to cease to be distinct things ourselves, residing instead as branches of a larger, all-encompassing whole--to be children of our Father more completely than the newborn to the mother (and certainly more intimately than one purportedly innocent flesh-and-bone to another.)

This leaves, then, the present blog about when "Shame Appears."  Shame appears when we look at anything and see not God, when we think of anything and think not "God."  The cultivation of "Shame" as a general principle is, of course, rife with potential for error or misuse.  We will look for guidance in the teachings of Jesus, and we will look at how things might impede us.