Into that Vortex in Courage

Jesus hits us with the greatest of challenges: "he that endureth to the end shall be saved" (Matthew 10:22).  What underlies such endurance is courage.  Courage is what remains when all else has been rationalized and temporized away.  Every other virtue can be channeled into an effectual vice because every other virtue can be seen to be "too much" within the conceptualizations of humanity.  Every other virtue can stand only when placed in some context of action.  Even love, which we are commanded to show to God and to all our neighbors, is operable only when it has an object.  Being less than perfect, our displays of love to God are always tinged by our less-than-perfect conceptualizations of God, and our displays of love to our neighbors can be effected only by us conjuring up more-than-deserved visions of our neighbors.

And so we might seek to elevate truthfulness to the paramount position, but to say that we must be ever more truthful in every regard means that we must be increasingly unsparing in our assessments of our own veracity--a task as ultimately doomed as it is necessary.  But to say that we must display love to God even when we know that we cannot conceptualize God, and to say that we must pursue truth even as we know that the twin of greater realizations of reality is the concomitant greater realization of our own ungenuine character--all this requires courage.

Courage needs no object.  Courage needs to have no object.  Courage operates all the more when its object is elusive.  In fact, to pursue courage in the service of some end is merely to display a fear of some adverse eventuality--that, in the final analysis, is not courage.  Courage in its true form is the determination to pursue the good even as all touchstones are removed.  Courage in its true form disavows all groundings in conceptuality.

Only Jesus, of course, in the framework of our thesis can display courage truly.  Jesus cries out in the end not to his Father, or to his Master, or to any of the other imaginings we humans have of the deity.  Indeed, as I have alluded to previously, only a perfect person can occupy the "child" position of the parent-child metaphor of God caring for us as a father cares for his children.  To say that God is the perfect Father is of limited comfort to us human children, who can neither remember perfect human fathers as models, nor can conceptualize perfectly of divine Fatherhood.  Paradoxically, of course, Jesus is the perfect Son to the perfect Father because Father and Son are one--at which point the metaphor breaks down, and is revealed to be of limited use to us.

Jesus calls out to the undefined God, and does so out of undiluted courage--which is the only courage that really exists, and which we cannot claim for ourselves.  We must settle for our pathetic imitations of courage, but that does not excuse our pathetic pretenses that our courage could ever suffice, or that our courage melded with other virtues could ever suffice.  Of course, theologians might protest that such admissions are intrinsic to the denominations' reliance on the various theories of "grace," but all such protests are unavailing whenever it might be shown that an attenuated notion of courage underlies, not merely our moral failings, but also our failings of understanding the simple words of Jesus and the Scriptures to which he subscribes.

Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil--and endless jibes have been thrown up against the notion that persons not knowing Good or Evil could be punished for the evil of disobedience.  Of course, those jibes rely on it being pivotal to the Eden story that good or evil are particularized entities or sets of entities.  Inasmuch as existence demands responses, and inasmuch as Adam was created as interacting with his surroundings, then the groundwork for courage has been laid.  Adam could have reached out for the Creator at hand, and have satisfied himself that exertion for that ineffable object was sufficient.  Adam's need for something else to keep him from being "alone" can be placed arguably at the feet of God, but that is mere conjecture about the abyss of conjectures surrounding Creation itself--to which the reader is welcome.

The forbidden Tree of Eden story makes sense only if morality--distilled in our argument into courage and also understood to be operable without conceptualizable context--existed already for Adam and Eve.  Adam and Eve sinned when they asked for the context--the knowledge privileged to God--of morality.  The grasping for the prize of the fruit was an act of cowardice, and was punished by an avalanche of fears.  This truth must also be seen in the gospel insistence (most puzzling otherwise) that the people at large were taught only in parables--while the disciples were seemingly privileged to hear the analyses of the parables.  This standard construction of the parable theme relies on two notions.  First, that the people at large were being deprived of a good, and second that some sort of blessing was being bestowed on the disciples.  A cursory search of the gospels will show that Jesus rewarded again and again the grasping attempts of the unlearned to brave new thresholds of understanding through intuitive means, and a cursory search of the scriptures will show the generalized disdain for conceptualized and categorized "wisdom" that Jesus must have reckoned lurked behind any ostensible blessing of hearing parables explained.

Subsuming (nay, discarding) particular contexts of morality under a generalized determination to lunge toward the ineffable at all costs is what it is to surrender one's life.  This is what it is to surrender one's world.  Courage is what this requires, both the courage to make the leap and also the courage to trust that an aversion to the contexts of conceptualized life does not deprive a person of the ability to remain still a responsible actor within the bounds of reality.  This is what the "Lord's Prayer" is about, and it is telling that conventional Christianity cannot grasp this.

Our Father which art in heaven: We must conceptualize God in some manner, but we cannot forget that the heavenly manifestation of any such concept is infinitely more perfect than we can even imagine, and it must be understood first and foremost as existing, as it were, in an infinitely unimaginable heavenly realm.

Hallowed be thy name: This is the inescapable implication of God being the master, not of some kingdom in the sky (the nature of which and therefore the master of which is open to conjecture) but rather of a realm so remote in perfection as to be something we can only rally our courage to lunge for.

Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven: The only proper expenditure of our energies is to act in accordance with a boundless kingdom that leaps to the will of God, not a theologian's imagined kingdom of constrained righteousness.  In the kingdom of God's will mountains leap to do the will of the believer's prayer, and in the kingdom of God's will all parochialism (from families to nations) bows before the believer's unutterable aspiration to live in the rarefied nature of God's angels.

Give us this day our daily bread: Reality intrudes, as it must, but it must not be acceded to any more than necessary.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors: This awesome statement of courage can exist in practice only when the believer trusts God to be awesomely generous in mercy.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: And, finally, the believer must fall back on petition, expressed (as most starkly here) in asking for the particulars of moral burdens to be lifted away, even as the onus of life's particulars remains for the person.

The world of the Lord's Prayer's aspirations is a ceaseless vortex that devours the particulars, the categories, and the conceptions of our accursed world, and to dive into that vortex in courage is to display morality in the only manner understandable in Jesus' teaching.