I started upon this present blog "Aware, Away, Awry" because my thoughts seemed to have moved to a succeeding and yet distinct realm from my previous blog "Roused, Readied, Reaped."
"Roused, Readied, Reaped" has humanity experiencing existence as a practically infinite cascade of overlapping arcs of differing lengths and on parallel tracks. "Aware, Away, Awry" has humanity experiencing the internal, time-mediated architecture of those tracks, that is, humanity from moment to moment knowing only each moment and guessing at what comes next. This necessary guessing at what comes next is the seed-bed of our wandering conceits. We experience the awareness of each new phenomenon in the real-time genuineness that hearkens back to our primordial birth, but we across our lives develop more and more the tendencies to recognize less and less pure confrontation with reality, and to substitute for it our conceits of moral authority.
"Aware, Away, Awry" seemed necessary to me because I am attempting to describe in generic terms the moral logic of the teachings of Jesus. "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is the framework, and it serves somewhat to humanize our necessary processing of the related experiences of Jesus' contemporaries--as well as our own--but "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is unavoidably backward-looking, attempting to make sense of things that have happened (and things that we decide to understand in terms of our own arc-plans, which might be more or less consistent with those of the divine.)
"Aware, Away, Awry" is the distilled notion of the experience-type related in the beginning of Genesis, in which the first humans are startled into awareness and respond--in what has come to typify our kind--by attempting to understand things that cannot be understood. Adam's very existence was relational, inasmuch as he was the pristine creation of an ever-present Creator, yet Adam insisted on explicit relations, such that his Creator moved in superintendence to assess and address Adam as a creature who was "alone." Adam was never alone, and in this contradiction resides the base-level maladjustment that characterizes the story of humanity. The "Fall" part of the Eden story--in some ways the parent in our mutual Western consciousness of the "Roused, Readied, Reaped" formulation--is actually only an out-playing of the original discomfiture of Adam.
In terms of our discussion, it becomes then transparently insipid to hold to the old innocent-before, guilty-after paradigm of the Fall. Sin existed in humanity before the eating of the fruit, and sin--if understood in the permeating quality that Jesus relates in his chiding of humanity ("you, being evil")--is the quality of evil that retracts when backwardly-viewed into the inscrutable recesses of the moment after Creation. Sin lurked in the heart of Adam--the heart casting about needlessly for explicit relations--long before the revelation of the dallying heart of Eve, or even the revelation of the devious mind of the snake.
The fruit-eating Fall, then, is merely the crystalizing of the progression of sin. Here, of course, the "Roused, Readied, Reaped" progression is typically useful as a means of understanding the history of humanity, but it relates only clumsily the unfolding history of Adam and Eve, who of course experienced the "Fall" (and all the rest of their lives, as we ours) in moments as yet unrecognized as parts of (perhaps only more or less real) experience-arcs. Yes, Adam and Eve sinned in the eating of the fruit, but the residing and lurking sin of their lives (as of ours) was the more basic tendency to take startling moments of awareness and proceed immediately to slot them into anticipated experience-arcs. This is what we do still. We seek to usurp the role of God--who knows all ends--and in the process we subsume the comparative innocence of genuine response to life, placing it under the purported "knowledge of good and evil" that we are shown to possess most obviously when we are shown to possess it--and to wield it--as the overweening adolescents that we adults are.
There are two elements of Jesus' teachings that Christianity emphasizes particularly. One is the teaching that we must become like little children. The other is the teaching that we must tend Jesus' flock. Unsurprisingly, organized Christianity with its attachment to the notions of the Bible as a complete story, and of the history of the Church as a Book-of-Revelation-bound pre-completed story, is an organized Christianity fixated on a beginning-and-end paradigm (perhaps the greatest "Roused, Readied, Reaped" there is.) What is missing is the moment-to-moment logic of Jesus' teachings. The self-described "little children" of the denominations are adults who have drawn up the story-lines of their conversion (or confirmation) tales. The mature, teaching-capable, "flock-tending" adults of the denominations are persons who have seized upon (and have had confirmed for them by others) the story-lines of their growth to religious seniority. Neither of these conceptualities (child or shepherd) admits of real-time molding--each being institutionalized by a requisite story-arc--and the conceptualities themselves are strangers to each other. The ossified child of the denominations is stiffened with some such branding as "humility" (when the humility of real children is displayed in the awe-struck exuberance that leads to the most impertinent of questions), and the petrified adult of the denominations is frozen in some such posture of orthodoxy upon which the communally-bestowed title of shepherd is based.
In contrast is the teaching of Jesus, which is enlivened from moment to moment, and which thrives from moment to moment on a continual cascade of instants of awareness. Each of these instants is a story, or a part of a story, which has not yet ended. The story-arcs (the essence of "Roused, Readied, Reaped") have not yet closed, and perhaps never will. In the teaching of Jesus, the moments of awareness--the recapitulations of the experience-rush of infancy--are ever burgeoning. In the teaching of Jesus, the experience and the expression of seniority are leapings toward the heights of understanding, leapings that might be of greater profit in their failures than they might be in any heights-attaining that they can seem to have. One is reminded of Jesus' bemusement at the beginning of John--when he is hailed as the messiah on the slimmest of evidence--and then his incredulous (and soon to be ratified) doubt of his disciples' claims of understanding on the eve of his arrest.
Still later in John, Peter is admonished by Jesus to look after Jesus' flock. One would be hard-pressed to invent an ordination that was a more deflating event than the agony session at the Sea of Tiberius. It must not be lost, however, that Jesus emphasized "feed my sheep" as a concept over "tend my sheep." This is the same Jesus who said he himself--in the most graphic terms--would feed the flock with his very body. This is the same Jesus who, at the start of this same gospel, is described as the very means through which all Creation was formed--and this Creation is the source not merely of creatures but also of the means of their sustenance.
The enlivened core--the very heart--of Jesus' teachings is the uncompleted moment, the reaching for the next instant even as it portends of error and of alienation from the source of enlivening. The heart of Jesus' teaching is the uncompleted arc--the unfinished story--not the fulfillment in this life of any aspirations of his creatures. It is telling that Jesus speaks as often of the growth of the plant as he does of the life of the "breath of life" creatures, and yet organized Christianity does not really know what to do with the plant. This is a tragedy. The plant springs from a seed that Jesus calls dead, and yet we know that the seed is not dead other than as a metaphor. Our souls--as Adam's--spring into this life from a seed-bed of unimaginable miraculous quality, and yet this seed-bed, being not God, is not perfect. Who then can plumb the mystery of the source of our evil? Who can say that evil does not permeate even the most prosaically biological--perhaps even mineral--phenomena?
This is the wrenching condition that afflicts Creation in the teachings of Jesus: the tracking of morality is not to be found in stories, but in the raw elements from which stories are created. God does not wait, God does not need, to see the end of any story. God knows, and God judges, the very primal urges of the least of his creatures. The intention of God is that the fig tree be fruitful. The insistence that such fruitfulness must be "in season" is an element of human arrogance. God judges the creature's response to pre-conceptual urges, and urges are not comfortable residents of story-arcs--story-arcs develop when urges are frustrated and when urges conflict. Jesus chided his disciples for thinking of harvest-times, and he told them to look around, for already the fields were white unto harvest.
This, then, is the proper conceptualization of moral matters in Jesus' teachings. Moral matters are not described truly in stories--stories are the corpses of moral matters. Stories start at beginnings, and yet moral matters have no beginnings, just jarring moments of awareness that moral scenarios have already begun. Stories have endings, yet moral matters are decided in real-time by a judge who gives real judgments, not after-the-fact rationalizations of judgments. It is as insipid for us to try to write or tell stories about such things as it would be insipid for us to tell a story on the one hand about how Jesus cursed one fig tree for being fruitless out of season, and a story on the other hand about how Jesus taught of a fig tree that was given a year's reprieve--and a full year at that. Insipid, I say, because the mercy-story would seem to us to be complete and satisfying, while yet the out-of-season story would seem to be utterly jarring. Or will we recognize at last that the God who judges all does indeed judge all--all moments, all thoughts, all urges, all responses to urges?
Jesus teaches that evil does not come from without, but rather from the heart. There is no reason to think of this source of evil as any different from that which bedeviled Adam from the start. The heart sends out urges, and the soul--that uncomfortable, ill-fitting, frustrated steward of the inner household--seeks (or should seek) to mold those urges into more wholesome things. Those "things," however, are no more than sprouting tendrils reaching for the "skies" that are their aims. Even the lowly plant reaches for the sky, or spreads itself upon the soil. If the plant is not hewn down or chewed apart, it nonetheless will not describe an arc of seed-spreading and of crashing itself down to earth as some sort of "story"--it has lived merely moments, and the story (if imagined by any creature or categorized as such by the divine) is alien to that collection of urges that is the plant.
This is what connects us to all Creation, and this is what informs a truly enlivened moral sense. Over and over again Jesus treats us as creatures who must live in moments, not because we are unable to foresee intended results or uncharged with attempting to attain them, but because the very act of foreseeing is as much treading on dangerous ground as it is laying prudent groundwork. We are properly creatures of uncompleted arcs, creatures described through sprouting tendrils--twisting in winds and curved toward the decay of our energies or the expenditure of our lives. What we must seek to incorporate into ourselves, and to give to each other, is every available sustenance we can collect. We are properly nourishers of ourselves and our fellows, just as Jesus fed the sinner first (or encouraged others to do so) and tended to his or her moral conceptualizations later. We are never to forget to feed the flock first, and to tend it later--because tending is what we do when we think we understand the courses of events--the story-arcs--of the Creation that only God understands.
I hope this will serve as a preface.
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