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.
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