The progression in thought from "Roused, Readied, Reaped" to "Aware, Away, Awry" is plodding and virtually unstoppable. In regard to "Roused, Readied, Reaped," our biologically-mediated experiential lives are understandable in terms of arcs or cycles, either returning to familiar ground, or at least putting us through familiar-seeming paces of beginning-middle-end routines. We can tell ourselves, for example, that we have grasped linear narratives of such wrenching situations as the fall of Adam in Eden or the falling away of the disciples in Gethsemane, yet we grasp nothing of those stories if we do not identify ourselves with the waking, writhing, and withering away of our heroes. That is the pattern of honestly understandable experiences--not linear narratives. Adam was thrown into his experiences with the sin-germ eating at him already, and his rise, reign, and fall were pregnant in his essence always. The disciples were lurched awake and found their minutes-long career of brave defenders of Jesus collapsing even as their master was bound and led away. So also do we process the experiences of life, much as we would like to pretend that we are erecting edifices of our lives-long progress. We are as feckless as the disciples when we are falling asleep, and we are as newly-arisen and undefended as Adam when we awake.
And, in equally unstoppable fashion, any attempt we have to honestly process life's experiences--even seen by us as conceptually (if not ideally)--rhythmic, is frustrated by the stubborn fact that the future lies before us. Our cycles or arcs are seen by us only in our fancied anticipations, or in what chances we might have for retrospective examination. Really, our arcs of experience bend and flail off into the future as they will--these are the "tendrils" I have described in terms of "Aware, Away, Awry." We watch our experiences, and our accomplishments (or at least our effects), and our more-or-less identifiable selves, careen off into the future. This is our lot, as our souls seek to herd the unruly collections of tendencies and of transient self-identifications that comprise the shambling households within our souls' individual compasses--the households for which care we will answer to God.
And so, truly seen, we are indistinct creatures, as changeable in substance as the child is changeable, so that the parents (no matter how blessed--or how proud--they feel in their roles) cannot but look at their adult children as persons who have stolen away their toddler selves from their parents. Only in this vein can we hope to understand the otherwise mystifying attitude Jesus has toward persons. When Jesus calls Peter blessed, and then calls him Satan, we cannot escape the conclusion that the one-and-the-same person Jesus is addressing is really two different persons. All that matters is the person of the moment--the person of that instant in the soul's flight. The Jews who Jesus would describe as children of Abraham were in the next moment children of the devil--as surely changed in their substance as they were in their attitude.
This, presumably, is why Jesus does not dwell on the notion of the permanent person--human beings are persons of their moments, with their uncharted, beckoning futures. The moralists will never cease to note that Jesus told The Woman Taken in Adultery, "Go, and sin no more"--as though the woman in her next moments, days, and years could be conceivably tended with other advice. Jesus heals a man and then tracks him down and tells him to stop sinning, lest something worse befall him. There is no past for those people, and there is no future except the uncertainty that faces us all--the uncertainty in which we might become different persons to God, amenable or not in any given moment to the beckoning of salvation which knows no moment but the now.
So it is not surprising that Jesus performs the staggering miracle of raising a little girl to life, and then--rather than basking (or allowing the child to bask) in the glory of the miracle--instructs those present merely to give the girl something to eat. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead--from the several days' dead--and one would expect a moment of rapturous reunion followed by days (or at least hours) of celebration. Instead Jesus merely instructs that Lazarus be freed from his funeral wrappings. Yet this is the Jesus who most famously "wept." For whom, then, was Jesus weeping? For the lost (though to Jesus merely "sleeping") Lazarus? Jesus knew just where Lazarus was, and Jesus knew just what would happen to Lazarus--resurrection. Jesus also knew, of course, what would happen to Lazarus overall. Was Jesus weeping because the just Lazarus was to be subject once again to the trials of life on earth? Can we think that Jesus did not know that evil persons would conspire to send Lazarus to the dead once again?
In this ever-heightening emphasis on care for other people is to be found a great tragedy of our experience. To ask to care more and more for other people is also to ask to feel their sufferings more deeply, so that the soul of the person who wishes to be empathetic can be overwhelmed rather than buoyed up. The equation of trying to care is merciless, extracting from the person more and more even as the person seeks to put more and more into it. For us, of course, this is as nothing compared to how we might (attempt to) understand what Jesus felt. Jesus attempted to give all, even as he knew we could give him nothing back. Here we must come face-to-face with the reality of the Crucifixion as a torment. Jesus could not have failed to know what sufferings people would endure for the glory of his name (or what they might endure thinking it was for the glory of his name.) But there is precious little of such zeal shown for him in his hour of need. Those who stayed by his side (or in the shadow of the cross) were those who would have been reckoned of little account by the Romans, and Jesus' main companions abandoned him, and all of the theologians' cant about Nicodemus and about Joseph of Arimathea is no more impressive than those two privileged gentlemen's skulking.
The Jesus who promised that he would not leave his followers without a Comforter was himself denied a comforter. The beings created in God's image--even those precious few given by the Father into the care of the Son--deserted Jesus in his sufferings. Jesus near the end cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus did not ask, "Why are you torturing me?"--and in this fact might be found the true scope of Jesus' suffering. Jesus was left alone in such manner as no mere human being might--that was his torment. The torment of physical suffering on Jesus is properly to be called "unimaginable," and yet Christianity has had no difficulty imagining torments endured by "the saints" that seems almost to be designed to leave the Master in the shadows. Much of such recorded saintly acceptance of horrific torture is undoubtedly true, but in part the point seems to blunt itself. Chief among such examples is the story of Peter, who is held in all the more regard in that he sought to make his voiced inferiority to Jesus a spectacle in his upside-down crucifixion.
And of course the saintly canon of torments endured for Christ has to do with the giving up of life voluntarily--sometimes after tortures as great as those recorded for Jesus, even as it is recorded that Pilate was surprised at the brevity of Jesus' sufferings. Nonetheless the evangelical radio vibrates endlessly with praise for Jesus having given up his life (usually phrased as giving up his life "for me")--while yet the same airwaves are crowded with praise for mere mortals who have given up their lives "for him." To read the gospels, however, it seems that Jesus was only too ready to "give up the ghost." It seems a triumph of blessedness when he exclaims, "It is finished." And, of course, this is the Jesus who says that he lays down his life, and he takes it up again. The whole "He gave up his life for me" fascination rings hollow.
Jesus set out to do things in his earthly ministry, and he was really alone but for God, and we cannot imagine the loneliness he felt when his father seemed far from him--just as it is true that trying to have connections with other people only sharpens a person's awareness of the gaps and misalignments, such that the distances seem to outstrip the experience of closeness. We, however, have Jesus. The greatest of the "however's", however, is still ahead of us. The real implication of having Jesus is the conceptualized necessity of having nothing else. "Having" is an experience, and experiences come and go, and experiences trail off in their anticipation into the future. Add to this the realization that the actualities of life must fade and wither in the light of divine immanence, and a person is faced with the grinding equation that everything that gives meaning in this life must be seen more and more as futile.
In the teaching of Jesus the counterpart of life being really nothing is the affirmation that we are really nothing. "We" do not have to hold to contentions that we exist, because we are assailed continually by those alien, rebellious "selves" of which our souls are mere caretakers. And those selves stretch themselves out against the harshness of the future before we are aware of it--this future having innumerable turns and hazards. Of course the landscape of the future need in no way reflect the assessments God has of our journeys--our real journey is one of seeking closeness to God, and the landscape of that realm is not discernable. It is not for nothing that Jesus tells a young man who seeks the truth that he is not far from the kingdom of God, and then follows it up with no further instructions--for it is the desire that is the journey.
As I said above, "having" is an experience, and experiences come and go, and experiences trail off in their anticipation into the future. The "come and go" is the "Roused, Readied, Reaped," and the "trail off in their anticipation" is the "Aware, Away, Awry." The journey of salvation is a letting go of the self (which is really a letting go of the mental hoarding of the self) to confront whatever comes next--in a continual endeavor to do that "letting go." The initial and repeated task of self-abnegation is the "easy yoke," and the winding path of confronted eventualities is the narrow way. This is in sorry contrast to that twisted-around thing called Christianity, which forces the believer to bear a deadly burden of self-conceptualization, and seeks to make the journey bearable by setting out some program of sacraments or similarly-scheduled recitations that one is saved by one great moment of conversion. So in this sorry contrast is the believer stacked under the burdens that Jesus saw typified in his day, and so also here is the believer led to believe that one can be led on a broad and easy way to salvation.