The Terrain of Shame

I think the most effective way to understand the Gospels is in terms of John first, followed in order by Mark, Matthew, and Luke.  I also realize that for certain reasons some Bible teachers have described John as uniquely unsuited as a Gospel starting-point.  I maintain, however that the most important thing about beginning to understand the Gospels is to have a starting-stance, rather than a starting-point.

What I maintain to be the best starting-stance is an explicit statement of the most basic elements of the Gospels.  Which of the Gospels is the source of this starting-stance description is irrelevant.  I choose Luke's recounting of the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

The story of Lazarus and the Rich Man speaks of earthly life and un-earthly (or "New Earth-ly," if that is preferred) judgment.  Suffering leads to comfort, and indulgence leads to torment--that is all that the Abraham-figure states about the two individuals' afterlife existence.  The story gives the intimation that the Rich Man was deficient in not sharing his pleasurable wealth with others, as well as the intimation that Lazarus' plight was not of his own doing.  (Lazarus, we might imagine, could have occupied the same position in his life as in the story, and have been a cauldron of impious rage, but it is the Rich Man's disposition that is in focus in the story.  The story would not have had the same impact if the Rich Man had woken up from death to find Lazarus tormented along with him.)

The story speaks of people being prodded to repentance by listening to "Moses and the prophets," but the actions of the persons in the story, or indeed in the rest of the world, cannot on their face be found to be in violation of those sources.  In fact, one of the prompts for Jesus to describe how everything is possible with God, is the question of how the wealthy can be saved.  There is no necessary interpretation of "Moses and the prophets" to the effect that those who live in pleasurable wealth will be tormented, even if legions of those deprived Lazarus-like exist in the land.

The story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is to be taken in its raw form, even as it is presented in the fewest-possible of unvarnished elements.  The raw form of the proper motivation assignable to humanity (as represented by the characters) is not to be found in Judaism or its rules, nor in recognition-of-the-God-of-the-Bible and that recognition's ostensible rules.  The raw form of the proper motivation assignable to humanity is shame.

There is God, and there is not-God.  Lazarus, in a universe in which there is God, might possibly have petitioned the heavens for the sustenance he craved--if Lazarus failed to do so, or if his petitions were denied unaccountably by God, is immaterial to the story, and is between him and God.  Lazarus did not act contrary to the proddings of shame (or the story makes no sense.)

The Rich Man either trampled over his own shame (as, let's face it, the story has him effectively trampling over Lazarus), or the Rich Man had cultivated an ignorance of his own shame--these two possibilities are implicit in his belated hope that his similarly-destined brothers will "repent."

What we see in the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is the terrain of shame.  The Gospels require no more framework than this in order to be relevant, and it is within this sparse framework that we get a helpful introduction to the Creation story--with its minimalist presentation of great ideas--that prefaces the Gospel of John.

Their Own Stories in Themselves

An understanding of shame as presumed in the Gospels can be obtained only through an appreciation of the intellectual architecture of the Gospels' treatment of Creation itself.  Time and space, and the amalgamations thereof, mean nothing to the essential teachings of Jesus.  By "amalgamations thereof," I am speaking in the most "vital" sense, that is, time and space as our broadest horizons within which are comprehended the very elements of our existence.

We "exist" in time and space (insofar as we credit ourselves with understanding "existence"), and we experience in time and space, and we live in time and space--but we have no claim to infallible conceits about those elements (or any of their lesser particulars) and we have no claim to an "understanding" of existence without them.  We experience time and space, but only in terms of our conceits, which can be postulated as being virtually unquestionable, or as potentially phantasmagorical, or as anything in-between.  We can scarcely fail to notice, however, that if we grasp for the rationalist's most ardent appraisal of (some of) our conceits as "virtually" unquestionable, still we cannot replace rationally the word "virtually" with the word "absolutely."

So we experience our existence on a scale of greater or lesser phantasmagoria.  We cannot claim to experience our existence directly--or so claim the most ardent of skeptics.  The most ardent of skeptics are correct.  I must imagine, however, that there are much more rarified notions--and schools of thought--about these matters than I have ever encountered, and so I will not pretend to have covered this topic authoritatively.  It will have to suffice that I can put forward two competing popular notions about what we can ever "know," particularly as such notions touch on religious belief.

One notion is that we can never experience existence directly, with all of the corresponding considerations about light and sound and distance and distortion, to say nothing of sensory organs and neural synapses.  This notion helps some people contend that we can never absolutely "believe" anything, making religion (and especially its notions of divine judgment) tenuous and insubstantial, if not outright coercive.  A competing notion is that "belief" is intrinsic both to human nature and to human existence, a notion related often in the contention that all of us "believe" things, even if it be the belief that a sidewalk will not collapse beneath us.  Of course the former camp can be expected to admit that we can, in common parlance, "know" a sidewalk when we encounter it, and the latter camp can be expected to admit that on occasion an undetected subsidence will result in the collapse of a sidewalk.

What is important to us here is to recognize that there is a pair of distinct notions about existence in the Gospels, and it is a pair that must be understood in contradistinction to the pair described above.  In every connection, here and above, we are considering questions of time and space, but "time and space" as an unspoken topic in the teachings of Jesus is not a question of belief, but of rectitude.  The teachings of Jesus presume that God exists, and that people can know things.  Ideas about what can be believed in or what can be known are ideas that the Gospels stride over--this must be recognized, or the Gospels will make no sense.  Jesus demands that people exercise their faith and also exercise their knowledge--and the fact that Jesus makes such demands in the context of suspended and potential condemnation displays for us a Jesus-imposed regimen that results in a life-course for us that may seem not so much as a striding over this or that, but rather an experience of being trodden over in a stampede of simultaneous considerations.

To fail in the demands of rectitude is to experience shame.  What is important to understand, in light of the teachings of Jesus, is the manner in which shame is, for us, coterminous with our larger experience-realm itself.  Indeed, shame for us is understandable only as an ineffable union of the spiritual and the organic (which is really just a particular way to say that shame is the state of all that is not God.)  Ignoring in our presumption the conceptuality of organic existence, and applying only theological precepts, we can say that we are, as the result somehow of sin, totally depraved.  We can say that we are required to do good things, and to refrain from evil.  This recitation of "total depravity," on the one hand, and the burden of behaving correctly, on the other hand, is merely to say that we are made evil by God.

We were not, properly speaking, made evil by God (and this argument is intended to subsume, as proper, all carping about Adam and Eve and proclivity to temptation.)  We and Adam and Eve were not made evil by God.  Rather, we are evil because we are not God.  We are evil because we are not perfect like God.  Beyond every perfection we might attribute to God is a greater, more imaginable perfection (carp about that, if you will) displayed in the perfection of Jesus' offer of forgiveness and reconciliation to his followers--but that is a topic for another time, and it is a topic that unfolds with the Gospels.

What is important here is a recognition that shame is conterminous with the experience of existence--and Jesus expects us to know that.  The Gospels expect us to know that, and upon this knowledge hangs the very practicality of gospel-stories themselves.  Jesus plays with concepts of time and space, and he expects us to know that time and space are as nothing in the context of the divine.  Jesus presents stories about Moses and David, not accounts of Moses and David.  Jesus describes things that have happened and are happening and will happen (with great disregard for actual chronology), but "happen" as a concept does not have to do with stories that happen in time, but rather with time (actual time) molded to fit the truth of a story.

Underlying this playing with the particulars of time and space is a reality of the teachings of Jesus that draws ever closer to the question of shame.  The teachings of Jesus have no use for proportionality.  A universe of rectitude is held in a proffered cup of cold water, yet a minor deed it would be (for some noble cause) to order a mountain to plant itself in the sea--the latter deed a thing that can be accomplished with a mustard-seed of faith (if indeed one were to possess so much.)  Jesus describes the pittances that we can accomplish as greater than all the works he performed.  If the greatest and the least of things might be done, and the greatest and the least of faith must be employed, then no consideration of anything is connected by necessity to proportion.  And if time and space are not first and foremost particulars of existence, but rather elements of existence-stories, then we are each in our self-perceptions revealed to be what, in the Gospel presuppositions, we really are.  We are stories of ourselves, and we exist in story-realms of our own conceits.

In the deepest recesses of each of our experience story-lives are the footprints of sin that Genesis depicts as stalking us--a sin-genesis much murkier and and more diaphanous than any story about a snake--a sin-genesis simultaneously more foreboding and more reverent than some preacher's conceit of God as a heartbroken parent flabbergasted by a rebellious child who had been given everything good.  In the deepest recesses of each of our experience story-lives is the beginning of our individual grapplings with reality, and reality is that which is stirred in the stew-pot of time and space.

The Bible possesses a thread of understanding about the beginning of each of our lives that bears particularly upon this point.  In the Scriptures, the recess of the womb and the small, tenderly crafted resting place of the stillborn child is one and the same, as regards the troubles of life.  "Life," with all of its joys and troubles, begins with the newborn's first encounter with touchable and manipulatable reality.  (There will always be objections to any story about the Bible, such as, in this instance, to say that some great truth is to be found in the story of Jacob and Esau striving in the womb.  That story can rightly take its place with the story of Jacob depicted approvingly for accepting the Lord as his God on the basis of a bargain.)

When we are born, we begin to experience life, and it is important to note that this is an intrinsically organic process.  Here the neurons and synapses and potentials for sensory distortion--the playthings of the skeptics--are presented not as elements to be dissected philosophically, but as elements of playings-out in time and space.  They are presented to us as elements of stories, and from the perceptible first we concoct stories.  Creation is a story, Genesis is a story, and our lives from the start are stories.

The newborn experiences rhythms in life, and for the newborn that becomes the story of life.  That the newborn's conceits are infinitesimal, and that the consequences of internal story-telling are scarcely great at this stage (and probably important in many ways to the newborn's development), merely makes the essential point--life not as "life," but as the "story of life," is conterminous with--and develops in stages from the tiniest of beginnings with--all the rest of experience.

As the rhythms of life develop, the newborn is given things, and is deprived of things.  Having no grasp of practicalities, the newborn (who is like as not to find that insistence brings relief to this or that complaint) can scarcely but imagine that the parent is possessed of infinite means and withholds them arbitrarily.  All of this develops gradually, but inevitably, and if there is anything that signifies maturity in a growing child it is the ability to come to grips with the reality that stories once held must sometimes be given up for new ones.

Similarly, growing up as a human being involves realizing that one has seized on stories out of convenience.  Out of imperfect and incomplete information we come to thoughts--sometimes great and magnanimous thoughts--but always we are liable to need organic respites, liable to need to rest on our conceits, faulty though we know them to be, and faulty we know our information-gathering process to have been.  This is only human, but this is humanity as it really is--a collection of storytellers who are stories in themselves.  From the beginning this is seeded with an element of shame, and it is unwarranted to say that we were shamed, or made liable to shame, as though we were created to be so.

We were created to be.  We were created by God, and we are therefore not God.  Shame is an element that proceeds from this reality, but that is no more than to say that fear is an element that proceeds from the reality of being not God, and therefore we are in peril--or believe ourselves to be in peril--in God's creation.  To be not God is to be afraid.  To be human is to be afraid.  To be not God is to be shamed.  To be human is to be shamed.

Jesus tells stories.  To parse them is to oppose one's storytelling skills against his.  However, Jesus tells stories to address his listeners' relationship with their own shame.  This intent is only of incidental relationship to the content of the stories, and this intent bears fruit only as it challenges the content of the listeners' own stories, as it challenges the listeners to confront the fact that they are their own stories in themselves.

We Extract in Our Presumption

A popular Seventies-era mechanism for making fun of non-Western cultures was referring to Oriental puzzles such as, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  What concerns us here about such notions is the fact that unsolvable quandaries are not emblematic of certain cultures--they are inherent (albeit in different forms) in all cultures, and in fact they are intrinsic to all of human culture.  People do things, and they do things within matrices of common understanding--the defensibility of such understandings being at best secondary, if considered at all.

For example, what is the sound of a follower of Jesus making an offering at the altar (or any similar focus of presentation to God) according to the dictates of Jesus?  If a believer--for reasonableness sake, a believer of sufficient age to be competent in belief--must square himself or herself with his or her fellow humans before approaching the altar, who would ever make it there?  That the churches of long standing will differentiate, for example, between mortal and venial sins, will provide for consideration of practicalities in making amends, and will present the clergy when necessary as arbiters, merely makes the point.  A cultural matrix providing support for decision-making is merely the state of functional humanity, and decisions are made always with less-than-perfect information, less-than-perfect reasoning, and with all-too-human impetuousness, however muted such impetuousness may be, or may seem to be.

A pivotal question for a follower of Jesus, then, is the question of whether a follower of Jesus will adhere always to the principle that any human being is all-too-human always.  Adam-and-Eve conceptualities held by the theologians to have yearned unaccountably for the fruit, or to have succumbed unaccountably to the snake's snake-conceptualized temptation wiles (when sinless humans would have possessed by definition no temptation vulnerabilities) are Adam-and-Eve conceptualities that exhibit no proximity to the Christian self-regard of reasonableness that is a proximity lacking in the most grotesque of pagan idols.

Real people do things in moments.  Real people are mutable people who do things in moments, and moments differ in character even as people have not had time to digest and analyze each immediately-preceding moment.  Eve was imperfect, and time was potentially endless.  In addition to being "desired to make one wise," the fruit of the tree is described in the text as being good for food, as Eve could see.  How in the name of Christian reasonableness Eve was able to "see" that the tree was "good for food" is not explained to us, nor is the reason that the forbidden fruit (in God's own "very good" lush garden) was created "pleasant to the eyes" such as to merit being described so.  Was the snake being provided with the opportunity to say, "Eve, have you ever seen fruit so beautiful?" even as she could have pointed to innumerable others in response?

The situation in the Garden trends insistently to the conclusion that the inconstancy in any creature not God will, given time, be seized by a confluence of conceits (however routinely drowned in a preponderance of others) such that the most objectively unlikely actions will heave to the surface.  Now the smell of a fried egg is all but irresistible, now it is nauseating.  Now the fruit in the Garden was (as we might conjecture) visually unremarkable, now it was a creation of God's hand (held in the observer's gaze) such that its beauty surpassed that of all the heavens.  Now it was a thing of inapproachable beauty, now it was--as so many other things, edible or not--looking good enough to eat.  Eons enough passed for Adam and Eve to have been seized by such moments--one wonders why the snake is described as having any role at all, or--inversely--why the prating of the snake about "good and evil" is not described as tempting Eve to partake otherwise of an unremarkable fruit that seemed a so-so meal in the offing.

Of course we will think of the snake as Satan, but it is with somewhat less warrant that we will think of him as being crucial to any story in which he is mentioned.  How much more straightforward would have been the story (to say nothing of the preachers' phantasms) of Judas, had the devil not been described as a character in the traitor's tale?  Does this make Judas more guilty, or less?  Does not the Satan-participation in Judas' role raise the bar of our attempted analyses such that we might be all the more humble, and all the more quiet?  Are we to forget that Judas alone--as publicly associated with Jesus as the threefold liar Peter--makes himself open to being seized by the authorities, authorities who have reason to see Judas dead, all the more so as he declares the death of Jesus as being the shedding of innocent blood?

We do not know what we will do in moments of stress (to say nothing of three years of the disciples' stress), and we cannot know moreover that our responses in objectively equivalent situations will be constant.  What we can know (or, to be more realistic, what we can gather ourselves up toward the knowing of) is the extent of our shame--so that we are trying to ask forgiveness for the right things.  We can speak of "total depravity," but the last thing we can do is write ourselves off as totally depraved.  We can say that we can do nothing good except through the divine, though Jesus' observation that we do good things even though we are evil is an observation that calls out the only-good-through-God or only good-with-God prattle as the ultimate humble-brag.

A person who lifts up a sheep on the Sabbath once a week is not "good."  A person with as many opportunities as the first person and who only lifts up a sheep on the Sabbath once in a lifetime is not "good."  A person who leaves each and every sheep bleating in a rut on the Sabbath is not "good"--yet seems somehow to be the least admirable of the lot.  Is a person overtaken by a moment of stock-owner's greed, or by a moment of not wanting a sheep to be afraid or hurt?  Did Eve fall prey to the Devil's wiles on her first morning in Eden, or had a trillion years passed?  Or did she just have a bad first day, when like as not she would have passed the test in a succeeding span of 999 or so billion years?  If shame is as bad as the Gospels take it to be, then its true form (or, as I would say, its progressively appearing form) must be an abiding and emerging phenomenon, not a mantle of opprobrium draped over discrete acts.

Neither is shame, as I alluded to above, a characterization of a person's proclivity to do bad acts.  Doing evil and acting (and perhaps being) unconcerned about how it looks brings "shame," and this is the aura of shame as a performative phenomenon.  Being convicted internally of evil, and confessing and repenting of discrete evil acts, is shame as a performative phenomenon.  Being convinced of one's proclivity to do evil acts, with or without public confession, is nonetheless a performative phenomenon--a drawing up (even if only internally) of oneself as a character on a matrix of conceits.  All of these--and progressively as I listed them--are useful aspects of shame, but they are not shame itself.

Shame is being not God, and therefore less than God.  Shame predates (so to say) the story of Creation, not in some presumption of anything being before time, but as time understood (so to say) as being itself created.  Creation as a story in Genesis is a useful story (though of greater use, perhaps, in showing us what we grant ourselves as story-processors more than anything else.)  "Creation," however, properly speaking, is the ineffable and therefore story-defying origin of all of us in the wind-from-who-knows-where imagery of Jesus speaking to Nicodemus.  The collapsing negation of ourselves into this Creation-well, from which instead we extract in our presumption the conceits of our very lives, is our duty, and that the entirety of our self-recognized selves rebels against this collapse is our abiding shame.

To Be the Preserved

In the last post I wrote:

"For the purposes of this blog, I will contend that a person's conscience is as suitable (and as ineffable) a description of a person's basic existence as ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘heart’."  My use of the term "conscience" will be intended to have the full force of the prevailing definitions of the term, though I (and the reader) must consider that the postulation of this or that term being understood as "basic existence" is attended necessarily by a fading to inexactitude as this equivalence is made the more stringent.  At this point I refer again to the previous post, wherein I wrote, as a presentation of examples:

“. . . the distinction between ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ pertaining to us is a distinction that dissolves, not in a forced combination, but in a coalescence occasioned by the consideration that each concept represents a swallowing of conceits by an ineffable and untraceable--and time-less and space-less--anomaly.

"By ‘anomaly’ I mean that there is no reason--save the will of God--that we ought to exist.  Similarly, there are no reasons why any of our characteristics ought to exist.  We can think of cause and effect, as we imagine they occur within us, but for us to imagine that we can trace such things back to some source or sources identified as our ‘true’ selves is the same as to say that we can comprehend our very existence."

If "conscience" is to be our understanding of the basic cohesive element of our described "selves," then simple prudence will recall that the appearance of this Hellenistic conceptuality is represented in somewhat more organic and imprecise forms in the centuries before Jesus and in the daily milieu of his ministry.  The notion of a person knowing that he or she has done wrong, and "burns" therefore with "shame" (or the like) must be understood as the equivalent of "conscience," and indeed it is this more rather than less visceral manifestation-type of conscience that accords most closely with this blog's theme--that when the accretions and distractions of our lives are scaped away, "Shame Appears."

Jesus, as a moral philosopher, is nothing if he is not a scraper-away.  Nothing, indeed, scrapes more deeply into the layers of convention than Jesus' scouring (and literalist-confounding) declarations that "you have heard" this or that.  We have heard, "thou shalt not kill" (and the like), yet Jesus probes the matter like no one else.  According to Jesus, to as much as verbally abuse another person is to transgress against the commandment against murder (and, in another context, Jesus tells us that to imagine a deed is as bad as to commit it.)

What must be considered about such probing accusations of Jesus against us is the fact that they are condemnations not to be extracted from the Scriptures themselves.  Literalists can chant all they want about how "the Jews" or "the religious authorities" or even "the unsaved" simply "did not understand" the implications of "you shall not murder" (though, ironically, the literalists themselves are the first to limit to "murder" the quaint traditional rendering "thou shalt not kill"), yet the letter of the Scriptures is quite precise in representing gradations of assault culminating in "murder."

No, the reasoning behind verbal abuse being the equivalent of murder is not to be found in the text, but in the "heart"--what we call most usually "conscience."  Jesus peels the matters of misdeed all the way back (or at least as far back as we can understand) and lays bare the "heart" of the "soul" (or the "soul" of the "heart", or whatever) as being "evil."  Here we might be tempted to find the Calvinist's "total depravity" (and to engage in the Calvinist's frantic work of renouncing "works" in favor of baffled babbling about unmerited grace), yet it is precisely in the harrowing recesses of our revealed evil nature that Jesus demands that we be perfect, even as our heavenly Father is perfect.

The inescapable implication of all this is the very fact that we cannot escape having been launched upon our life's journeys in the spattering and the surging of shame.  To be human is to be afflicted with shame, or at least this is to be the best humans and the most human we can be.  Nothing can be understood (or begin to be understood) without the throbbing of conscience as the firm foundation (irony of imagery intended) of our lives.  And at least conscience, properly addressed, can drive us to assess our existences as we ought--as existences undeserving of those very conceits about life that "the world" holds so dear.  And by "the world," I do not mean to echo the radio-preachers' railing against "Hollywood", or the foul language one encounters at work, or even the flesh-world-devil construct so conveniently externalized to the believer's Sunday-morning mindset.

In warning against "those very conceits about life that 'the world' holds so dear" (as I put it), Jesus really puts forth a set of notions consistent, not with the devoting of life, but with the surrendering of life.  Life is up and down and side to side.  Life is here and now and there and then.  On the contrary, the existence that Jesus tells us we must embrace is that very existence of being cast adrift, adrift in a measureless (and therefore incalculable and un-anticipatable) rush of experiences.  This is the existence in which it is truly the case that Jesus, who fulfills the Old Testament command that we love one another, issues us a New Commandment that we love one another.

There is no time and no space in the Jesus-defined realm--which means there is no limit to our guilt and no limit to God's mercy toward our guilt.  There is only the rush of exhaustion (or the rush of unbidden conceits to crowd great stretches of tedium) to define our "lives" (the latter term employed because we cannot really ever shed the conceit of life.)  Where we really exist is in the realm of shame navigated (or, to our discredit, not navigated) by conscience, and when we wobble unpredictably toward our better realizations we glimpse in the shadows of our conceits our true selves--creatures thrust onward by our Creator and creatures best flourishing in our Creator's estimation when wilting in our own efforts and our own eyes.

It would be nothing to me to say these things were they not flimsy approximations of what Jesus himself says, revealed to us when we simply listen to what Jesus says.  Our role as passive observers of our own lives--which, yes, is the inescapable implication of our everyday duty to surrender our own lives--is a role that is revealed to be less dismal than conceivably the case, when we remember the fact that even the time and space by which we measure our existences are not really elements due us.  To be called to do things, when we are truly incapable of as much as orienting ourselves to the doing of things, is the greatest of unmerited privileges, and the greatest of challenges.

In this realm of no-dimension, there is only the unmeasurable measure of shame, of failed conscience.  To be enlivened and cohered by an internalized knot of tension for being other than what we ought is all we supply to our existences.  Otherwise we are just the creations of a Creator who cannot fail to be a perfect Creator.  That we can be less than what we ought when we have such an origin is unfathomable, and added to this is the One Great Scenario of the Intolerable--that we were created by and through Jesus the Son of God, who did all this (and who sustains all this, and who suffers all this) in the sight of his Father.

Our only hope is an unmerited covenant with our Creator, and by "covenant" there is only the timeless and spaceless shame-conscience fusion, for that is what a covenant with God must be.  The only relevant dimensions can be the measureless depths to which God reaches for us, and the too-small-to-be-measured reach of our aspirations.  All else would be meaningless, yet a table for a covenant in the midst of the meaningless is what Jesus spreads for us.  Centuries have been spent in the arguments about the Table of the Lord, yet scarcely have we even begun to wonder what is implicit in the strange passive phrasings Jesus uses--phrasings that frustrate year after year after year of theologians' pronouncements about ages and dispensations and institutions of sacraments.

"This is my body," "this is my blood"--these are statements of existence, and these are statements that presume those elements of existence are timeless and ubiquitous.  Jesus suffered, and suffers, everything that has ever been or will be suffered, and he suffers shame for the failings of his Creation.  Why we should ever exist as such torments for our Savior is beyond us, but even this is dwarfed by our Savior's incomprehensible determination to present us as offerings to his Father--to be the preserved among those given him by his Father.

For this is what should really strike our consciences.  We persist in our evils not merely as Jesus seeks to give us the things of God, but even more horribly do we persist as Jesus seeks to give us to the things of God.

Ever Receding Representations

In the previous post I wrote:

"The flow of our analysis comes from God outwards, and starts therefore with our recognition that we are at base lost and befuddled---it is to be hoped that we are groping to some understandings as we make our way through life.  Instead (and unfortunately) we are tempted to imagine our existence as well-founded, and from there we construct conceits about God that we offer simultaneously as worship and as excuses for reaching up with the self-same minds that we have trusted to frame what we are reaching for."

It is from the above basis that we can begin to conceptualize what we are--though perhaps it would be best to state foremost that the resisted temptation to form such concepts is really the matter at hand.  We don't know what we are, and we never will (at least on this plane.)

This difficulty we face is neither a difficulty of terminology, nor a difficulty of misplaced ideas.  The epitome of terminology as a problem for theologians on this matter is the question of the "soul" of the human being versus the "spirit" of the human being.  The latter difficulty--that of "misplaced" ideas--is displayed in some theologians' pronouncement that we do not "have" souls, we "are" souls.

Certainly we do not want to "lose" our souls, as Jesus warns, but neither do we want to be "lost" souls.  It would seem prudent for us to consider that we do not have categorical knowledge of our own selves, but at the same time it would seem imprudent for us to assume that the matter is laid before us as a thing of mere directionless befuddlement.  For example, the distinction between "soul" and "spirit" pertaining to us is a distinction that dissolves, not in a forced combination, but in a coalescence occasioned by the consideration that each concept represents a swallowing of conceits by an ineffable and untraceable--and time-less and space-less--anomaly.

By "anomaly" I mean that there is no reason--save the will of God--that we ought to exist.  Similarly, there are no reasons why any of our characteristics ought to exist.  We can think of cause and effect, as we imagine they occur within us, but for us to imagine that we can trace such things back to some source or sources identified as our "true" selves is the same as to say that we can comprehend our very existence.  We are either collections of minimal original characteristics, or we are single original characteristics--it is the "original" business that resides in the realm of the ineffable.

What we ARE, if we are ever to think of the matter as our business at all, is the collapsing of our conceits about ourselves.  It is the experience of the "collapse," not its placement in our experience of time or its direction in our experience of space, that is crucial.  We have much (far, far too much, it usually seems) in our psyches, but these constructs of our thought-lives (and the endless successions of reappraisal we make of our thought-lives) are not for our purposes what we must think of as our souls (to use an ancient definition of "psyche".)  Our souls (or, in deference to the theologians, the souls that we are) are collapsed conceits--as we would view them--of our thought-lives.

What is true regarding the notion of our souls applies as well to all conceits about ourselves.  As the conceivable disappears, the true remains--this is the implication of any acknowledgment of creation.  Either that, or any protest we make of how we believe in a Creator God is really just an assertion that we have a divine Senior Partner who fashioned us on a matrix of objective truth by which we puny humans and our big, big God are measured.  As our souls are the disappeared vapors of our conceits (if ever we are to think of our souls), so also are our "spirits."  Jesus asserts that we all navigate a teeming landscape of spirits, and it is with a maddening naturalness that Jesus describes spirits coming and going within a person.  To think of ourselves as "spirits" is a thought that can approach truth only to the extent that the very ineffable "soul" of the concept of "spirit" (disappearing over every orientation of thought-horizon at the very instant of contemplation) is the matter in question.

So also must we view every notion of what we are at bottom (or in our deepest recesses--or whatever.)  The heart (or any other organ thought pivotal by the ancients) is just a lump of tissue, yet if our souls or spirits are thought to be rightly-positioned, they must be in accord with a "heart" that is in turn deposited in the correct position (with the "treasure" of Jesus' hearers--in heaven.)  Needless to say, I can trot out the notion in English of "heart of hearts" to claim that a person's "heart" is as much an ineffable, ever-collapsing, ever-conceptually-receding representation of our basic existence as anything else.

For the purposes of this blog, I will contend that a person's conscience is as suitable (and as ineffable) a description of a person's basic existence as "soul," "spirit," or "heart"--and insofar as I have described these things (if they are things ever to be contemplated) as things that disappear into the vortex of Creation's implications, I will assume that the reader will not expect some definitive assertion that all of these concepts of "basic existence" are the same.  Of that I am unqualified to speak, and so is the reader.