Additionally, we can never address concepts without tainting them with our impure predispositions. We do not really know the truth, we cannot really express the truth, and we cannot do either without behaving, thinking, feeling, or reacting other than how we should. This is what it is to be not God, and to be not God is a shameful thing. We might call such a judgment unfair, and yet the actualized "we" who would be thus in operation would be an imperfect "we." We might as well accept the fact that, while "sin" might be too strong a word to describe our original inadequacy (especially as "sin" is described usually in terms of some discrete offense), nonetheless shame--even if infinitesimal beyond our grasp of "smallness"--is ever present in us.
When we entertain concepts we behave shamefully, even if this source of shame is the frustration we feel in finding ourselves less than perfect in thus addressing the subjects of thought--and even if this frustration is what we can find in some way laudable insofar as it goads us to further explorations. Similar to this is the frustration (and perhaps innumerable other less-than-perfect mental states) involved in meditating upon things we think we know, or upon puzzles we think we can crack.
Such shameful imperfection trails behind us in everything we have done and experienced in life. Concepts (and meditations thereon), and impressions, and inklings, and feelings, and responses, and urges--all of the elements of our experience-lives burrowing back into the unremembered depths of our existences from the first--are in some manner shameful. Only the inestimable and unrecoverable mystery of our origin might claim to be free of shame, and the very collecting-together of a consciousness by which to claim innocence would extinguish by its imperfect assembly any vestige of that claim.
The teaching from Jesus, to become like the little child, is instructive rather than directive. We cannot become like the little child, in some comforting sacerdotal or declarative sense, any more than we can possess faith in that immeasurably small way that by Jesus' definition would be immeasurably powerful. We can only reckon, when considering the "little child" directive, that we must consider ourselves as unmoored from our lost birthright as innocent children as we are unmoored from our contentions that we understand reality or our place in reality. Jesus, when he directed Nicodemus to be "born again," did not provide him with a new parentage--Jesus told Nicodemus that he did not even understand the earthly things of which Jesus spoke, to say nothing of heavenly things. We, as Nicodemus, are not properly-oriented children of the earth, and we are not properly-oriented children of heaven--we are shameful creatures given as our true patrimony continual life-chances to cry out in our shame.
Of course, to live a life and to "cry out in our shame" is really to live out that cry in innumerable fashions and in every possible instance. We will always make something shameful of every fashion and instance--for such it is to be human, and the living with and processing of shame is what we must do beyond everything else. From the ground up, from first infantile urges to the most rarified of meditations, we must live with shame, for that is the only way to live. When told, "Go and learn what this means, I require mercy and not sacrifice," we are set upon a course of assimilation of that idea that is a course dragged inevitably through the dross of our shameful natures. When the young man responds correctly to the notion that God values mercy over sacrifice, the young man can be no closer than not far from the kingdom of heaven--for shame will always (as we might understand the matter) stand in our way.
And, as I have written, shame and not sin is what bedeviled our first ancestor from the start--shame arising from the insensible, rather than sin describable as this or that act. This is the story of Genesis, and this is the story that finds its resolution in the Passion of Christ. The redemptive history of humanity did not begin with The Fall and the ejection from the Garden, any more than our possibility of redemption was consummated in the shadows of Gethsemane. This is an important point, for nothing shows better how off-kilter is the course of conventional Christianity than the commentators' fascination with the two Gardens.
Adam did not arise in a Garden, and Jesus did not die in a Garden. Adam arose from among soil and rock, as Jesus died on a patch of earth that was not permitted to bring forth life. Adam was given a garden to tend--a garden given by a God who saw Adam as a creature of need--and Jesus was torn from the garden of his petitions to God. Adam was set to bending the boughs of Eden to his fancies of design, and Jesus was hung on a twisted tree designed for the essence of torment. Adam was given other human beings to keep him company, and Jesus saw the company of his followers disperse in shame and despair.
Adam, before ever he could speak it or conceptualize it, had his incomplete, needy, and shameful nature seen by God and addressed. Jesus, after all else he had done to reach out across the chasm between God and the shameful Creatures Who Are Not God, cried out more acutely than ever we might, in the pain of our pain and the shame of our shame--and in our absolute inability to understand alienation from our Creator as different from abandonment by our Creator.
We were shameful from the first, and we will be shameful to the last. This is really no more dismal than the theologians' assertions that we of the post-"Fall" race are originally sinful, and that we of the post-"Fall" race will carry sinfulness to our graves. Shame, however, must be lived with, while sin--as the innumerable "salvation economies" make implicit--can be bought, or sold, or wiped clean from this or that conceptualized slate. The "sin" conceptuality makes a shadow-play of Scripture's descriptions of humanity's ill-adjustment to existence from the start, and substitutes between Redemption's incomprehensible beginning and Redemption's incomprehensible end a devised drama of sin as committed and conquered. Spread out the full scope of Jesus' story concerning us, however, and it becomes plain that our alienation from God began before ever humanity was aware of it, and the end of our alienation from God awaits a moment when our smoky and devouring flame of life is extinguished.
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