In the Throes of Our Demise

There is a certain silliness that the Western World is exposed to every year.  Clergy will celebrate the coming of spring with signs that say some version of "The flowers are blooming.  The birds are singing.  Spring is here.  God did it again."  One would hope, of course, that children attending such church schools, or passing by to attend others, would learn that the death and decay theme of the end of the preceding year was part and parcel of the cycle of the seasons.  One would hope, additionally, that such children would be taught that humanity's inescapable assessment--dictated by the realities of thermodynamics--is that death will win out in the end.  Such an end, of course (and its understanding of earthly death being asymmetrically superior to earthly life) is not entirely alien to most of those clergy, after all.

These notions present us, however, with other--more ponderous--considerations.  Christianity has wrestled through the ages with Jesus' demand that his followers give up their lives in order to attain eternal life.  The impact of this demand is, of course, contingent upon the prevailing idea of "life," and of how it relates to the forsaking thereof.  How are we to know what it is like to live while having given up life, for surely that is the type of phraseology that comes closest to the immediacy of Jesus' demand?

There might be innumerable approaches to the preceding question, but inescapably this observation is suspended (if we are to be honestly introspective) above the more fundamental problem of the definition of life itself.  Is it really "life" that Jesus requires us to abandon, or is it rather our conceit that we are "alive" in a definitive sense within the scope of God's sovereignty?  We are, after all, the "dead while living" offspring of the "dead while living" post-Eden Adam and Eve.  Is it not our attachments to our conceits of "life" (and our concomitant attachments to things we think our lives entail) that Jesus asks us to abandon?

We cannot proceed upon this score without stating a fundamental reality evident in Scripture.  Our existence does not consist, either in whole or in part, on a duality of life and death.  Ours is not a universe of life and death.  Our universe was born in the life-effulgence of Jesus as the Creator and the medium of Creation--and this entails the unimaginable consideration of Jesus' creative participation being, in part, the Sufferer of every searing permutation of every action-reaction cataclysm, as well as being the Sufferer of every subset-element of the universe's contortions that we can relate to creaturely pain.  To entertain the possibility of the preceding sentence, and--once having considered it--to discard it, would seem to me to be the height of impiety.

I have thought it reasonable--or at least I have written in my flaccid, passing conceits--that the "light" of original Creation might have emitted from water-submerged volcanic activity.  Or are there other, equally silly, "rational" explanations of the first words of Genesis?  What cannot be escaped, however, is the implication that a "formless and void" Earth is an unimaginable potentiality.  As I have also written before, the preface to John says--in an incredible potency--that the "life" of Jesus was the "light" of humanity, when the prating of the commentators hews almost exclusively to the notion that the "light" of Jesus' teaching gives "life" to human beings.  Did not Jesus impart life to the universe through its spectrum of potentialities, and did not Jesus experience the throes of suffering and death in each particle's resolution to some depleted energy state?

More particularly for our purposes, is it not really the case that the original life of the universe is tending toward its inevitable death, while yet we allow ourselves to be distracted by the fancied "cycles" of life and death, growth and decay?  Jesus, after all, assailed his followers with the challenge of seeing the world not as "four months and then the harvest," but as being, rather, "white" unto that very harvest.  And this leads us to where our train of thought must arrive--the universe is not an arena of life and death, but is rather an arena of fruition and death.  Fruition and death are the twin (though hardly equal or compatible) emanations of the life-impetus of Creation.

The world is autumn more and more.  The world is--by stages and by haltings and by distracting pulses of momentary growth--tending toward the harvest-paradigm of piling and twisting of dry and spent limbs bearing such fruit as presents itself.  The world is fruit nested in death, and the world is the result of the only life it has ever really known, the life of Jesus.

The bones of the ever-dying Earth are the rocks that coalesced from the churning, energy-laden "void," and the death embedded in those bones pre-dates and bears as only a small fraction that which the paleontologist scrapes up and calls "fossil."  The dry land emerging from the waters was dying and death-laden from the first, decaying into that substrate from which arose the creatures.  In our daily experiences, and in those of our predecessor generations, the cleansing of water and the refreshing of wind--each of those media being "life-giving" only insofar as they carry or are infused into the grimy reality of eventually-degrading biochemical reactions--are the abiding biblical metaphors of "life," a supreme though inescapable irony.

We must understand "life" not as something that happens or that can be properly possessed, but rather as something that surges still through all of Creation, something that presses upon us and that imbues us with the sensations and felt potentialities that give us at once the opportunity to do good things, and at the same time the unfortunate proclivity to attempt to enfold and thereby possess such surging energy, as though we were ourselves properly living things.  We are not living things--we are dying things exuding in the throes of our demise droplet-like, fragile, meagre fruit.