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.
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