(Of course, Jews and Christians can accuse each other of being irrational, and the in-fighting among Christians about "rationality" is rife, and after some one or another ostensibly unassailable rational framework has been laid, many Christians are eager to claim that their detractors in the West have an overblown sense of their own rationality and fail to grasp the "foolishness of the Cross" or some such. One way or another, the notion of rationality--ostensibly applied correctly, or incorrectly, or arrogantly in overweening error--is the controlling notion.)
One thing that is important to realize in all of this is the fact that "rationality" (along with its potential bedfellows "humanism" and "materialism") is only by popular acclaim held to be the special province of the Hellenistic influence that beset the Levant in the fourth century BCE. There are elements of rationality that are so deeply embedded in the "Judeo-Christian" heritage that they are scarcely recognized for what they are. One such element (which will become apparent to us in the importance it has regarding our emphasis on moment-by-moment digesting of experiences) is the concept of cause-and-effect as applied to the Creation.
The very "logic" of the literal Creation week (even when it is held to be metaphorical) provides the foundation for the "nature's God" or "clockwork" (or even deterministic) musings of the deistic Enlightenment. Ostensibly, the First Cause set into motion the dependent cause-and-effect universe with which we are familiar--and the Rationality Set of Western apologetics (to include the Paul of Romans) have determined that the existence of a divine Creator is so unquestionably manifest in the palpable universe as to make belief in that Creator the epitome of logic--and the denial of that Creator the epitome of lamentable irrationality.
There are cracks, however, in the edifice of the cause-and-effect notion of an initial Creation (and I mean these in addition to the obvious fact that reliance on cause-and-effect in religion is an invitation to the cause-and-effect held by deterministic materialism.) In the fourth chapter of Mark, Jesus says that the earth "bringeth forth fruit of herself"--which can be held to be deterministic only if one ignores the apparent anthropomorphism of the statement. Earlier in Mark, Jesus in the Temptations is described as "with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him." This is the Jesus who could certainly order mountains (or beasts) around--were he not (as apparently here) placed in a state of debilitation. This is the Jesus of which it is said, "All things were made by him," and yet he who tells his followers that they can ask anything of him in his name, needs apparently in this moment to have his needs met, and to have dangers warded away from himself.
This is a Jesus, I would contend, whose creative role is not to be understood merely in a linear or narrative fashion--cause and effect be damned. Jesus laments that Jerusalem will suffer a fate that--to the endless consternation of the commentators--Jesus describes in terms that reach undoubted implications about the world as a whole. Jesus asks the daughters of Jerusalem to imagine what will happen when the wood is dry, considering what can happen when it is green. Unavoidably, Jesus is describing a world in which his creative power is not one of initial, deistic clock-winding, but one of continual (and continually emerging) miraculous quality. The flourishing of the green is a momentary miracle of God, and the sparseness of the dry is a momentary miracle of God. Jesus administers a Creation in which the sparrow that falls to the ground is not of concern to God merely because the poor bird has fallen to some mishap of predation, accident, disease, or senescence, but rather because the bird has taken wing that very day because God bore him up.
In the immediacy of religious experience, the miracle of Creation is ongoing, and the ends and demises that we associate as latent determinants of the ends of cycles and arcs are no more capricious than the beginnings (with attendant life-oriented urges) that God's creatures experience. The poor dumb creature that is placed in a precarious and ultimately deadly existence in also a poor dumb creature that is endowed individually with a desire to survive and--to some extent--to enjoy the advantages of that survival. Even the interventions of God that seem brutal must be viewed as interventions among an innumerable cloud of other interventions--for good or ill. The early Genesis framework is important in the teachings of Jesus, and so it is perhaps appropriate here to opine on the slaughter of the Flood. All of those people were killed. Their lives (or at least most of their lives), however, were not comparable to our expectations. Only in the Flood tumult was the life-span of humans reduced to a hundred years or more--the unfortunate people (or unfortunate-to-be-so-evil people) before the Flood lived lives that dragged on and on.
In addition to the question of the immediacy of experience, is the question of the conceptual implications of creation understood as an ongoing process (or, perhaps better, as a process out of time and space.) Paul describes the necessity of deducing the existence of God from the elements of the physical universe. This is folly. The non-existence of God can can be deduced as well from the elements of the physical universe. Jesus, however, described a universe of unending potentialities, tended from moment to moment by his creative role and amenable from moment to moment to his gracious affirmation of his disciples' petitions.
Most importantly, Jesus simply described a universe of unending potentialities. This, however, is distinct from a universe without end. We must expect that, in a manner defying all authoritative quantification, the end will come. The green wood will dry. It will not be a happy moment, but it will be no less miraculous than any moment.
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