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.
No comments:
Post a Comment