We do not know what we are. We can say that we are souls, and that our material manifestations are--as it were--immaterial to our existences viewed largely. But we don't know what souls are.
What we must do, rather than opine about our existences and assign to those existences states of damnable quality from which we must be saved, is to reckon that we cannot so much as claim existence. The soul that cries for salvation--or, perhaps more properly, the soul that utters such cries with greater or lesser conviction--cannot entertain any other thought. We enter palpable existence with a diffuse, unselfconscious yearning for we know not what--and we ourselves are we know not what.
We do not know what we are. We can grow to survey and to some extent understand ourselves and our surroundings, but essentially by definition we cannot retain the undiluted energy of the striking-off of ourselves into existence by the ineffable interaction of the spiritual with the material--the recapitulation in ourselves' emergence of the Genesis description of the emergence of Creation.
If the state of our moral lack is of concern to us--as prudence would seem to dictate--then the broadest and deepest definition of our failure should be our concern. A "state of total depravity" (or some such notion of the moral theologians) is ultimately self-defeating as a concept for consideration, in that it assigns qualities to human beings and then ticks off a potentially endless list of perversions of those qualities. Yes, we are less than we should be by any measure, but the concept of measurement contains in itself the seed of an unacknowledged arrogance--the contention that we know what we are, depravity and all.
We are, in the realm of moral consideration, greater than we can know--only in this way might it be understood that we are lacking in such fashion as would render us liable to the judgment that God imposes and Jesus describes. We are, in fact, gods--this is the inescapable implication of the burdens Jesus lays upon us (and the concomitant weights of judgment that hang upon our limitless failures.) We might with a word or a thought squeeze the solar system into a wad and throw it through the nearest black hole--this much Jesus tells us, though such a feat exploding from some person's virulent faith would presumably busy the Lord's hosts in fashioning an accommodation in that contorted universe for the soul-drama of every other person to play out.
The greatest implication of the demands placed by our Savior upon us--demands predicated upon the abilities that we possess in potential and that we might express through faith--is found in the inescapable step-wise understanding of the demands placed upon our souls--when our souls are understood properly as the ineffable realities of our lives. We ought each to ask with conviction for God to grant the healing of every deficit in Creation. Jesus tells us that, if we asked properly, our request would be granted.
Well, then, perhaps we could each ask merely for the healing of every deficit in humanity. Or in our nation. Or in our community. Or in our neighborhood. Or in our family. Or in our closest relationships. Or in ourselves.
Only when the shrinking envelope of our ineffectual and impotent strivings to do God's will (or even to care to do his will) closes in upon ourselves individually do we equate our moral failings with that realm of "total depravity" so often described. We might do wonders for our communities or for humanity, we might say, if only we could command ourselves properly. But the notion of our souls (for that is what we claim to be concerned about) crying out to God for the enlightened self-control of our bodies or minds makes no sense when confined to such realms--no such confinement is necessitated by the relationship of the soul to God. No, we are individually the god--the failed god--of ourselves, and of our families, and of humanity, and of Creation. That is the infinitely multifaceted mission of the soul, and the infinitely multifaceted tablet of the soul's recorded failures.
This leads then to the implication of my previous blog's emphasis on the cyclic (and coming-and-going and varied and continually overlapping) arcs of experience. We are only by moments aware of various aspects of ourselves, ranging from the unconscious to the acute, with the acute perhaps being the more insidious, in that the acute seems to obliterate all else within the realms of perception or consideration. We--if souls are we, souls that we might hope to preserve from judgment--are not our bodies or our minds, and if souls are we, then we are the hopelessly burdened overseers of what we call our "selves."
If our "selves" are beyond grasping in any definitive sense by our souls, then the moral burden due to self is as wide-ranging as any interaction we might have in all of Creation. If we treat another harshly, does not our "self" potentially harry that other--indeed, inhabit that other--until death, and perhaps unto a judgment rendered the more severe in the next realm by our own doing? Certainly Jesus speaks in like terms about the moral burdens we might incur.
This, then, is what we must remember about the ineffable nature of the soul. Our souls are failed gods, failed overseers--the fact that the soul's realm, like the soul's nature, is unknown to us does not lessen our burdens, or change the fact that we must proceed through faith on a journey in which we cannot effect our own salvation, but rather must delegate the performance of our salvation-pleas to underlings. These underlings are our thoughts, moods, memories, attentions, and the like--and are also the analogous aspects of all of Creation, the Creation for which each of our souls is--excruciatingly--responsible. None of us has any less burden than Adam.
This is perhaps why Jesus speaks so often of the custodial functions of servants who tend households in the place of the master--a rather ill-fitting (it would seem) set of analogies to use of propertyless, itinerant evangelists and good-deed-doers. The conceptualized household, of course, is the realm of responsibilities of the human soul, as responsible (and as imperiled) as any manager of people, depending on others to respond to direction while yet those others cannot be subjected to automatic control. Those "others" reside within the person of the soul in question, as well as without.
The "Aware, Away, Awry" notion of this blog's title has to do with the notions expressed above. "Aware" is the ineffable creation moment, "Away" is the soul's first move (and all subsequent moves) away from simple urge into "understanding," and "Awry" is the fact that we spend the rest of our lives in churning tides of misunderstanding. This we will examine in light of the teachings of Jesus, who I believe explains it best.
No comments:
Post a Comment