The Agony of Existence

Jesus was hoisted up on a cross.  He was not killed with fire or sword.  I do not intend to make too much of any theory I would have about the manner of his death, but here I intend merely to relate how the imagery of the Crucifixion has impressed itself upon me and my other notions.

If any notion of Jesus as a shaker-up of humanity's conceits is pursued with vigor, that notion can scarcely escape an imagery of Jesus as incorporating both fire and sword within himself.  "Sword" is the most familiar of these conceits, evoking thoughts of how Jesus' unyielding criticism of our self-satisfactions confronts us with unsettling realizations.  Among the most poignant of those realizations is the fact that family (along with other conceits of emotional proximity) is a hindrance to our pursuit of proper orientation.  Our forcing upon Genesis the notion that Christianity ought to be a "family-centered" faith is manifestly unwarranted, but as if to seal that realization Jesus tears apart our notions of family as foundational to proper Jesus-following.

Jesus is the sword, the knife, the conceptual edge that sunders every preconceived connection (indeed, in the final analysis, every notion of necessary connection) between anything that exists in the universe and anything else that exists in the universe.  The universe is an ever-refreshed, incomprehensible, un-creaturely-encompassed congeries--a well of potentialities that we view as consisting of limited potentialities (the "laws" of nature or of physics) even as Jesus ascribes to us (or to the posited "us" that had at least a mustard-seed of faith) the power to transmute without limit at will.

And then there is "fire."  Everything in the universe is describable as "in the universe," and by that very inescapable definition all is connected to all.  Just as anything that we call a "thing" is separate from any other thing--at least upon the level of definition in question--so also is every "thing" connected to all others.  Nothing has any existence that is not encompassed within the realm--however attenuated--of the effect of every other thing, and as long as the universe endures every thing in it will be possessed of an energy imprint, a "fire" of itself.

Jesus is the fire, the searing energy, the vital fusion that binds all together, and this fact must perfuse any notion we have of our existence as a constellation of parcelings-out of things ostensibly separate one from another.  To recall Jesus' disdain for our preoccupations with "family," there is Jesus' strikingly passive description of Mary as the "mother" of "the disciple standing by, whom he loved"--as though it were more the case that Jesus was describing a pre-existing effectual reality, rather than assigning some adoptive familial relationship.

We are all of us of a family of all of us, and simultaneously we are none of us members of any family that can claim any validity other than how this or that "family" is an expression of the will of God.  We are all of us separate from all and bound to all, and the will of God as expressed by Jesus cuts everything apart as with a blade and fuses everything together as with a flame.

Indeed, we must reckon always that any scenario, any packaging-within-intellect, is describable and therefore analyzable in innumerable ways.  A hawk soaring in search of prey is describable as inhabiting the sky, or perhaps inhabiting the earth that is shrouded in the sky, but that is scarcely to exhaust the possible descriptions of the hawk's habitation.  To us the hawk is above us, or is above (in a much smaller relative increment) the earth, but we have decided that reference to the horizontal is what matters.  In the immediacy of flight, the hawk's habitation can just as well be understood as being in reference to the vertical.

The hawk can inhabit a column of rising air driven upwards by its heating over a relatively dark--that is, sunlight-absorbing--field or grove.  The hawk's world is a relative verticality of the earth's gravity, of its fiery core's contribution to the energy milieu, of the relative local quality of the earth's surface below, of the rising air, of the solar and cosmic radiation playing about the atmosphere's upper reaches.  We can imagine our world, or other worlds, or even a universe of worlds, and we can probe such matters in our thoughts or with inventions wrought with our thoughts, but we cannot escape our common creaturely finitude with the hawk--or with the God-numbered sparrows whose worlds are haunted by (and partially defined by) the terror of deadly silhouettes soaring above.

At best we can challenge ourselves with our limited understandings of the universe.  Or perhaps better yet, we can challenge ourselves about how we are loathe to give up our conceits once we have formed them, or have inherited them.  Genesis tells us that man and woman will become one flesh, yet other than leaving short-lived DNA traces (or, lamentably, rather more long-lived sexually-transmitted diseases, perhaps laced even with incorporated DNA from the previous hapless host), man and woman do not "really" become one flesh.  In the conceit espoused by Jesus, we do not even become "one" with the food that we eat--though of course we have learned much about how ingested nutrients can become part of the eater's body.

Inescapably, the process of giving up prior conceits--in our discussion, the testing of prior notions about how things are connected or not, separate or not--is a process to which we must be always open.  The "one flesh" that the man and woman become might quite easily be understood as the conceptus, or--to challenge prior notions even further--the "one flesh" can be the gamete-inhabited, nutrient-infused, cell-and-milieu commingling of the involved couple's coupling.  That this mostly-fluid "flesh" might be held conventionally to be outside of the couple's "bodies" proper is perhaps an outdated, parochial view of our bodies.  As a further consideration, a collection of evidence has been gathered that--for all practical purposes--the individual human's mostly-fluid gut biome is an "organ" as crucial as any other.  Add to this a body of emerging evidence that the gut biome can have profound effects on the mental and psychological states of the individual, and it can be considered at least that we have much--perhaps infinitely much--to learn about our very selves.

And into this world of many thousands of years, and many billions of lives, comes Jesus as God incarnate.  This is the world, as we cannot deny, in which we think we know things that we do not, and in which we do not even know the scope of things we do not know.  As the snake was raised up in the desert, rendered in bronze to be both imposing and impotent, so also was Jesus raised up.  Was the snake transported from the dust to an imposing height, or transfixed into powerless rendition for all to see?  Does not the same manner of question--whether we see Jesus raised to power or shorn of power, or both--confront us with the Crucifixion?

I have for years wondered about Jesus' declaration, at that final earthly meal, that he would not drink of the fruit of the vine until he did so in the heavenly kingdom.  Yet later he takes from a sponge of sour wine.  Is this just a matter of confusion, or of conflicting accounts?  Or is not Jesus, who is "raised up," deprived thereby of the merest powers to which we lay claim daily with nary a thought?  Jesus on the Cross could not eat, he could not--as we would in any decency understand it--drink (though he might try), and then finally he could not lift his frame, or scarcely even breathe.  Though a critic might contend that Jesus did indeed "drink," and that he held back enough breath to cry aloud in finality--effecting, so it would seem, a self-euthanasia in his distress--such criticism might be sliding easily and conveniently by without considering how Jesus' death (and, most importantly, his confrontation of his death) is incorporated into his ministry.

Jesus came with an expression of power, and I have tried to present a possible (among, admittedly, many other possibilities) set of pictures of that power.  Jesus wields a blade that cuts apart all of our notions about how existence is to be parceled up, and Jesus wields a flame that sears together all of the things that it pleases us to be kept apart.  Insofar as our experience of existence--indeed the experiences of us, and of the animals, and of the plants, and of who-knows-what-else--hinge of necessity on having some graspable ideas of conjoined and separated phenomena (as long as we exist on this plane) we--and the Jesus who made us--will endure suffering.  Things do not come together as we would wish, and things do not stay apart as we would wish, and in our permeating faithlessness we are powerless to remedy our state.  This is not just philosophizing--the "things that do not come together as we would wish" can be jigsaw puzzles, or they can be political federations that might or might not protect us from the most searing of horrors, or they might be things even worse.

And the Jesus who came with an expression of power met his death in humanity's most artfully-devised imposition of powerlessness.  Time being as nothing to the divine, we must understand that the Crucifixion is shrunken in our conceits when we think of it as something that happened.  As long as things can--as we understand them--"happen," then the Crucifixion is always happening, and will always happen.  The Jesus who gave us Creation--who gave us the experience of Creation wrapped in a "very good" world's worth of supportive ministrations--has endured throughout the agony of existence.

In Incalculable Proportion

In the Gospel of Mark is the following parable:

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.  For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear.  But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come. (4:26-29)

This parable of Jesus, which is found only in Mark, is a very simple one--so simple indeed, that is has seemed almost self-evident.  The work of the Word of God, when placed in the heart of humans, does its work imperceptibly--or some such is the standard preacher's notion of the parable.  Of course, if God is he who casts the seed, then it would seem ridiculous to say, of the the seed's growth, that "he knoweth not how."

The above parable centers on the inability of imperfect persons to understand the processes that surround them.  We do not know how things work, any more than we know where things come from.  In this regard we can begin to understand the miracle of Creation in a more wholesome manner.  God as the Creator is not he who begins Creation (and then, presumably, will end Creation, or transmute it fundamentally)--at least, that is not the proper understanding of "beginning" and "ending" in the kingdom of God.  God is always beginning and ending things, although it would be more proper to say that God is the author of the ineffable processes that support our self-perceived existences, existences that we strew with our own conceits of beginnings and endings.  In any attempt we might make to conceive of a reality overseen by God, we must understand our pitiful and ultimately indefensible parcelings-up of reality as reflections of our inherently limited conceptions.

It is to our shame that we seize on pretexts by which to claim that the divinely-ordered Creation is presented to us in graspable parts.  When given insights into the trends of Creation's activity, we try to find therein assurances to which we cannot legitimately lay claim.  We can remember God's declaration to Noah, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease"--though apparently God indeed made the day cease, and the sun stand still, on an occasion in which his people were engaged in defeating their enemies in battle.

Moreover, the effectual ceasing of seedtime and harvest was threatened (and occasionally levied) against the people of God if they disobeyed--witness the innumerable references to famine and to the heavens being shut up so as to withhold their rain.  What happens with the vagaries of nature is always a mixture of patterns and anomalies--or at least it seems so to us, as we try to sort through the "parcelings-out" to which I referred above.

In the existence we experience, the inchoate pattern of Creation that we introduce frequently to our minds--the "remembrance," as it were, of God starting the world (along with the less serene remembrance of his potential to end the world)--is a pattern that we ought better to see as ever-present and all-encompassing.  God is more than just the maker, the suspender of the universe upon a weakly-conceptualized "nothing," as we would have it.  God is the author of all proportion, such that it is incessantly God's will that prescribes the effectual content of every conceit we might possess.

What is important to understand here is that there is a penetrating implication to our transient self-assessments, an often disregarded implication that bears with crucial weight upon the idea of the "kingdom of God."  We want to know that we are in the kingdom of God, but it is the very phenomenon of our attempted self-assignments to that desired end that is the phenomenon that frustrates that end.  The kingdom of God is that which happens--that is to say, that which "reigns" rather than lies there as a territory--when we are unaware of it.  This "unawareness" is a much a feature of the "kingdom life" as is the agonizing fact that Jesus will tell us only whether we are near or far, and will tell us only that striving for a goal of "narrow-gate-ness" is the "way."

God is the author of all proportionality.  This is the aspect of God's continual process of creating Creation that is most crucial to our obtaining the kingdom, while yet it is the aspect of our existences that frustrates us most acutely.  We can imagine that we are near the kingdom or far from it, and we can imagine that we are close or far on some measure of sanctity or righteousness or orthodoxy, but envisioning ourselves as suspended between Heaven and Hell, even when assigning ourselves the greatest imaginable proximity to the latter, is to arrogate to ourselves a view-point as suspended apart on some god-like vantage.

It is for this reason that it makes sense that Jesus says to us that we must be forgiven our trespasses by those we have wronged before we might approach the altar (however we might deign to conceive of it.)  We might never receive such forgiveness (just as, to put the matter in more comprehensive terms, we might never do well enough in recalling our trespasses to begin with.)  The preachers will tell their congregants that they can only give a good faith effort to elicit such forgiveness, at which point (assuming the wronged parties answer with a refusal) the individual congregants have done all they can--and the wronged parties will have to answer separately to God for their stony countenances.  (As a separate consideration, certain of the Protestant preachers will assure their congregants that salvation is obtained only by faith--as though the horrid punishments Jesus describes awaiting those who cannot obtain forgiveness from their fellow humans are to be taken as punishments of only relative horridness.)

Again, we might never receive forgiveness from those we have wronged.  A person who will square himself or herself to the above demands made by Jesus will realize quickly that questions of sin or of guilt, while providing the conceptualities that illustrate our distance from the kingdom of God, provide no calculable assessment of that distance.  God's sovereign grasp of all proportionality crushes all notions we have of our standing before him.  We are left not standing on some basis of sin or guilt, and we are left not crushed under a burden of sin or guilt--we are left, rather, ground into shame, soaked in shame, perfused by shame, obliterated in all natural-world metaphors by an ether of shame.

This is when the ineffable nature of the kingdom of God--the seed-growing-we-know-not-how nature of the kingdom of God--is revealed to us (or rather, glimpsed by us from afar.)  When we slip from our arduously-maintained self-awarenesses, when we succumb to exhaustions of all types, when we collapse effectively insensate from our batterings of self-doubt and self-incrimination, then all that suspends us in our existences is the will of God--the will that prescribes proportion in the unmeasurable potentialty encompassing Creation.

We cannot bear the weight of our shame--and yet we wake from troubled sleep, or are roused from troubled reverie.  The journey of life has gone on.  The march toward death has gone on.  That which is nearest to us through all this--nearer than kin, or friend, or sentiment, or memory, or aspiration--is that mirror of our conceptualized existence that is ever our side.  This is the mirror of shame, the realization of the created thing as being other than the Creator--the realization that the divine, the only Existence that "ought" (in our feeble use of the term) to exist, is conceptualizable by us in only the feeblest of terms precisely because we are separated from the divine in incalculable proportion.

God Has No Edge and We Have No Center

A new short blog description, which I intend to show is appropriate both for this blog's approach to the divine, and for this blog's approach to humanity:

God has no edge and we have no center.

How Satan Thinks or Worse

I've got to come to grips with a certain concept that undergirds this blog's emphasis on "shame."  There is being right before God, and then there is not being right before God.  While of course our hopes for "being right" before God hinge on the proffered phenomenon of salvation, it is essential that we begin with a settled notion of our moral state beforehand.

Our individual moral states are part and parcel of our thought lives, even as we must admit the possibility that a "thought life" can consist not merely of intellectual content, but in practicality can consist of a less definite openness, both to learning new things, and to being willing to let arise to consciousness things that have yet to register with us.

Fundamentally, our less-than-perfect moral states are functions of us being mere created things--or at least we must consider the situation to be so.  So also is the case for all created things.  All created things are less-than-perfect moral beings, and--paradoxically though it might seem to us in spates of self-castigation--all created things are less than absolutely evil (if we reckon in prudence that nothing is absolute but God.)  If pass or fail be the applicable conceptuality, then of course we fail absolutely the test, but in this case it is we ourselves who have provided the conceptuality, or have decided to implement it in this or that context.  The final judgment is God's.

I say all this because I think it is detrimental to our states of moral apprehension to understand ourselves as degraded, even degraded to the lowest possible state of which we can conceive, against some imagined background of what we might call absolute evil.  In such a case we can rate ourselves as being hideously evil, but we have allowed to ourselves a conceptuality of participation within a context of at least relative dimensions.  If we are almost as bad as the absolutely evil, we can be ashamed of our failings, but we can assail ourselves at the same time as being apt to wallow in shame when we ought at least to contrast ourselves against the absolutely evil by taking such righteous stands as we might.

There is no absolutely evil--else there would be a balanced counterpart to the absolutely good.  God is the absolutely good, with peer neither in dimension nor quality.  Neither is there value in rating Satan, that creature of God, as absolutely evil.  An absolutely evil Satan (as though it were any of our business to ponder the qualities of Satan according to our conceits) is a conceptualized Satan who is only by a strained artifice conceivable as the father of those who ally themselves to him.  That God in an ineffable miracle of grace might call us his children is of course beyond understanding, but it ought scarcely to seem to us that we can become Satan's children (even if only metaphorically) by only a sort of anti-miracle.  We as created beings become the children of the created Satan by the grimiest commonalities--commonalities of us to each other and also of us to Satan.

Indeed, an absolutely evil Satan understood as a person is as detrimental to an understanding of Jesus' teachings as is the modern "liberal" understanding of Satan as merely as force of evil, or a description of evil itself.  In neither instance does the notion of a fellow creature stalking us with eternal implications really hold.  Eve is not tempted by a disembodied force--she is joined in creaturely conspiracy and creaturely motivation.  Conversely, the Satan of Genesis or of Job cannot be understood but as a creature who desires vindication.  When Jesus castigates Peter with "Get thee behind me, Satan" and "thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men," Jesus is assigning Peter's conceits to the realm of the creaturely and (in the ultimate pass or fail duality) to a realm in which all creatures might vie perversely for the title of the most evil.

I mention all this because "shame," as I alluded to above, can be taken often to be some sort of element of self-assessment easily overdone.  In a universal realm in which evil is understood to be absolute, a human being of low moral state can resort as easily to a determined stance to live up to being created in the image of God, or to a determined stance of expiating guilt through being angry, though "sinning not," at the injustices in the world, as to arrive at a determination that shame ought to be the ever-present undergirding of a creature's moral self-assessment.  If, however, one (even if only in a moment of wrenching self-assessment, as would befit Peter) might be the one among all God's creatures who is the most evil, shame is the last and most undeniable thread connecting one to any hope that exists.

Shame is without dimension and without direction, and that Jesus speaks to creatures who must embrace shame is the most logical reason why Jesus would assign dimensionless tasks and directionless paths.

Crouching Shadows in the Mist

I must say something about the concept of "thought" before I try to describe the thoughts in the first part of John.  We are going to be dealing with the notion of "made in the image of God" if we are going to be dealing with the obvious Genesis parallels in John, and it is important that we understand what must be the character of "thought" in any creature not God.

In Luke 19, the "chief among the publicans" Zacchaeus makes the declaration before Jesus (who has chosen the "sinner" Zacchaeus from the crowd and deigned to be hosted by him) that he will give half of his goods--presumably obtained by his profession as a tax collector--to the poor.  In addition, Zacchaeus declares that he will restore fourfold to anyone he has swindled.  Jesus declares that, "This day is salvation come to this house, forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham."

In Luke 23, "one of the malefactors which were hanged" with Jesus declares his own sinfulness and also the innocence of Jesus, and says, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom."  "And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise."

I will return to these episodes later, but for now suffice it to say that these episodes speak (in as clear a manner as is usual in the Scriptures) of a benediction from Jesus to the effect that real, eternal salvation --or at least a momentary status of earthly eligibility for that real, eternal salvation--is possessed by the characters I mentioned above.  The tenor of those interactions will be important to us later.

We reckon that there are limitations to our thoughts.  We forget things.  We make unwarranted connections between things.  We shove some things aside and fixate upon others.  We embrace what satisfies us emotionally, and we shrink from what frightens or repels us.  We habituate ourselves to what is familiar to us.  None of these considerations are all that surprising.

Unfortunately, neither is it all that surprising that we--each, individually--reckon that we possess a discrete cognitive self that thinks things.  To be possessed of multiple personalities, or, to be more germane to this topic, to be possessed of multiple internalized personages, is (as we reckon) to be psychologically disturbed.  We can entertain internalized debates, but we reckon this latter distinction among communicating internal voices to be an intellectual tool, a representation of opposing thoughts phrased in contrasting--perhaps inchoate--statements.  But to say that the voices of multiple personalities debate inside of us is the language of insanity, or at least intellectual instability.

What, however, are we to make of the "stability" of a mind that concludes one thing one moment, and then (upon recall of a forgotten consideration) arrives at a completely opposite conclusion the next moment?  And what are we to make of situations in which we forget something as a convenience to our psychological placidity, and then recall that same something when in the extremity of some distress?  The same Gospel of Luke (chapter 15) has the Prodigal Son as one who "came to himself" squatting in a distant pigsty (or "came to his senses" while squatting, or some such.)  We must reckon in humility just what it is that each of us calls our "selves," and, if we are really to confront the implications of being created creatures under a creator God, we must reckon that this same humility will--of frightening necessity--cast us down before looming prospects of insanity (or its ilk) and demon-possession (or its ilk.)  "Ilk" is a term I use because I really don't know what I'm talking about--and neither does any creature not God.

What is important here to us is for us to consider how the above might compare to the actual architecture, and actual implications, of Jesus' teachings in the Gospels.  Are we really disjointed, wavering, apparent "selves" that--properly understood--are momentary critical masses of congregating thoughts, masses composed in part of sentiments that arise we know not where, masses deprived in part of sentiments that seem lost to us (or that have escaped us unnoticed?)  If we are really to think about the God we are not, does not the apparent proximity of this overwhelming idea crush--as if by pressure of an intangible ether--any notions we might have of what we think we understand, any notions of what it is of ourselves that is doing the ostensible understanding?

Certainly Jesus does not think we really understand anything, as the two examples above demonstrate.  Zacchaeus' declaration that he will give half of his to the poor is admirable, but it is not associated intrinsically with him being a "son of Abraham."  And as for paying back the swindled fourfold?  Unless Zacchaeus is intending to defend his practices before the Roman authorities (which seems scarcely consonant with the "son of Abraham" designation) and is intending to insist on at least fourfold compensation to anyone adjudged to have been wronged by Zacchaeus, then one must wonder how he can make good on his vow.  Any other of the "sons of Abraham" from which he has wrung taxes can join in a virtual class action that would amount to Zacchaeus owing fourfold of all he has collected (or eightfold, if he manages to disburse half his wealth to the poor before the lawyers get to it.)

Zacchaeus is babbling.  We all babble--and in matters of religion there is, moment by moment, only more or less babble from us.  Even our most sober moments of theological reflection are infused with babble, and we do Jesus a disservice when we refuse to give our treatments of religious topics the skepticism they deserve.  Unfortunately, we are overcome often by our fierce desire to have simplicity and clarity, even when they are least likely to be had.  Witness the bizarre craving for simplicity and clarity that is evident often in treatments of The Good Thief on his cross.

The only thing that seems clear to the Good Thief is his own (and his companion's) guilt juxtaposed against Jesus' innocence.  Just how the Good Thief arrives at this certainty of Jesus' unfair punishment (when he himself was probably being tormented in some dungeon during Jesus' trial) is unknown to us, but this is a Bible "story," after all.  It is what is simple about this story that is important.  The Good Thief knows that he is guilty of sin, and he knows that he must make supplication to heaven for forgiveness.  As it is (and as I have described before), the thief's plea of "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom," could be a dying, desperate person's petition to any of the apostles destined to rule over one of the twelve tribes of Israel.  That Jesus responds with, "To day shalt thou be with me in paradise," is reassuring, but this reassurance is not contingent upon any hair-splitting over when the "kingdom" will be realized (or, indeed, contingent upon any later New Testament eschatology.)

Zacchaeus and the Good Thief speak, like all of us, out of imperfect understanding and out of imperfect grasp of the nature of each of our own momentary congregations of sensations, impulses, proclivities, and memories that constitute our "selves."  This is the necessary predicate of attempting to understand anything, and I have presented it here most particularly because it will bear on our treatment of the first part of John, which is of course so reflective of Genesis themes.

And Genesis describes us as made in the image of God, the God who says of that which he alone can create, "Let us make."  God is the quintessential co-existence of the singular and the plural.  We can call the "Let us" phraseology the "plural of majesty" if we like, but we ought at that very moment of utterance to be caught short by how presumptuous we have been.  Why is the God who is greater than the very concept of unity to be denied overlordship of the concept of plurality, as though in the purview of God the apparent conflict would be insuperable?

And if we are made in the image of God--imperfect in quality, as we assume prudently--are we not conglomerations of singular and plural?  How many times must we be admonished to be single in our devotion to God, before we will recognize that a multitude--a malleable and transient multitude--of sinful self-parts strain individually and in confederations to seize control of that supposed whole, individual "self" who we enshrine in our conceits?

Our thoughts, like the babblings of the tax collector and of the thief, are convocations of disparate voices within ourselves, and our "selves" are congregations of many person-like parts, some as innocent (or at least as little-worn) as our infant selves, some as familiar as our various day-to-day self-conceptions, and some as alien--or we hope as alien--as the crouching shadows in the Genesis mist.