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.