Would Fly Asunder

There is a bit of lore that is virtually universal in Christianity.  This is the conceit that the world as we experience it--the world that we look upon as the "wonders" of Creation--represents a design that shows us simultaneously, one, the awesome beneficence God presents to us, and, two, the "fallen" nature post-Eden to which we ascribe everything we find disturbing, frightening, or painful.  The "fallen" nature is, of course, placed rightfully on us, but we have an essentially unsurmountable disposition to reckon that we can tease out the evidences of God's design for us by seizing on those things we attribute to the design that is really his alone to comprehend.

Take sex.  There would have been nothing lacking necessarily in a Creation that consisted of a sinless Adam in communion with, and satisfied with, his Creator.  Humanity can exist in one person or many persons--or at least so much must be reckoned possible by us.  In God's observation that "it is not good for the man to be alone," is entailed the entirety of the potential for alienation of one person, or countless persons, from their Creator, who ought to be enough.  Why Adam was not--from the humanly-perceivable beginning--what he "ought" to be (for that is the import of my contention here) is a question that dissolves in our appreciation into the very question of why evil exists to begin with.

To say that it "just turned out" that Adam was not satisfied with God is ridiculous, since God knows everything from the beginning.  Are we to suppose it was similarly an open question (for God, that is) whether or not any animal was going to suffice as an "help meet" for Adam?  To say that God designed Adam to be unsatisfied with his Creator is, of course, a ghastly presumption.  Are we humans, for whom the origin of evil is a question unapproachable, to accord to ourselves the right to determine the framing of that question?  Adam was unsatisfied with God.  Adam was appreciative of his provided help-meet in his self-provided context of her fitting his own needs.  Eve spoke scandalously with the snake.  Eve ate of the tree.  Adam joined her and then blamed God for it.  Are we empowered rightfully to designate any of these points as the instant when the question of evil--unsolvable at any rate--became pertinent?

Much, of course, is made of the trauma of the "Fall," but that trauma did not include the instantaneous demise that would be the logical out-working of God's threat of punishment.  Can we know that God was not forbearing applicable punishment for the couple, or for the one man, from much earlier on?  Any notion of our understanding the "how's" of evil, or of our participation in it, is ridiculous.  It is ridiculous inanity for us to dress up theological contexts for a question the content of which is beyond us,

And then, as I promised above, there is the matter of sex.  There never "needed" to be more than one human being.  There never "needed" to be more than two human beings.  That the family structure came into existence is traceable through a narrative that shows such structure as filling unfolding needs, not as being God's design from the beginning.  (Of course, God knows everything from the beginning, but we do not have time to indulge in the silliness of going through that again.)  The denominations will understand marriage and the family as being under assault by a fallen Creation.  The denominations will even--remembering the Eden curses--understand marriage and the family as being cursed as well.  However, the denominations will embrace to the extreme the ghastly presumption that the designs for marriage, family, and society are aspects of God's "very good" Creation--Jesus' dismissals of marriage, family, and society be damned.

In our very day the conceits of family-, marriage-, and even sex-worship are as lively as ever.  Any human longing for mutually and competently understood fellowship--any such type of echo of fellowship with our Creator--is understandable, but the social-order and social-cohesion missions of religion requires the maintenance of institutions to be defended and coalesced around.  Anything can be reckoned by the denominations as "fallen" or "broken"--anything, that is, except the denominations' cherished social conceits.  The most horrific of congenital disorders, genetic or otherwise, can be processed as evidences of the brokenness of God's Creation, yet understood simultaneously as faint reflections (as are we all) of God's original plan.  But let the notions of genetic intersexuality, or of genetic factors frustrating the conservatives' cherished X-Y duality, or of psycho-developmental variations, be brought into view, and those denominations who hew most closely to God's beneficence over a sin-warped Creation will contort into a frenzy of denial that the paradigm of the male-female binary might deviate at any point from "God's plan."

And hanging over all of this is the potential employment of Genesis in its larger Creation narrative, with its presumptions of humans "commanded" to multiply and dominate.  Of course, as the denominations would prefer to ignore, the beasts of the field and the very elements themselves are the recipients there of commands.  That the story of Creation describes proclivities and roles for its components is no more to be understood in its "Genesis" than are the proclivities and roles for evil.  The question in the appreciation of Genesis is no different from the question looming over all of That Which is Not God--do we reckon the existence of a God beyond understanding, or do we conceptualize a God and flatter that image as reflecting an entity we call "beyond understanding?"

If we hold truly to a God beyond understanding, then we will reckon the pertinent rift in existence to be that which stands between created and Creator.  To bemoan--loud those those moans may be--only the chasm we credit as existing between our fallen world and the way Creation ought to be, is to place both God and our conceits about his designs on the blessed side of the chasm, and ourselves and the rest of everything "fallen" on the damned side.  Needless to say, we have thrust thereby next to God a pantheon of "godly" things that we cannot imagine God's proper Creation existing without--and we have made God himself an idol thereby.

It is the unfortunate function of religion to speak of God in the most expansive of terms, and to squeeze God down into the smallest of conceptions.  Christianity speaks of God as the greatest and biggest thing that can be imagined (which utterances ought, in their presumption, give pause), while yet the God of Christianity is the shrunken fiddler-about with effectually toy houses and toy families and toy marriages--while yet the rest of the universe shivers in concomitant want and exclusion.  Jesus speaks of God as found in the smallest of gestures expressed without reserve or boundary--while yet this is the most fitting and effective ministry before a God who defies even our definitions of dimension.

The world is not fallen.  The world ought not to exist--for that world that ought properly to exist finds its dimensions in God's ineffable will, beyond any of our musings about "beyond."  The world is not a pattern of what God would design--the world is a constantly stitching and unraveling tapestry that carries by the instant pictures that we only in our feeble conceits will try to hold.  Now we have an insight--now it is gone.

These flashings-about are what we need to understand about ourselves, and about those with whom we interact.  We do not really understand ourselves, and we do not really understand others, and anyone who wants to understand the things of God (a necessity of folly) must appreciate this lack of understanding most acutely.  It is pathetic how religion squeezes down our little-to-begin-with set of capabilities, and religion glories in doing just that.  So often do preachers delight is ascribing to this or that person a "scientific" mind, or an "artistic" one, or--whether a female wants it or not--a "nurturing" mind.  We can reckon just as well that one person's mind would be filled with a desire to "make sense" of existence--either conceptually or in terms of fulfilling some outwardly-provided template, while yet another person would be filled with a desire to flatten every conceptual horizon and burst every conceptual bound in pursuit of a notion that God must exceed all.

We might be the greatest of strangers to ourselves or to each other, and no one can be told that there is any bound to the perceivable that ought to be reckoned between ourselves and the God who is beyond all reckoning.  We, of course, will never reach the end of our world or the end of our possible reckonings about our world.  To maintain, however, that there is a divinely-designed world that confronts us is for us to place parts of God's Creation as bounds between us and God--and all a thing needs to be an idol is to have a frame or a pedestal, concrete or conceptual.

Better for us to take Jesus' advice, to hold (or to try to reckon, at least) that the elements of the universe would fly asunder if we but prayed to be one step closer to God.