Yearning for Return

The theme of this blog is yearning.  Yearning is intrinsic to the logic of "aware, away, awry," in that it is desire that at first propels us away from God, placing us on a life-long path of failed and foibled attempts to recapture what has been lost--a desire heightened in its futility in that the very "what" that we miss is essentially a pre-desire innocence of thoughtless satiation that by its very nature cannot admit of purposeful reconstruction.

The theme of yearning presents itself to us as well in our attempts to conduct ourselves rightly, attempts made all the more failure-prone in that (contrary to our perceptions of "concrete" experiences,) the real experiences that we undergo are processed by us as we are: as extra-physical souls, rather than as our (imagined) status as physical or mental "selves."  So we as souls must yearn (as do all managerial persons) for situations in which we do and think and feel the right things, while yet those particular accomplishments must be left to the multitudinous, more-or-less apparent members of our multifaceted "selves."

And yearning is the very rub of existence.  Jesus in his agony on the cross does not (contrary to so much preaching) face at the end consignment to damnation as his father turns away ("My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?")  Neither can it be thought that Jesus is merely praying from the psalms (or merely expressing an extremity of emotion such as all person might) as he experiences for humanity the damnation we deserve.  Inasmuch as Jesus suffers in our stead, it is illogical to understand the punishment--our punishment--that he endures as springing from abandonment by God.  Despite all the images we conjure of Satan and his pitchfork-wielding lot, there is really no warrant to think of damnation as something administered by the devil when God lets us at last fall into it.  The punishment of hell is administered by God, and Satan shares the torments with damned humanity.

Jesus, therefore, was not at the end of his pre-Resurrection life forsaken by God so as to endure punishment.  Jesus was forsaken by God in the very calculus of separate existence from God, as indeed all that must exist apart from God has been forsaken.  All that must exist apart from God is beset by yearning to writhe back in time to that epoch before separation--even if that epoch could be known as pre-existential for the separated less-than-God entity.  This is the great yearning.

Only in the vein of yearning can it be seen that there is a single theme at the end of Jesus' crucifixion, a theme spread across the Gospels.  Matthew and Mark have "Why hast thou forsaken me?", Luke has "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," and John has, "It is finished."  If abandonment to torment is seen in Matthew and Mark, then the concluding statements to Luke and John must be seen as in an entirely different vein--and a curious vein at that--if Jesus' endurance of torment is the overriding matter.

But when forsakenness is understood to be the separation from God that haunts all independent existence (however small or partial in scope), then Jesus' turning of himself over to God, or Jesus' declaration that his strivings are at an end, bespeak the same yearning for a return to God that is inherent in "Why hast thou forsaken me?"