Joy Passing

The thrust of "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is humanity's existence as the self-experienced pattern of innumerable arcs or cycles of varying duration in simultaneous expression.  The thrust of "Aware, Away, Awry" is humanity's existence typified by those arcs or cycles impressing themselves on us as foundational experiences upon which we pile increasingly tenuous yet evocative conceits.  The thrust of the present blog, reckoning that the above-described phenomena are attended to by us fallible beings, is that upon any examination--either relatively frail or relatively robust in terms of truthfulness--"Shame Appears."

Any examination of the roots of humanity's shame before God, reckoning that the things of God are to be understood in terms of absolutes rather than in terms of quanta, will reveal that it is fatuous to contend that humanity was ever free of shame.  All entities that are not God are either shamed by that fact, or are encompassed by such effulgence of God's righteousness as to be understandable by us as being in fact God.  Jesus is God, and he is also understandable by us as distinguishable from God, and we cannot put together the first two clauses of this sentence without giving ourselves cause to experience the shame of our inadequacy.

On the other hand, we shame ourselves and our species by contending that Adam was ever without sin--or without the attendant cause for shame.  Adam is never described other than as giving God cause to respond to his first man's foibles.  Adam indeed was from the start "very good" rather than perfect.  Adam was also--as we are as well in this creaturely life--saddled with predispositions to take life's rousings of us to consciousness, and life's proddings of us to awareness, as the unquestionable (and scarcely conscious) institution of horizons against which our fortunes are displayed.

Adam sought, after that one described sin that is recounted so often as the cause of The Fall, to find comfort in remedy.  Adam sought to cover himself, and Adam sought to hide.  Both of these courses seemed preferable than to stand naked in shame before his God.  What is lost to us--when we make of Adam and Eve cartoon-characters rather than prototypes of real people--is the fact that the take-hopeful-action-rather-than-remain-in-the-despair-of-shame phenomenon is always, and has ever been, the condition of the human creature cursed to be not God.  If a creature is not cursed, and not expected to respond as one cursed, before a perfect God who extends only the praise, "very good," then the notion of being "sinful" has no substance.  How can a creature possess an iota of sin--no, less than an iota, for "iota" forces itself upon us as a quantum notion--and be described as other than "sin full"?

And so we creatures seek to squirm away from the despair of shame by lunging for horizons that we define for ourselves, by criteria just as murky as any far-away prospect to which we aspire, though as much as the thin comfort of swallowing hard, or of allowing ourselves to sit down and think for a moment, is as far away from us, and as murky in substance, as any grandiose scheme we might have in which we will redeem ourselves and find happiness.  It is small wonder that Jesus describes a desired kingdom that has no location, and a narrow path that has no direction, for it is our very desire to move, to act, to ponder, to do anything to conjure up some modicum of joy out of our shameful despair, that is the source of our still greater shame and despair.

This foundational quandary--and the pain that it brings to us as creatures--is what Jesus submitted himself to as a human.  There is much silly talk about how Jesus "became" this or that in the course of his life, as though he was ever less than the perfect Savior--or ever less than perfectly qualified to be so.  Just as Jesus might have beckoned to legions of angels to come to his defense, so also might he have deluged the minds of every person living with the sere truth of every question ever asked by preacher or lay person or wondering child.  The Jesus who created the universe and all in it was the Savior of the universe always, not just in the thirty-odd years he was "Jesus of Nazareth."

What Jesus submitted himself to on earth was the life-course, the moment-by-moment course, of existence that is the lot of the created being.  Jesus went from moment to moment, and in so doing experienced such joy as we humans might ever have.  The Jesus who dreaded the Crucifixion was the same Jesus who anticipated eagerly the meal he might have with his disciples just the evening before the trial.  We might call this nonsense, if we ignore the fact that our fascination with the unfolding of events in our own lives, and our conceits about how we can make such things unfold, is as old as Adam.  We can talk about sinfulness and righteousness, and about good and evil, but what we really yearn for in such matters is the chance to actualize our conceits.  Such change--such permutation in time and space, even if only in our minds--is what seems to succor us in our horror of the alternative--to stand naked in shame before God.

And Jesus was transfixed, in our stead, before God.  This was the experience Jesus was willing to undergo (displayed for us at the end and also in the wendings of a life to proceed it)--the experience we are unwilling to undergo ourselves.  The nothing-experience, the no-time, no-place, no-musing-nor-conjecture experience of shame.  Nothing to occupy us in our despair.

Joy is as diaphanous and as passing as the sages have ever called it.  Joy is despair in motion.

The Whisper of Satan

The remarkable thing about Judas' series of interactions with the devil in Luke and John is how mundane it is.

Luke's "then entered Satan into Judas" at the time of Judas' approach to the "chief priests and captains" is the parallel of John's account of "the devil having now put into the heart of Judas" to betray Jesus.  Only later in John is it said of Judas that "Satan entered into him."  The degree or the timing of the devil's influence over Judas--to say nothing of how the moralists will assign responsibility--is perhaps a series of puzzles, but if the Judas-Satan nexus is remarkable for anything at all, it is how organic, malleable, and variable it might be.

Christian commentators--wedded as they are to artifices of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and also to conceits about the assignable individuality of persons--can only either stride metaphorically along, hands in pockets and whistling distractedly, or pause so as to render the question of Judas' responsibility separable from the rest of the Gospels, a discrete question about how it might be admitted that This Is A Problem.  Christianity has no use for Jesus' description of our self-conceits as houses riddled with door and windows and traversed by myriad entities.

In truth, there is no such thing as a neutral thought, or even a neutral observation.  This is not merely because we are limited, but also because we are under influences that assail us beyond the limits of our understanding.  There is no thought upon which we light that is unattended by the praise of an aggregate of internal voices (whether near or peripheral), and in this din there is always the whisper of Satan.

The Very Demon Itself

The "self" is a curated phantasm.  The "self" is an affront to coherence.

The self cannot be seated in the spiritual realm, and it cannot be located on any contiguous dimension in the physical realm.  The self is a thing that in its very "thing-ness" is a degradation of its ineffable origin, and also it is a perversion of any confrontation with the universe, which for the purposes of the self's "thing-ness" must be a universe divided into that which is within the self, and that which is without.

Chiefly, the self is a locus of desire, an amorphous cloud of desire permeated by an infinitude of permeable and endlessly permeated miasmas--miasmas of what can be imagined and what is unimaginable.  The self's greatest desire is to wince away from consideration of itself as--unfathomably--either an entity possessing and expressing appetites, or an indescribable non-entity generated by imposed appetites.

It is upon the matter of desire that the conjured existence of the self is of most relevance to the Scriptures and to Jesus.  The self generates a futile, frantic whorl of transient reflections within which it resides and by which it defines itself--there is that which is within, and also that which is without, the self.  This self-devised separation, this threshold, is that upon which crouches the sin-demon of Genesis.

The sin-demon of Genesis is the self's own creation, and the self by its own possession and own expression is that very demon itself.