The Shame of Contemplation

In Luke's version of the Parable of the Talents, the story is prefaced by the master going off to be made king, with certain of his countrymen hard on his heels with the intention of frustrating his appointment.  This detail will emerge again later.

The first two of the servants, entrusted with a portion of the master's wealth, are notably successful in their investments on his behalf.  That the story means little or nothing to the success-religion fixation on Jesus' (numeric) emphasis on "money" references is evidenced by the fact that the story obviously uses the success of the servants' ventures as a proxy for their intents.  It would be vapid to image that Jesus intends the moral lessons of the parable to anticipate a situation in which a servant is found morally reprehensible because the rains of God perchance did not fall on the season's wheat crop.

Of course, Jesus' listeners will want to imagine themselves in the company of the venturous servants, and will want to think they have little in common with the despised servant who did nothing but salt his master's money away.  (To little avail, as it turns out, since we must assume that this wretch will fall lower in his master's estimation than would a bold servant who lost all in the market.  Unfortunately, the thrust of Jesus' parable here does not accommodate a master's statement of, "Nice try, thou good and faithful servant.")  The unsuccessful servant is castigated by the master for not having at least entrusted his talent to the bankers for the sake of the interest.

It is this last point that is probably of much more importance than the rousing stories of the two successful servants--whose stories are both one-dimensional and unsurprising.  We tend to be surprised, however, (and not a little discomfited) by the servant's explanation of his paralyzing fear--that the master is a hard man who reaps where he did not sow.  The master, most importantly, does not deny this characterization of himself--or at least he does not find it problematic that the servant views him so.  The master's subsequent declaration--that the despised servant should have at least deposited the talent with the bankers at interest--must of necessity translate into an instruction to the listener, and it would be as good a surmise as any to assume that Jesus means for us to persevere by such means as we can, even as we feel only an indifferent affinity with what we can understand about the character of God.

There is much about the character of God that we do not understand, and that is bound to leave us troubled.  Unquestionably the God of Jesus' teachings (for all that we want to associate Jesus with love) is the God of eternal (and therefore infinite) damnation for finite misdeeds.  It would be a foul lie to pretend that this prospect does not echo the notion of the master reaping more than he sows.  This is not the same as to say that humanity's lot is infinitely dismal in the exchange.  Jesus speaks much about salvation as generously offered and easily obtained.  The wretched servant is dealt with harshly, but the extent of his failing need be seen as no more than the difference between placing a talent with the bankers or placing it under a mattress.

And, as I promised, the matter of the opponents of the master's elevation to king is revisited at the end of the parable.  These persons are to be apprehended and slain in the presence of the master-now-king.  Harsh indeed are the master's judgments, but taking a deposit to the bank or refraining from contesting an official's elevation are scarcely such duties as would consume all available joy from a person's life.

And we must ask ourselves if life is ever to be free of plodding investment of time and energy in prospects of wavering, transient enticement.  We must ask ourselves if life is ever to be free of wondering about the divine we cannot see, about questions of infinitude we cannot comprehend.  How much, we must wonder, of our religious energies are wasted on fussing about questions of the eternal and the infinite, when it is quite possibly in the formulation of those popularly-embraced "great questions" that we waste what opportunity we might have, if not to answer such questions, at least to refrain from god-like picking and choosing which questions to contemplate?

I say that we draw lines out ahead of ourselves in our imagining, not merely that we can contemplate the infinite, but that we can tell ourselves that we have chosen proper lines to pursue.  I say that we concoct stories about humanity's relationships to the divine, and that we are masterful story-tellers in convincing ourselves and each other that the stories that matter to us are the stories that matter.  In short, our relationship to the divine is a question most typically of the story-lines we will pursue, and those we will not.

We embrace fantasy if we embrace the notion that the life of the believer is typified by the fantasy-existence of the favored servants of the parable.  Leaf but a few moments more through the gospels, and there are warnings aplenty against servants thinking they are other than worthless servants--worthless even as they have done their duty.  Collect for yourself ten cities or ten additional talents (or the modern equivalents thereof) and be prepared to hear, "You fool, this very night your life will be required of you!"  Step outside and wonder if you are stepping over a Lazarus, or wonder if you ought to concern yourself about who languishes at other doorways.

And, of course, thinking that the parable applies to the time of judgment is but a fantasy-projection of one's fate over the intervening moments or decades.  All of us are under the suspension of judgment about what we do with our "talents," and all of us harry the prospect of Jesus' enthronement as King with our pleadings about how we ought to be spared this or that trouble in our plodding lives.

And yet here we stand with Jesus' promise--nay, his fervent hope--that we have abundant lives.  And here we stand with Jesus' admonition not to worry about tomorrow.  And so are we to gather to ourselves the goods and the good things of the earth, and to trust that tomorrow will bring nothing but the continuation of such prospects?

And yet Jesus tells us that each day has troubles enough of its own.  And we are to live it abundantly.  Would any of the logic of the theologians, or any of the aspirations of the theologians, be empowered--were we but to contemplate for a moment--to sweep away the looming potential that Jesus' idea of an "abundant life" for his followers is a life bursting with daily realizations of personal sin and failings?  If we are to contemplate the infinite, then ought we not to contemplate the infinite ramifications of our sin?  If in rage or neglect we barrel over roads and highways, do we not share in the sin of our fellow humans who collect, in the horrid lottery of chance, the label of killer?  If we flare up in murderous rage, do we not share in the undiluted guilt of others who--given goads and opportunities that we are perhaps spared--actually commit the deed of murder?

And Jesus will not stop there.  Do we not actually murder those whom we assail with "harmless" words?  If we commit adultery even by the mere thinking of it, do we not commit murder even by the mere contemplation of speaking harmful "harmless" words?  In religion, there is the thinking about infinities of time, and there is the thinking about the relative foolishness of imagining we can conceptualize infinite time, and there is the thinking about how we must guard ourselves against madness in thinking about infinite time.  Do we not possess therefore a competent arsenal of thoughts to protect ourselves, insofar as practical, from madness at contemplating any infinity?  Might we not be both empowered and entrusted to consider infinities of questions about infinity?

Our questions about infinity--and particularly about our infinite God--radiate from our existences in an infinitude of expanding possibilities.  The merest notion that one question about the potentialities of God (or about how the potentialities of God impinge upon us) is more important than any other question is an act of horrid presumption.  I am thinking at present of merely on example.  Jesus describes an "unjust servant" who buys the gratitude of his fellow humans by shorting the master on what is owed him.  The master praises him.  Such a parable is taken wrongly if it is taken to provide answers about our existences, and it is taken half-wrongly if it is taken to provide "food for thought" in how it might illuminate our understandings about our relationship to God.  The parable is meant to blow the lid off how we think about ourselves and God.

Jesus tells us that we can gain for ourselves not merely the good wishes of our fellow humans by passing off to them what belongs to God--we can gain for ourselves welcome into heaven.  To get to heaven (or at least to get to where we need to be to strive for heaven) we must clear ourselves of accusations or hard feelings on the part of others.  We must plead to fellow creatures as our judges.  This does not make sense in terms of our contemplation of the sovereignty of God, but that is only because we choose to claim, for our psychological benefit, arbitrary boundaries to the question of God's sovereignty.  We do not say that we understand infinity or eternity, even as we can imagine that we are infinitely inferior to God and dwarfed by the eternity that is in turn dwarfed by God.  Why then would we say that there are bounds to the implications of our sin, sin of which we do not know the bounds?

View these matters so, and one can no longer entertain the artifices of the denominations' writhings.  Pick up a Catholic study Bible, and read about how the "Keys of the Kingdom" legitimize the pastoral role of the Bishop of Rome--or the College of Cardinals--and his (its) subordinate functionaries.  Pick up an evangelical study Bible, and read that the binding and loosing of--Peter's? the apostles? the believers?--Keys of the Kingdom is a function of pronouncement of what God has already decided.  Preferably, take the Gospels as a whole and the "answer" to the question is couched quite simply--though in a quasi-organic flow from the mundane to the abstract.

We look to our fellow creatures for salvation.  We look to the good or bad estimations we might receive from the Ninevites, or from the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We might expect to be appraised by Balaam's ass.  What of it?  Sin is question of an infinity of shortcomings in the sight of God.  Why then would we think of this particular question of infinity as being intrinsically different from any other?  All questions of infinity involve not merely our inability to get our minds around it, but also our inability to encompass the possibilities latent within it.

It is to be expected that, in our study of great ideas that bear upon our relationship to God, the sublime (to us) would rattle up against the ridiculous (to us).  We are to give up our lives.  We are to live abundant lives.  If we would but do the personally ridiculous thing of stepping back for only a moment of contemplation, we would realize that "no life" in the framework of "abundant life" amounts to a life of days of trouble--trouble of which there is aplenty.  In this simple yet challenging viewpoint the teachings of Jesus make most sense.

The Shame of Ourselves

Jesus tortures Peter.  Jesus does not tell Peter that Peter's love for him is sufficient, and Jesus only gives Peter an endless responsibility for the flock--an endlessness that is particularly dismal in that it involves not a burgeoning of Peter's agency, but an eventual diminishment of it.  Peter will be led in his old age against his will.

God tortures Cain.  God does not tell Cain that he will be protected from avengers of Abel's blood, but merely that such avengers will suffer sevenfold themselves.  God's design is presumably to protect Cain from physical vengeance, but that is not the same as to expunge from Cain's mind the possibility that vengeance yet looms.

Jesus tortures Nicodemus.  Jesus tells Nicodemus of a conceptuality applicable to the process of salvation, but only in connection to another conceptuality--the wind of which no one knows the origin--that describes the metaphorical basis of salvation as founded on something as mundane yet as unfathomable as the physical world.

In short, Jesus leaves Peter thinking about something, the question of his love--his already crisis-shaken love--for Jesus.  God leaves Cain with an "assurance" of safety that exists only insofar as Cain can convince himself of it, even as Cain must wrestle with God's tantalizing question, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?"  Jesus leaves Nicodemus with, "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" (KJV).

These human beings are left with impressions imparted by God that are impressions assimilable only as live experiences, not as objectifiable lessons.  This is the great secret of the Gospels, a "secret" only because the plain import of described experiences undergone by Gospel figures is turned by the interpreters into theological "truths"--as though the very process of translating some figure's confrontation with the ineffable into a humanly-described "truth" can be effected by us without blasphemous presumption.

The denominations formulate "truths" ostensibly extracted from the Gospels, and congregants are admonished not to forget those "truths."  In a subset of those admonishments, congregants are instructed to consider the emotional impact of the Bible stories on the stories' figures.  In a still lesser subset, congregants are instructed to place themselves in the stead of the stories' figures, so as to internalize the emotions of those moments in order to further the relevant teaching.

This manages still to miss the point.  In the teachings of Jesus, the emotions ARE the messages, and the forgetting of each message is in the dissipation of the emotion, not in the fleeting apprehension of the ostensible point to be taught.  Jesus in a single passage admonishes his disciples for failing to consider how two great crowds were fed by miraculous means.  Inasmuch as these are miracles demonstrating dominance over physical possibility, and not (say) ostensible miracles of perhaps-fortuitous timing, then the number of such feedings is irrelevant.  What IS relevant to Jesus' admonishment here is the repeated opportunity for the disciples to cultivate mindsets open to the miraculous.

What I have driven at in my writings has been a consideration of the undeniable fact that we humans are the occupants of worlds--that is to say, of lives--constructed by us moment-by-moment.  To give up one's life for Jesus is not to dedicate or devote or consecrate one's self-conceptualized "life" in favor of a life better suited than before to some prevailing notion of a "godly" life--this is mere conceit (perhaps admirable conceit, but conceit nonetheless.)  To give up one's life for Jesus is to render one's life void of everything but that which satisfies the conditions for salvation.  Inasmuch as we can reckon safely that we can never satisfy the conditions for salvation (on our own, at least), then it makes as much sense as anything to say that our predicament is a damned shame.

Our "life" is considered properly as the reduction of our existence to the consideration of our shame.  It would be dishonest to pretend that a reasonable person would not construe this as a form of torture.  On the other hand, it would be dishonest to pretend that we do not experience internal lives in which we juggle and contort our selectively-appreciated horizons so as to effectively create artificial worlds for ourselves.  In a "real" world (as far as we can tell, applying ourselves in general consideration) of suffering and evil, it takes no overt religious goad for us to admit (if we are so willing) that we have a responsibility to consider always that we are creating false internal worlds out of our own convenience or predilection.  How the moral import of this realization, and our responsibility to act to upon it, could differ in substance from any shame-based "torture" of Jesus' teachings is quite a lively question.

What is important here, insofar as I intend to discuss the teachings of Jesus, is how the teachings of Jesus do not really make sense when viewed in light of the denominations' insistence upon distilling ostensible lessons from the Gospels.  "Lessons" are things we pretend we can extract from the narratives of the Gospels, and therefore by virtual definition are things that we can transplant into our own lives by simple volition.  It is incredible what earth-shaking presumption is involved in this process, but any unbelievability we might experience momentarily disappears as soon as we draw a breath, or blink an eye, or have a thought about any passing moment, because all of these phenomena are collected by us continually in a process by which we construct and maintain internalized "worlds" that we do not intend to have shaken.

And so, in terms of the Gospels and everything else, we insist on translating our experiences into lessons that we pretend we apply to the world, when in reality we apply them most crucially to our constructed worlds, our constructed lives.  We live moment-by-moment in internal worlds, and if we halt ourselves at any given moment (or perhaps have truly earth-shaking moments thrust upon us), we realize this truth.  We just don't want to.

We don't want to burn with the shame that Jesus cast at Peter.  We don't want to have shame slosh and splash in its raw acrid nature through our precious internal worlds.  Each of us, however, has an internal world--an internal life--that we nurture simply because we want to, and we choose by the moment whether we furnish it with good things or bad.  That we collect to our lives good things or bad, or even that we can store away good or bad "Bible teachings," is, however, alien to any true understanding of the claims of Jesus' teachings upon us.  Jesus claims authority not merely over the content of each person's life, but the actual existence of it, and in the hollowing-out of any person's life the last particularly defining aspect of that life is the shame that has driven the self-denying process to begin with.

And as the process unfolds, we--in our usual fumbling manner--end up in the best case choosing good shame over bad.  We can always excoriate ourselves for invented misdeeds, but we can scarcely err if we attribute to ourselves the failings common to humanity.  This, however, is the great pivot-point of our relationship to Jesus.  We can decide that our "selves" are stained with things that bring us shame (and so claim humble-sounding membership in humanity), or we can decided that the very conceit that causes us to objectify ourselves as "selves" is a shame (and so appeal to God for mercy for our being God-knows-what, for indeed only God knows what we are.)

Or to put the matter more bluntly, we can attribute correctly to Jesus (who knows all of our thoughts) his claimed intention of supplanting our most personally-identifying conceits, or we can attribute to Jesus the status merely of a presenter of lessons (some potentially salvific, some not) for our consideration.  In the latter case, to speak again bluntly, we treat Jesus (who knows all of our thoughts) as acting as a perfect and transcendent teacher who decides unaccountably to comport himself as a relative moron.

Encroaching Conceits

Jesus says that his disciples individually must attempt discreetly to correct a person who is in the wrong.  If that does not avail, then the offended disciple in question must bring one or two witnesses from the assembly of believers.  If that does not avail, and the offender will not listen to the assembly as a whole, then the assembly is to treat the wayward party as one would a gentile or a tax collector.  This raises, then, a pertinent question, that is, how is one to treat a gentile or a tax collector (as this general classification is to be one of "offender"?)

Elsewhere, Jesus says that we are to forgive an offending person "seventy times seven."  Taken together, Jesus' instructions about the status of another annihilate--in the ultimate sense--any true notion of "othering" a person.  To come to view, in times of alienation, another person as distantly as one would a "gentile or tax collector" is to view that person in the intimate sense of an incipient friend.  The circle has closed upon itself, and the notion of alienation has been shown to have valid status only as part of an all-too-familiar cycle of frustration and exhaustion.

The notion of distancing oneself from another dissolves by necessity in the glare of Jesus' supervision.  In truth, the notion of distancing oneself from another is a shameful prospect.  "Distance," indeed, whether in terms of location, time, or any other conception, is--if seized upon as a supposed necessity--an affront to the ever-present Creator.  All of Creation shrinks down into the person of Jesus, and Jesus extends himself to all of Creation.

John says that Jesus came to his own, but like all concepts applied to the divine, it is the dynamic of momentary and passing contemplation of such an idea that is important, not its establishment as a dictum.  Who are Jesus' own?  The Creation he created?  The humanity, pre-Flood and post-Flood, that ever walk the earth?  The offspring of Noah?  The children of Abraham?  The child of Abraham (excluding, by brutal assignment, Ishmael?)  The tribe of Judah?  The tumbled-together and unequal remnants of the first century?  Galilee?  Nazareth?

It is of course conventional to say that Jesus came to the Jews, who rejected him.  Even if we regard as incidental the very fact that "Jews" or "Judea" as terms hinge upon the unequal proportion of ancient strains of Jacob's surviving progeny, we are left still with pointed questions about Jesus' "own."  Are not Samaritans of particular import to the Jesus stories precisely because they have in their mixed heritage that essence--questionable, to say the least, in our more expansive moments--of "Judaism" distinct from religion?  If "own" is a matter of kinship, is it not possible that many of the Samaritans were more of Jesus' "own" than were the Idumean though ostensibly "Jewish" Herods?

If descent (as a rough correlation, given the possibility of intermarriage or conversion) is the precipitating element of the description of Jesus' "own," then we can say that the broad range of humanity's primordial past contracts in the accounts into that tiny cohort called first-century Judaism.  As I wrote above, all of Creation shrinks down into the person of Jesus, and Jesus extends himself to all of Creation.  Neither Jesus nor his mission (and particularly as we consider here his mission, with its universal implications) can be contained within points of reference.  Of course Jesus strides into the territory of the Samaritans.  Of course Jesus ventures farther, into the realm of the gentiles.

On the fringes of Judaism's conceptualization of humanity, Jesus uses an analogy of scavenging dogs to describe gentiles, and a gentile woman draws up an image of those dogs as part of a master's household.  The "part" element is all that is necessary--humanity is not divided finally into distinctions except in the ravings of ideologues.  Here we find the rub of notions about inheritance and family connections.  Such things, rightly handled, are passed on and passed beyond.  Indeed, such things pass readily into the realm of the ridiculous--especially when the things of God are considered.  As said by John the Baptist, God might turn stones into children for Abraham.

So, in the musings above as in all concepts, we can see that the divine, when rightly considered, cannot be considered among points of reference.  Think of God in some connection, and have it revealed to you that all connections are broken, and it is only in the momentary experience of their sundering that any contemplation can occur.  We do not generally want God-experiences that are momentary and passing, and shamefully we engage in shameful conjuring of idea-schemes that allow us--though in final futility--to frame our religious experiences.  This is why shame, of all candidates for our assiduous examination, is of such importance.  Shame is without context, and in contemplation of shame we can be reminded of the encroaching conceits that are our attempts to define the divine.

Things Might Impede Us

When God commanded the waters of the earth to be gathered to one place, a process of concentration was being described.  Indeed the "one"-ness of the "place" or "mass" of water is of course approximate in terms of location, given the sinuous layout of the seas, but it is the process of concentration that is important here, not any geography that we as observers would number as the "seas" or "oceans."

Similarly, the collection of a mass of light--or, presumably, light-emitting particles--would seem to be the crux of God commanding into being the "greater light to rule the day."  The sun is a "thing," of course, just as the surrounding space is a "thing."  "Thing-ness," however, is chiefly a matter of human conceit--and no human being can say with authority where ends the sun, with its atmosphere, emissions, radiation, and influence upon its surroundings, and where begins the enveloping space (to say nothing of whether we can say with authority that space is a "thing.")

We as a species conceptualize things.  We divide up our existences, and we find the memory of our origins in a collection of divisions that represents a vastly complicated internal life.  The infant that grasps only for reciprocating touch is as alien to us in a peer-representation sense as is to us the newborn of any mammal--while yet all such creatures evoke in us a hope for their innocent satisfaction.  The present fussing about individual, presumably-empowered citizens choosing pronouns and gender identities, and such persons being admonished that all are born and must be identified as male or female, meets an age-old rejoinder here.

Babies for centuries have been called "it" in English, and those that were born dead or perished in the process of birth have been considered--as asserted by the prophets of old--to be creatures spared the tribulations of life.  That babies grow to become human beings--or, more revealingly, that common human usages have acted accordingly in many respects--is one of the echoing elements of our communal perception that a "human being" (and, more importantly, a person in need of salvation) is of necessity a being infused--and beset--with the complexities of life, complexities that accord in general with our ages of personal memory.

We, tragically, are not as simple as babies, and even more tragically we are not disposed to cling babe-like to the simple, gracious love of our Father.  We are creatures of complexity, and the next-to-most basic underpinning of this complexity is our insistence upon viewing existence as a collection of things.  And the most basic underpinning of this complexity is our intellectual predisposition to view existence as a collection of things.  That these two underpinnings would seem to be infinitely interlaced is a mere reflection of the agonizing state of persons-who-are-not-God.

Whatever else they might have been, Adam and Eve were adult persons-who-are-not-God.  They were infused with all of our complexities when they stood before God in judgment, they were infused with all of our complexities when they ate of the forbidden fruit, and--though the theologians might thrash and howl upon this point--Adam and Eve were infused with all of our complexities in the moments and perhaps days and perhaps eons when they were impaired in righteousness such as to be fertile receptors of the snake's wiles.

We think of existence as things, and we divide experiences into things, and we have experiences that cause us to separate our lives into things, and we invent things that are not there.  To be alive is to have a life, and a life is a collection of things--a collection that becomes usually more complex even as we yearn for some simple illuminating principle.  This is the architecture of our predicament before God, and I have found that the progression of blogs through which I have stumbled--writing, often mistakenly, in greater or lesser attention to the teachings of Jesus--has been a tracing of this architecture.

"Roused, Readied, Reaped" is a general description of our subjection in our existences to persistent, overlapping patterns of cycles and arcs.  Our lives consist of starts, and stops, and repeatings, and experiences that resemble each other more-or-less, and in the process we have the elements of our existences hammered into things that we cannot imagine existence without (such as the comforts of interpersonal relationships), and we have those experiences themselves hammered into memories and lessons (both potentially false or misleading) that we cannot imagine our self-narrated "lives" without.  These aspects of our "roused, readied, reaped" lives stand in defiant opposition to the teachings of Jesus, in which the only relationship that matters is that of us to our Savior, and the only moment that matters is the calendar-and-clock-defying Now of attention to Jesus, forsaking all else.

"Aware, Away, Awry" is a general description of the tenacious hold of our developing consciousnesses upon us.  To become aware of any "thing" is also for us to invest ourselves in the possession of that thing, whether in practicality or in contemplation.  Of course, the first awareness of the newborn is an awareness of some part of overall reality, and--as has ever been the case with human beings--we will never know at what stage (perhaps unique to each individual) a person has become a full-fledged entrant in the great arena of humanity's disputation with God.  This disputation has for eons been described in terms of possession, and into this milieu--a milieu of time and space that dwarfs and drowns the oft-described "sliver" that is the Levant in the mere millennia of its fame--comes the record of Jesus in the Gospels.  This is the Jesus who claims that one part is a great as the whole, that a little leavens the great mass, and that all of life is to be surrendered for a treasure that the world accounts as nothing.  Most importantly, this is the Jesus who tells us that the remedy for going awry as an individual is--as the most direct and wrenching counterpoint to our awareness of "things"--to cease to be distinct things ourselves, residing instead as branches of a larger, all-encompassing whole--to be children of our Father more completely than the newborn to the mother (and certainly more intimately than one purportedly innocent flesh-and-bone to another.)

This leaves, then, the present blog about when "Shame Appears."  Shame appears when we look at anything and see not God, when we think of anything and think not "God."  The cultivation of "Shame" as a general principle is, of course, rife with potential for error or misuse.  We will look for guidance in the teachings of Jesus, and we will look at how things might impede us.

The Purchase of Shame

The kingdom of God is that which is good.  The kingdom of the devil is that which is evil.  The two kingdoms occupy the same space and time, though presumably in greater or lesser intensity at each place or time in which they coexist.

This coexistence of the two kingdoms, insofar as they involve us as individuals, is not gainsaid by the powerful notion of the complete depravity of our souls--all of which this depravity must consist in the on-balance judgment of our inescapable tendency to render less-than-perfect (and therefore unholy) everything we touch.  That is not the same as to say that we are entirely bereft of wholesome tendencies.

Indeed, that very Creation that was once called "very good" is still "very good" in our possible appreciations.  Jesus calls our attentions to the wonders of nature and he reminds us that we--though being evil--are still capable of reflecting the virtues of God.  Even if we are reckoned to be "fallen," that state of depravity which is lamented so often in the Scriptures is never so great that it cannot be exceeded by the appearance of still more lamentable examples.

What is important is that this capacity for lamentation be still displayed within us, and directed to our own thoughts and actions--especially because at the end, when all is stripped away, the undiluted causes of our lamentation will be poured upon us.  This is the realm of shame, because guilt is measurable and compartmentalizable, and because humiliation is referenceable to particular contexts.  We are guilty against what we have done, and as measured against what others have done, and we are humiliated in the judgment of others--even if the "other" in question is the God who made us.  But shame?  Shame permeates us, and shame infuses its cast into every perception we have.

It is for the reason of shame, shame that soaks through every element of our still God-created selves and surroundings, that we will suffer the accusations at the very end of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Not that they are better people than we (or that such relative judgment would even matter), but that their necessarily (though perhaps much attenuated) kingdom-of-God essence would still gain purchase upon everything--even as would also ours.

Shame in Focus

Inquiry into the nature of God, as I described in the previous post, always includes the idea of God as a moral being.  In fact, it is inevitable that any exploration of the nature of God will settle upon the idea of God as a moral being--to the exclusion of essentially every other consideration.

God as a moral being, considered as such in the absence of the notion of him possessing describable qualities such as appearance, location, or duration of existence, is essentially the God that humanity has arrived at over the course of civilization.  The universal primitive human attachment to deities, which persons might or might not take as "evidence" of God's existence, has been considered most typically as an effectual coalescing of conceptualized tribal or local deities into the idea of a universal God.

This is, of course, not necessarily so.  A universality of religion could be represented conceivably by any number of constellations, interlocking or not, of particular "gods," and the multiplicity of such "gods" themselves might be taken as "evidence" of their existence, but the inevitable intruding notion that there must be some matrix upon which those deities could exist seems almost to dictate the presence of some larger principle emblematic of a universal deity.  Whether any of the World's Great Religions might in particular be called "polytheistic" or not, it is undeniable that an overarching concept of a singular universal deity is intimately familiar to all of them.

However, a single One God need not be understood or represented in the moral sense alone.  Christianity can paint ceilings with God as an old man in the clouds, and God can be fixated upon as the God of History, and God can be reduced to any this-or-that figure of some preacher's conceit--and meanwhile someone else can opine upon the resulting representation as being unsuitable or morally objectionable.  This sort of representation--and this sort of virtually inevitable tut-tutting--is, however, the type of occasion in which the element of morality is injected (or not) by the wills of persons, while yet the idea of God as a moral being is merely one element of his considered nature.

But there is still to be considered the rub of God's existence as understood by humans in the experiential sense--or, that is to say, in the sense of our understanding God as a reality pressing upon us.  A universal God does not exist if he exists merely in the realm of conjecture, or even in the realm of adoration.  In the Gospels, the idea is presented of God incarnate in the person of Jesus.  Jesus is presented as sharing in our humanity and as knowing our experiences.  That Jesus is a "moral" person is of course presumed in the texts, and we are to understand that he comprehends our feelings--including most acutely our sufferings.  It might be postulated, however, that Jesus' experiential existence as a human being would be hampered in the most crucial fashion--that is, Jesus presumably could not, as a function of his becoming human, "experience" the remorse, the regret, or the shame of having sinned.

It is extremely important that Jesus is represented as having been tempted.  We are tempted (though rarely in such stark fashion as The Temptations in the Desert)--and none of us can pretend that the feeling of temptation to sin is a feeling that is un-occasioned by at least the fleeting sin of momentary hesitation.  Saying that in some instances we remain sinless because we do not commit any overt act that tempts us is futile for us to say, in that Jesus is most careful to tell us that the thought is at least a minor version of the deed.  But did not Jesus then commit sin in being tempted?  Can a sinless person be tempted?  As if to grind in this latter question most distinctly, we are confronted with Jesus not merely throwing off Peter's tempting prospect of avoiding the Crucifixion, but also with Jesus casting it back onto Peter in the most virulent fashion.

Again, did not Jesus commit sin in being tempted?  In such a consideration we come face-to-face with the sort of mental exercise that has always confounded humans.  Think of the age-old jibe--can God make a stone so large that even he could not lift it?  This question can be called silly or cynical, but that sort of retort sells God short.  Of course God can make a stone so large that even he could not lift it--and then he could lift it.  God could make and lift an infinite progression of larger and larger stones in a timeless instant.  For all we know, an infinitude of physical (as well as every other type of) phenomena might be the stable-state of the changeless God--what of it?  Do we not commit moral slights (at the very least) against God in conjecturing anything else?

And so we can draw ourselves up--even if only momentarily--against the question of how a sinless Jesus might be tempted.  For all we know, the "sin" quality of Jesus' temptations might have fled to infinite nothingness even as Jesus opened himself with infinite haste to the experience of that quality.  We don't know how a sinless Jesus could be tempted, and most importantly, we don't know how a sinless Jesus could be tempted.  (I intended that repetition.)  The really crucial aspect of this consideration is the realization that nothing but the moral aspect of the Incarnate God applies here--all else is foolishness.  And this is what we need to remember, if our faith is to be something other than foolishness--God is not good because he exists, God exists because he is good.  Fools yet we are, but in this realization we are at least honest.

If we understand God and his son Jesus as moral beings, and reckon that we cannot hope to understand them otherwise, then we can address ourselves to the lessons of the Gospels in straightforward fashion.  Commentators want to describe Jesus as having some sort of ineffable magnetism (since many of his instantaneous connections with persons seem inexplicable otherwise), but there is no reason to dally with a sloppy notion of that "ineffable."  The observers of his death are represented on balance as exclaiming either that Jesus was the Son of God, or that he was a righteous man--what was "ineffable" then seems to be rather obvious.  The Good Thief asserts that Jesus was undeserving of his punishment.  Judas--the only disciple described particularly as placing himself overtly in the clutches of the authorities--laments thereupon that he has betrayed innocent blood.  Jesus' existence as a moral being is the portrayed vitality of his ministry.

When we understand the import of God as a moral being, then we can begin to understand our proper response.  By "moral being," however, we must understand that even our most focused attentions upon God as a moral being--such that this attention would seem to annihilate any other conception we might entertain--is an insufficient attention.  Our concern for God, demanded in the ministry and the teachings of Jesus, cannot hope to comprehend the moral perfection of the deity as part of some scheme of salvation.  We cannot postulate some satisfaction for guilt other than that which is beyond our understanding, and we cannot display such humility as to overcome our intrinsic attachment to the aims of that display.  All we can do is be ashamed.

In short, the only way for us to be unashamed of Jesus and unashamed of the Gospel is for us to be ashamed of ourselves.

Shame Honestly

If I am to present shame as the genuine through-line of the teachings of Jesus, I will have to present a defensible scheme of justification of "shame" as a humanly-accessible premise for our existence.  Jesus addresses an audience, and the audience is expected to know not merely of shame, but also of the God before whom we are ashamed.

Shame is a simple notion (if perhaps a frustratingly complicated notion in our workings-out of our real-life existences) and God is a stark notion--if we will entertain in our own lives a straightforward version of belief (so straightforward, as it turns out, that the various versions and theories of "belief" waver and fade.)  We might think sometimes that we possess a God-ideation so innately that we can call it unquestioned belief--this is not so.  We might think sometimes that we possess a God-theory so manifest in logic that we can call it unquestionable belief--this is not so.  What we can possess straightforwardly, however, is a disposition to account any ache of lack we feel as being genuine and as being emblematic of the nature of true belief, which throws us through undeniable lack into the fearsome gap that lack presents to us.

The idea of God is where nothing else is, and the threshold of belief in God is the feeling (yes, I said it, the "feeling") that existence is contingent upon some organizing principle.  It need scarcely be said that such a "principle" has moral implications, but in the realm of wonderings about the divine there can be no such thing as a lack of moral implications.  Otherwise we can indeed become encumbered by such nonsense as the assertion that we all have a "God-shaped hole" in all of us, for if God has the virtues of integrity assigned to him by believers, and if God is to be understood as possessing ever and always the totality of his virtues, then every believer would have by necessity, for example, a "predisposed-always-to-foster-religion-without-deceit-or-coercion hole" inside of them--which, of course, is manifestly not the case.

What we do lack is freedom from the notion that we lack.  We can decide to pursue some ostensible formula by which we can free ourselves from the notion that we lack, but we do not proceed through our lives on the basis of un-thinking our deficits, but rather (it is to be hoped) on the basis of confronting them.  The notion of belief is no different.  Presented with a feeling of dissatisfaction in the lack of an organizing principle, it is incumbent upon us to consider not ways in which we might "prove" the existence of, say, "God," but rather ways in which we can conceptualize such a principle as ultimately foundational.  Better a boundless and undefined God of our trembling conjectures than a limited God "proven" by our logic.

And all of our conjectures about God fold back into moral considerations, with the attendant "moral" implications being admittedly in the realm of the subjective, no matter how hard we might try to insist on objective logic.  As a general consideration, I will say that every attempt to assert the existence of God by logic results by necessity in the "proof" of God's existence being accompanied by a "proof" that nothing exists other than God.  There is, for example, the notion that God is the necessary "non-contingent" element of existence.  If, however, God's existence is supposedly non-contingent upon the existence of any other thing, and if God is understood as having created Creation, then God's status of being the one-and-only-perfect-God-who-created-Creation is contingent upon the existence (even if he decides to extinguish it) of that Creation that did in fact exist.  Or it might be said that the "non-contingent God" who created Creation could make it so that Creation never happened (which is utterly distinct from destroying Creation), and therefore non-existence as a potential for Creation makes our appreciation of Creation meaningless.  The Creation that exists for us as a springboard for belief in God is thereby in itself an object of belief.

Or God could be both perfect and possessed of perfect integrity (which might seem like double-talk, if not for the fact that we must often look at things from various viewpoints.)  A perfect God of perfect integrity might create as a pure function of his existence, and might ever and always create in an infinitude of modalities and possibilities.  Every jump of every quark might produce another universe (or, that is, a universe for each potential jump or moment of no-jump.)  This might simply be the universe that we know.  The element of integrity will leap out for us when we consider that the notion of a God "proven" by some extrapolation of our perceptions is also a God limited thereby in our appreciations.

Belief in God is a moral enterprise--intrinsically and necessarily so.  God is not good because God exists, God exists because God is good.  This is not logical (and it bears the onus of being perhaps objectively and eternally "untrue") but this is as good as it gets--or at least as honest as we can be about the matter.