Awry Greatly or Less So

The "Aware, Away, Awry" progression is the progression of our response to circumstances.  If religion encompasses all circumstances (for who could imagine it otherwise?), then the foundational premise of religion is simple.  Our understandings are all relational--nothing existing in our conceptions other than in some context--and we are not the authors or originators of the relation-schemes that confront us.  The foundational premise of religion is simple--relational experience.  Only the divine might exist in the absence of relational experience.

So we respond to our circumstances, and our circumstances respond to us.  If a proper relationship to God is what matters, then nothing else matters.  The delineation--in our thought lives--of the elements of our circumstances is identification that is as flawed inevitably as any attempt we might make to sort out the proper relationships among elements that we ourselves have identified and labeled.  We can call ourselves puny and fleeting in the scope and ages of Creation's space and time, yet in the very speaking we are pronouncing ourselves the lords of our thought lives.  Space and time--to say nothing of the visualized Creator we see as making space and time--do not dwarf us in the manner boasted of by us in our false humility, if we have accorded to ourselves the presumption that space and time exist in other than our perceptions.

Things happen to us, but it is not piety to try to sort out the proper relationship among the "things," the "happenings," and the "us"-conceptualizations.  This sorting-out impetus is familiar to us, but it is not piety, even when we exercise ourselves in the attempt to do sortings-out correctly.  All we are doing is sifting through things we think we know--while Jesus is confronting us with the fact that we do not even know ourselves.  As I have described before, we are the unlocatable and indefinable caretakers of the thought-schemes that impress themselves upon us--"caretaking" being the logical default approach to anything that we attribute to God's creation and cannot--godlike--place outside the sphere of our concerns.

And of course we do our sortings-out incorrectly most of the time.  All of the time, actually--when we consider that even this or that "correct" thought or action on our part must be in some respects flawed.  We become "Aware" of things, we move "Away" from them in our very first--flawed and context-seeking--responses to things, and we go invariably "Awry."  In Christianity, this sorry progression plays out in the innumerable, always-flabbergasted-that-everyone-does-not-recognize-the-simple-formula, ultimately indefensible "salvation economies."  Some of the greatest minds of Christendom have expended themselves in such manner, characteristically bemoaning how humanity is baffled by the sublime "foolishness of the Cross," and drawing out great theology-schemes explaining God's lordship shown in his mastery of time and space.  And all the while the time-space-and-whatever arena of God's lordship is nothing but the fancy of the brilliant theologian.  And all the while the truth of God's singularity--his existence outside of context and his sovereign and ineffable possession of the truths of all elements--is a truth as available to the greatest fool as to the greatest genius.

This hunger for--and, as I have written, consumption of--the perceived elements of existence is all-pervasive in humanity.  We devour time and space and all that exists within them--that is, in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, we devour even our savior and Creation-mediator, and our salvation rests on whether or not we will accept this simple truth.  We can have the God who nourishes us--approaching warily the table of his bounty with the washing of our neighbor's feet never as complete as it ought to be--or we can devour in the maws of our conceit all the things he seeks to nourish us with.

We can choose to go greatly awry, or less so--but go awry we will.

Away on Journeys of Conceit

There is one aspect above all that must be related about the "Away" element of "Aware, Away, Awry."  "Away" refers to the person progressing beyond any "Aware" moment of unanticipated and unrehearsed experience.  The person becomes aware of some experience, and moves away from its immediacy, and such distancing can be described in terms of time and space--but it would be folly to imagine that the phenomenon of moving away from some galvanizing stimulus is a "moving away" that can be viewed as in an arena of time and space.  Time and space are not dimensions that--for the purposes of our present understanding--can be understood as templates for the "moving away."  Time and space are consumables, reached for by us as surely as any object of desire, and seized and digested by us surely as any draught or morsel.

We do not need time or space--nor do we need to be bounded by time or space--any more than do the angels.  We simply believe we are so bounded--and then therefore are indeed bounded--because we believe we are so.  If we possessed merely the infinitesimal faith that Jesus describes, we could surely make the peaks hurl themselves into the depths--and we could command the waters of our environment to saturate our bodies in perfect hydration.  "Living water" might be a metaphor used by Jesus, but that does not change the fact that the woman at the well might have availed herself of all the water necessary for her life without visiting the well ever again.

Of course, the moral implication of "Away" as a hazard to our eternal fates is of immeasurably greater importance than the earthly implications of faith.  Even the descriptions--easy enough when looked for--of time and space as optional consumables do not change the fact of our precarious state regarding our relationship with God.  What is important--and what cannot be missed--about consumption with its attendant appetites is how it lurks as a subtext to every understanding we can have of our experiential lives.  The story of the Woman at the Well (especially as it is rendered a standard trope of apologetics) is a perfect example of such subtext, so easily missed.  When the woman asks for the living water, Jesus tells her to return with her husband.  Jesus' directive is not perhaps the most sensitive he might make--he knows full well she has no "husband" to retrieve.  Jesus is launching into a morally-charged exchange.

Jesus at the well is also launching us into a realm in which our capacities of conceptualization are tested.  How often have the moralists said that the "husband" directive is intended to convict the woman of her sinful state--setting up nicely the theologians' offering of this or that salvation remedy.  Of course, any notion of proper sexual relations is tenuous when extended to our conjectures about the mores of first-century Samaria--and we are usually conjecturing as well about that particular woman's past.  She has had five husbands--what of it?  Might she not have been five times widowed?  And if she had five divorces, would it not be stated properly that she had only ever one husband, along with four invalid marriages?  And if she were perhaps past child-bearing (or perhaps even past conjugal relations) would the notion that she was living with a man outside of marriage carry the connotations that the moralists have wanted to attach?

This is the woman who is told she might have living water and never thirst again, if only she would ask for it.  This is the scene in which Jesus tells his disciples that he has food (by implication not regular "food") they know not of.  This is the scene in which Jesus tells his disciples that their notion of waiting for a harvest is a notion that ignores the ever-harvest-time of God's bounty.  The logical implication--would we but allow it to fall unimpeded--of the woman's domestic state is that the woman is acting on a hunger for what a relationship with man might bring her.  Her marital state could be "correct" by all the moralists' criteria, and yet be an unwholesome consumption weighing on the woman's soul.

All of our existence is a scrambling to consume that which we imagine we cannot do without.  Unless we understand that the very foundations of our perceived existences (the like of which I intend by throwing in "time" and "space") are themselves not foundations but rather hungered-for consumables, we will never understand the moral distance between ourselves and our Creator's conceits.  Jesus sends the pairs of disciples out to find the houses in each town in which to light, and the text tells us not how the disciples are to ascertain the true worth of those houses.  Jesus tells the pairs of disciples how to leave the towns--in blessing or in condemnation--but he does not tell them how long to stay.  Little things like time and place seem to mean nothing in the larger equation--though Jesus does tell the disciples that they will not finish their tasks in any event.

And even when the disciples do return from a missionary journey, the greatest exclamation Jesus gives out with is a description of Satan's fall--a description of an event generally understood as having happened in the primordial past, and in a place essentially inconceivable.  Virtually every "time" and "place" in the teachings of Jesus is immaterial.  Elijah is coming, and already has.  When we imagine that time and place are framework elements--rather than consumable particulars--of our existences, then we worship time and place.  We can at best be calling God the master of time and space, after we have in our conceits shaped time and space as minor deities.

God allowed Noah to eat animals, even as Noah was allowed to not eat animals.  God allowed Adam's family to eat of the plants of the earth, even as Adam and Eve and all the other ancestors of the woman at the well (and all of us) might in the merest of faith subsist on no food at all.  God allowed Adam and Eve to eat of all but one of the trees of the Garden, even as they might have done without any food at all.  God allowed Adam to eat, even as Adam truly needed--if Jesus is to be believed--nothing but God.

We experience the surprises, the shocks, and the traumas that impress themselves upon us, and we seek in succession to impress ourselves upon our environments.  We are most ourselves when we are confronted by things we do not comprehend, and every attempt at comprehension of--or confrontation with--that which besets us, no matter how satisfying our response might seem to us, is a moving away from the genuineness of the initial moment.  Comprehension--in the logic of Jesus' teaching--is an outworking of appetite, and every element of existence that we subject to our mechanisms of comprehension is something we ingest or imbibe, something we make a part of ourselves.  The net result is always a "moving away"--a journey of conceit that entails every intimation of hazard we can imagine.

Aware of Instantaneous Fragments

There are three elements of the "Aware, Away, Awry" approach that are understood necessarily to eliminate all of the myriad ideas of "salvation economy."  The "Aware" aspect of our analysis describes the instantaneous fragments of our existence in which we are confronted by phenomena before we can assess (or try to assess) them.

Of course, the phrase "instantaneous fragments" might be picked apart as internally inconsistent--does not "instantaneous" imply "involving no time," thereby implying also no dimension as a "fragment"?  Of course--also--this is silly.  The fact that our imperfect capabilities of perception can admit of no exposure to anything involving "no time" is in itself merely a fact contributing to the prudent assessment of our capabilities overall.  If our inability to assess dimensionality in its infinites--either absolutely small or absolutely great--disqualifies us from discussion of any absolutes, then the "God" of any religious topic is reduced by necessity to merely some effusively-described idol.

Yet we become aware of things suddenly.  We come to understand those things in time (and in the space that is the context of our points of reference.)  Merest prudence tell us that each succeeding step in our analyses is prone to error, and the cumulative effect is most likely to be an increase in error.  To congratulate ourselves for having "worked around" what we imagine is a complete tour of all relevant aspects of a belief system (such as Christianity) is to delude ourselves into thinking that a pure distillation of reason has allowed us to nestle into the comfort of our version of that belief system's premises.  (One need merely taste of the idiotic apologetics for Adam and Eve's expulsion in conservative Christian children's books.)

Next we will look at the "Away" aspect.

Lacking Comfort and Saying It

The progression in thought from "Roused, Readied, Reaped" to "Aware, Away, Awry" is plodding and virtually unstoppable.  In regard to "Roused, Readied, Reaped," our biologically-mediated experiential lives are understandable in terms of arcs or cycles, either returning to familiar ground, or at least putting us through familiar-seeming paces of beginning-middle-end routines.  We can tell ourselves, for example, that we have grasped linear narratives of such wrenching situations as the fall of Adam in Eden or the falling away of the disciples in Gethsemane, yet we grasp nothing of those stories if we do not identify ourselves with the waking, writhing, and withering away of our heroes.  That is the pattern of honestly understandable experiences--not linear narratives.  Adam was thrown into his experiences with the sin-germ eating at him already, and his rise, reign, and fall were pregnant in his essence always.  The disciples were lurched awake and found their minutes-long career of brave defenders of Jesus collapsing even as their master was bound and led away.  So also do we process the experiences of life, much as we would like to pretend that we are erecting edifices of our lives-long progress.  We are as feckless as the disciples when we are falling asleep, and we are as newly-arisen and undefended as Adam when we awake.

And, in equally unstoppable fashion, any attempt we have to honestly process life's experiences--even seen by us as conceptually (if not ideally)--rhythmic, is frustrated by the stubborn fact that the future lies before us.  Our cycles or arcs are seen by us only in our fancied anticipations, or in what chances we might have for retrospective examination.  Really, our arcs of experience bend and flail off into the future as they will--these are the "tendrils" I have described in terms of "Aware, Away, Awry."  We watch our experiences, and our accomplishments (or at least our effects), and our more-or-less identifiable selves, careen off into the future.  This is our lot, as our souls seek to herd the unruly collections of tendencies and of transient self-identifications that comprise the shambling households within our souls' individual compasses--the households for which care we will answer to God.

And so, truly seen, we are indistinct creatures, as changeable in substance as the child is changeable, so that the parents (no matter how blessed--or how proud--they feel in their roles) cannot but look at their adult children as persons who have stolen away their toddler selves from their parents.  Only in this vein can we hope to understand the otherwise mystifying attitude Jesus has toward persons.  When Jesus calls Peter blessed, and then calls him Satan, we cannot escape the conclusion that the one-and-the-same person Jesus is addressing is really two different persons.  All that matters is the person of the moment--the person of that instant in the soul's flight.  The Jews who Jesus would describe as children of Abraham were in the next moment children of the devil--as surely changed in their substance as they were in their attitude.

This, presumably, is why Jesus does not dwell on the notion of the permanent person--human beings are persons of their moments, with their uncharted, beckoning futures.  The moralists will never cease to note that Jesus told The Woman Taken in Adultery, "Go, and sin no more"--as though the woman in her next moments, days, and years could be conceivably tended with other advice.  Jesus heals a man and then tracks him down and tells him to stop sinning, lest something worse befall him.  There is no past for those people, and there is no future except the uncertainty that faces us all--the uncertainty in which we might become different persons to God, amenable or not in any given moment to the beckoning of salvation which knows no moment but the now.

So it is not surprising that Jesus performs the staggering miracle of raising a little girl to life, and then--rather than basking (or allowing the child to bask) in the glory of the miracle--instructs those present merely to give the girl something to eat.  Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead--from the several days' dead--and one would expect a moment of rapturous reunion followed by days (or at least hours) of celebration.  Instead Jesus merely instructs that Lazarus be freed from his funeral wrappings.  Yet this is the Jesus who most famously "wept."  For whom, then, was Jesus weeping?  For the lost (though to Jesus merely "sleeping") Lazarus?  Jesus knew just where Lazarus was, and Jesus knew just what would happen to Lazarus--resurrection.  Jesus also knew, of course, what would happen to Lazarus overall.  Was Jesus weeping because the just Lazarus was to be subject once again to the trials of life on earth?  Can we think that Jesus did not know that evil persons would conspire to send Lazarus to the dead once again?

In this ever-heightening emphasis on care for other people is to be found a great tragedy of our experience.  To ask to care more and more for other people is also to ask to feel their sufferings more deeply, so that the soul of the person who wishes to be empathetic can be overwhelmed rather than buoyed up.  The equation of trying to care is merciless, extracting from the person more and more even as the person seeks to put more and more into it.  For us, of course, this is as nothing compared to how we might (attempt to) understand what Jesus felt.  Jesus attempted to give all, even as he knew we could give him nothing back.  Here we must come face-to-face with the reality of the Crucifixion as a torment.  Jesus could not have failed to know what sufferings people would endure for the glory of his name (or what they might endure thinking it was for the glory of his name.)  But there is precious little of such zeal shown for him in his hour of need.  Those who stayed by his side (or in the shadow of the cross) were those who would have been reckoned of little account by the Romans, and Jesus' main companions abandoned him, and all of the theologians' cant about Nicodemus and about Joseph of Arimathea is no more impressive than those two privileged gentlemen's skulking.

The Jesus who promised that he would not leave his followers without a Comforter was himself denied a comforter.  The beings created in God's image--even those precious few given by the Father into the care of the Son--deserted Jesus in his sufferings.  Jesus near the end cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Jesus did not ask, "Why are you torturing me?"--and in this fact might be found the true scope of Jesus' suffering.  Jesus was left alone in such manner as no mere human being might--that was his torment.  The torment of physical suffering on Jesus is properly to be called "unimaginable," and yet Christianity has had no difficulty imagining torments endured by "the saints" that seems almost to be designed to leave the Master in the shadows.  Much of such recorded saintly acceptance of horrific torture is undoubtedly true, but in part the point seems to blunt itself.  Chief among such examples is the story of Peter, who is held in all the more regard in that he sought to make his voiced inferiority to Jesus a spectacle in his upside-down crucifixion.

And of course the saintly canon of torments endured for Christ has to do with the giving up of life voluntarily--sometimes after tortures as great as those recorded for Jesus, even as it is recorded that Pilate was surprised at the brevity of Jesus' sufferings.  Nonetheless the evangelical radio vibrates endlessly with praise for Jesus having given up his life (usually phrased as giving up his life "for me")--while yet the same airwaves are crowded with praise for mere mortals who have given up their lives "for him."  To read the gospels, however, it seems that Jesus was only too ready to "give up the ghost."  It seems a triumph of blessedness when he exclaims, "It is finished."  And, of course, this is the Jesus who says that he lays down his life, and he takes it up again.  The whole "He gave up his life for me" fascination rings hollow.

Jesus set out to do things in his earthly ministry, and he was really alone but for God, and we cannot imagine the loneliness he felt when his father seemed far from him--just as it is true that trying to have connections with other people only sharpens a person's awareness of the gaps and misalignments, such that the distances seem to outstrip the experience of closeness.  We, however, have Jesus.  The greatest of the "however's", however, is still ahead of us.  The real implication of having Jesus is the conceptualized necessity of having nothing else.  "Having" is an experience, and experiences come and go, and experiences trail off in their anticipation into the future.  Add to this the realization that the actualities of life must fade and wither in the light of divine immanence, and a person is faced with the grinding equation that everything that gives meaning in this life must be seen more and more as futile.

In the teaching of Jesus the counterpart of life being really nothing is the affirmation that we are really nothing.  "We" do not have to hold to contentions that we exist, because we are assailed continually by those alien, rebellious "selves" of which our souls are mere caretakers.  And those selves stretch themselves out against the harshness of the future before we are aware of it--this future having innumerable turns and hazards.  Of course the landscape of the future need in no way reflect the assessments God has of our journeys--our real journey is one of seeking closeness to God, and the landscape of that realm is not discernable.  It is not for nothing that Jesus tells a young man who seeks the truth that he is not far from the kingdom of God, and then follows it up with no further instructions--for it is the desire that is the journey.

As I said above, "having" is an experience, and experiences come and go, and experiences trail off in their anticipation into the future.  The "come and go" is the "Roused, Readied, Reaped," and the "trail off in their anticipation" is the "Aware, Away, Awry."  The journey of salvation is a letting go of the self (which is really a letting go of the mental hoarding of the self) to confront whatever comes next--in a continual endeavor to do that "letting go."  The initial and repeated task of self-abnegation is the "easy yoke," and the winding path of confronted eventualities is the narrow way.  This is in sorry contrast to that twisted-around thing called Christianity, which forces the believer to bear a deadly burden of self-conceptualization, and seeks to make the journey bearable by setting out some program of sacraments or similarly-scheduled recitations that one is saved by one great moment of conversion.  So in this sorry contrast is the believer stacked under the burdens that Jesus saw typified in his day, and so also here is the believer led to believe that one can be led on a broad and easy way to salvation.