Jesus Would Have Us Pray

My latest take on The Lord's Prayer (Matthew version):

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

Virtually any number of biblical descriptions of God will be taken by the denominations as "names of God."  However, it is indeed noteworthy that the phrase "Our Father which art in heaven" (or perhaps "heavenly Father") is not considered more seriously as the "name" referred to in the above verse.  Ultimately, the most pointed "hallowing" (or "considering hallowed") of "heavenly Father" would be as of a father beyond compare--of a father whose stature as such obliterates all other uses of the term.  This Heavenly Father, properly considered, would be our father not only in earth and in heaven, but our father in such transcendent terms as to render void all considerations of existence other than in terms of his will, and indeed this is where the rest of the prayer is leading. 

Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

This "kingdom" for which we are to hope is a kingdom of the father's will, not a kingdom of any independent stature--or, more pointedly, not a kingdom to which we will assign any independent stature.  This proper view of the kingdom must be such as to vitiate any sophomoric notions that the existence of God can be extrapolated from any perceived majesty, breadth, cohesion, or complexity of Creation.  This God Who is the Cause of that Which Exists is not God at all--this God is just a fancied creature of majesty sufficient to hover above all majesties we can imagine, to stride across all breadths we can imagine, and so on.  The kingdom to which we are to aspire is in its mountains and its mustard seeds--and it potentially innumerable "heavens"--present at every moment purely in the will of God, and a prayer of ours consistent with the will of God might alter the twinkling starlight of a moment or alter the course of galaxies.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Nonetheless, we will fail to adhere to the will of God, and as such failures we cannot pray into existence--according to the Father's will--the food we will eat (or the clothes we will wear, and so on--all the things to which Jesus says we--if properly oriented--might give no thought.)  The basest--and, to us, the most understandable--needs we might have are those which arise from the physical demands of our existence.  We can pray at least to have our temporal needs met, but we must see such needs as against a larger backdrop of the physical existence of the universe--of the physical expanse and terrain and components of the "in earth" phenomenon.  We must seek to see the universe as an expression of the will of God--not as an arena in which he can exert his will--or we have made of him, if not an idol, then an effectual pagan actor-god who might well be represented by a idol.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And we will fail to adhere to the will of God in more acute ways, so that it might be said that we have committed sin.  It would be more exact to say we are sinful, but opining on the depth and depravity of our sin is as insipid as opining on the subtlety and enormity of This God Who is the Cause of that Which Exists--we can fall short of the more properly described God Who Exceeds All in such manner as would warrant our saying that our sin exceeds all.  For this reason, as Jesus tells us, we must reckon that the extent to which we can be expected to forgive our fellows is limitless--just as the debt for which we must ask forgiveness is most properly considered limitless.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

And so what are we to do?  If the words of this prayer are taken seriously, the upshot is that we are to ask God to alter the nature of the universe, that is, to make the earth like heaven.  "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven" is an utterly vapid phrase if it is reckoned to be a suitable heading under which we will list those things we would like fixed, replaced, or alleviated "in earth."  This is the intellectual pathology that is revealed when we count God as above all, below all, before all, and after all--yet we reckon that the remedies (or candidate remedies) for our sinfulness are to be found in the sequelae of our discrete, sinful acts.  So also is it insipid for us to ask God to cure us of our sinfulness, as though he was bound by an unfolding preacher's-narrative about the decline and fall of the lost soul.

If God is merely an actor in a realm that he created--a huge, thundering actor, no less--then it would make sense to ask him merely to forgive our discrete, sinful acts, or to ask him to root out our sinful natures.  In such requests reside all of the theologians' notions about "genuine repentance" or "effectual sacraments" (or whatever), as well as all of the theologians' notions about "saving faith" or "saving grace."  While such conceptions are not devoid of logic, they are nonetheless opposed to the prayer's request to "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."  If God is the great, controlling actor against a backdrop of Creation, then--while it would be understandable to ask to be spared certain levels and modes of temptations--God (if he is indeed God) would be perfectly capable of adjusting his level of expectations of the person to fit the altered temptation-environment.  Nothing would have operated to the sinner's eventual profit.

No, the only value of the request, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil", is as a request that God alter the entirety of the existence that bears upon persons.  Asking God to do this or that--when Jesus tells us that we can do the this's or that's of moving mountains at a word--is to ask God to be as minor an actor--insultingly, of course--as even our most grandiose conceptions of his majesty would cast him.  Jesus, rather, is telling us to ask God (as the prayer foreshadows from the start) to make earth like heaven--and we cannot conceive of what it would be like for earth to be like heaven.  Our conceptions of improving our eternal lot (including the theologians'  vapid notions of faith and works and faith-versus-works) are--like all our conceptions--merely adjustments of our estimations of the existence we can experience or at least opine about.

Jesus asks Nicodemus to understand the "birth from above" (or "again"--it matters not) in analogy to the action of the wind.  And then Jesus tells Nicodemus that Nicodemus does not understand the wind.  This is our great predicament: We will never understand in totality the conditions of our perceived existences, and moreover will will never understand the totality of the nature of God ("Father," "King," "Creator," and so many other titles) whose nature is worshipped yet never encapsulated by our use of names and concepts.  We are therefore doubly removed from understanding God.

What Jesus would have us do is ask God to remove our predicament.  Attempting to "understand" that predicament--as opposed to considering concepts (as sobering exercises) about our alienation from God--is a waste of time and effort.  Jesus tells us merely to ask, and to trust God to do the rest.  I used the more familiar Matthew version of the Lord's Prayer, but it is worth noting that the prayer's iteration in Luke leads directly into Jesus speaking about "ask, seek, knock."

Into the Horrifying Reaches

A recent post by John San Nicolas on Patheos' Faithful Politics blog contains a summary of the--unfortunately mistaken--mainstream Christian view of humanity's original predicament regarding Adam being "alone."

Nicholas writes:

“God remarks that it is not good that Adam is all by himself. Animals of various sorts are brought to Adam to be named. But no animal was like Adam. So God puts Adam to sleep, and from his rib, creates Eve. It is when Adam wakes up and sees Eve that we get the very first poem of the Bible.”

Already Nicholas is "working" the ancient text (though, to be fair, this is all standard stuff.)  God does not bring to Adam animals "of various sorts."  God brings to Adam all the creatures that could be reasonably presented to him, in a process by which Adam names them, and they are presented with the intention of finding an "help meet" for Adam--the emphasis on an animal candidate being "like Adam" is Nicholas jumping the text.  The naked mole rat--to whom Adam assigns the Middle Eastern name for "naked mole rat"--is presented soberly as a possible "help" for Adam, not as his doppelganger.

Nicholas then presents Adam's ensuing statement about Eve ("the very first poem of the Bible") as her being "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."  Adam has taken his turn at jumping, leaping over Nicholas' insistence that Eve was suitable for Adam merely because she was like Adam.  Adam emphasizes identification rather than similarity, a quintessentially greater step that foreshadows all of the ills affecting humanity regarding our persistent inability to see our fellow humans as individuals, rather than as extensions of our own expectations.

And there is more to this looming conundrum.  The Eve that was "taken out of Man" is not described in terms of individual ensoulment.  To this day--and throughout all of humanity's existence--the notion of a part of oneself being incorporated into another (and the concomitant possibility of individual wills existing in internalized alienation rather than mere mood conflict or thought-process conflict in an identified "person") has never been resolved.  To venture that we are all part of a larger humanity, or to venture that our bodies or our minds can house separate wills rather than antagonistic tendencies, is not the stuff of mere poetry, at least as far as the Bible (especially in light of Jesus' teaching) is concerned.

However, Nicholas is presenting a set-up for the notion of humans as properly social animals, a notion that, unsurprisingly, Christianity would like to find in the very start of the Bible.  In proceeding through the standard narrative of how Genesis is thought to bear that out, Nicholas at least recognizes the inherent logical difficulty of the "eating of the tree" punishment for persons who could not know of the evil of eating of the tree before they ate of the tree:

“Eve and then Adam, taking the advice of a walking, talking snake, took the forbidden fruit. Maybe they wanted to become like God. Perhaps they felt rebellious. Or maybe they were innocently curious. But it happened. And their choice had cosmological consequences.”

When the notion of "innocently curious" is admitted to the analysis, then the Forbidden Fruit episode becomes more of a "Just So" story than a moral lesson.  Of course, if the "lesson" aspect of the Eden story is emphasized, it is certainly more logical to assign the "innocently curious" motivation than to assign a motivation of rebellion to persons who could not yet have known of the evil of rebellion--at which point the lesson falls apart.  On the other hand, a "Just So" story--with its function of the introduction of a state of affairs rather than a justification of a state of affairs--has at least a minimum of moral integrity.

But if there is not really a logical substratum of causation to the "Fall" story (and there IS NOT really a logical substratum to the "Fall" story) then the "Fall" events need not possess the pivotal significance they are conventionally assigned.  Sin is progressing throughout the Genesis story, and the cataclysm of the Fall is of importance in that is describes ("Just So") how humanity came to a sordid state in a dismal physical environment--the Fall is not, however, as it is usually described: When Sin Entered the World.

Nicholas even touches on this point a few sentences earlier:

“And let us remember that Adam was in paradise. He lived in a garden planted by God Himself. But he was alone. There was no animal like the Adam animal.”

There was, however, a Being (somewhat) like Adam close at hand.  Adam was made in the image of God.  God's remark that "It is not good for the man to be alone" can be--with every bit of equal logical salience--taken to mean that Adam was sinful in not being satisfied with God's proximity, as the "Fall" can be taken to mean that the First Couple were sinful in not being satisfied with every tree but one.

Conventional Christianity, which Nicholas seems to be representing quite gamely, has never been able to describe its actual justification in Genesis.  Nicholas describes the state of Adam and Eve under the "Fall" curses, and then writes:

“But it does not seem that God was prescribing these inequalities and sufferings to Adam and Eve. Rather, God was describing the consequences of life under sin.”

 If "sin" itself--with its signal importance as an affront to God--is to be addressed forthrightly, then it is inescapable that Genesis from its first descriptions of humanity is "describing the consequences of life under sin."  Humanity is never described in an other-than-sinful state.  Sinful beings we are, and the grave nature of sin--despite the denominations' insistence on that gravity--is something that can never be described other than as ever-present, even as the denominations want sin--and the plethora of offered remedies for sin--to be packageable as commodities.

This is, of course, only the beginning of our understanding of ourselves, and the wrenching paradox is that we can only further our understanding of ourselves by probing ever backward, into the horrifying reaches of the primordial darkness against which the Creation mediated by Jesus arises.  This is what the Gospels speak of, not the laying-out of lessons that can be stacked one upon another.  Jesus is always challenging us with the basics, and always defying us to claim to understand who and what we are.

This is in the starkest distinction to the best of the denominations' intentions, as reflected in Nicholas' concluding sentence:

"And now that we know who we are, who shall we become?"

At Best Exhausted Managers

I need to address a difficulty I have in sharing my views about the gospels.  To be fair to myself, I suppose that my notions about us human beings and our thought-lives would be difficult notions in any event, regardless of my religious beliefs.  It happens that my religious beliefs include a belief in the primacy of understanding ourselves individually as households of jostling personality-elements, but those religious beliefs are not attached necessarily to the criticisms I have of our tendency to see ourselves in contrast as single, integrated perceivers of our thought-lives.  The commonplace notion we have often of ourselves as "individuals" is attended unfortunately by the conceit that the self-perception we have of ourselves at any given moment is a comprehensive perception.  It is not.

We have things in ourselves that are below the surface, and we have things in ourselves that surprise us.  None of this, of course, is generally denied.  We accept that we have a subconscious, and a store of things that we have forgotten momentarily, and perhaps things we have repressed.  What we do generally with these realizations, however, is inherently problematic.  We think of ourselves as individuals with flaws, or fissures perhaps, but we assign to ourselves nonetheless the status of possessors of ourselves.  Even the standard Christian insistence on seeing ourselves as not our property because we were created and (hopefully) ransomed by the divine merely assigns the titular ownership of our self-images to another.  None of this addresses in substance the potential implications of our lack of total cohesion.

If we are not totally coherent in our status as individuals, then the question remains open, whether we are viewed properly as individuals with partially disjointed elements, or as collections of partially-joined individuals under the headship of a self that is actualized not in individual realization, but rather in the realization of self-submergence into the role of custodian.  And of course, any mixture of the preceding elements will have the same implications for us: Any allowance that we are each of us comprised of interacting individual wills--any allowance of this in the slightest degree--will stand in implacable binary opposition to the disallowance of this notion.  There can be no mixing of "we are individuals composed of parts" and "we are composed of this individual in part, and that individual in part (and perhaps more)," such that the latter notion does not obliterate the former.

In common interaction, this does not really amount to anything more than the assertion that we do not really know ourselves.  Also in common interaction, however, is the notion that it is anywhere from impolite to presumptuous to abusive to throw that assertion at one's fellow participants in debate.  In virtually every scenario, it would be entirely logical to participate in debate with the common understanding that a person's stated beliefs were held by him or her in such coherence and totality that they would be accepted at face value, and that their genuineness and thought-out quality would be beyond question.

This is all very civilized, of course, but it is not true.  The "I accept that you believe your viewpoint such that your belief is unquestioned in this debate" assertion is certainly an assertion likely to engender respectful discourse, but it is an assertion that is also a convenient social construct, and it does not sit well with any comprehensive definition of "truth."  It is, after all, the responsibility of participants in debate to question themselves constantly about their own beliefs, and about the genuineness of their own beliefs.  It's just not polite for other people to intrude into that business.

The problem for me arises with the notion that any philosophical contention can be a subject for respectful debate, yet I find myself drawn to the idea that people do not speak directly for themselves as individuals, but rather as spokesperson-managers of "households" of jostling personalities.  This idea, of course, makes it surely an awkward undertaking to introduce said idea into debate.  Embarking on a debate with "I accept that you really know what you believe, but I want to argue that none of us really knows what we believe" would seem to be a trifle difficult.  Couple this with the assertion--which is really a compliment to one's debate opponents--that each of us in any debate will question constantly whether we individually really believe what we say we believe, and the whole scenario can become difficult indeed.

I am thinking of this particularly because of a recent post in P. Z. Myers' Pharyngula.  Myers writes:

When I say what I am, that I’m an atheist, believe me. I’ll return the favor by accepting that you actually sincerely believe in your goofy mythology.

 Myers also writes:

One last thing I really detest finding in my mailbox: mindreaders. You know the type: they tell you that everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, or that all humans are hardwired to seek god, and therefore they know deep-down that I actually believe in their god already. No. Humans throughout our history have been looking for explanations for phenomena in the environment — we are pattern seeking animals. If we can’t find a pattern that fits, we tend to invent one, and god is just a one-size fits all stop-gap explanation that people have stuffed into the lacunae in their understanding of the world. I’ve never found deities to be satisfying. I do find people who try to tell me what I really think to be irritating.

I do not think it would be unduly presumptuous of me to extract from Myers' post that he believes humans are "hardwired" to be "pattern seeking animals."  Insofar as Myers is addressing the desire for religion to be found (at least in part) in the outworkings of unsurprising information-handling in sentient beings, the point is well taken.  Ordering, categorizing, predicting, and extrapolating from a limited amount of available data is how our minds work.  Making convenient over-generalizations, unfortunately, is also how our minds (and psyches) work--hence any number of insipid "evidences" and "proofs" of the existence of the divine.

Unfortunately, we are also hardwired to see patterns in ourselves.  We have a set of physiological tools with which to interact with the world, and whatever momentary consciousness (when, at least, we are awake and conscious) happens to hold sway in that experiential cockpit defined behind our eyes and between our ears is who "we" define ourselves as.  All other elements of ourselves are at least crudely rank-ordered below our "real" selves.

We have no warrant to seek to impose our will (or to seek to impose a pattern) on the elements of ourselves, as though those elements were foreign to ourselves.  Neither have we warrant to impose will or pattern on the elements of ourselves in the pretense that such elements are seamlessly parts of ourselves.  We know that such things are ludicrous.  And yet the expectation of civilized debate is that we would accept without question someone's assertion that "I decided on atheism thirty years ago and I have never doubted it" or "I came to belief in Christ thirty years ago and I have never doubted it," while an incidental assertion from a debate participant that "I made a decision to marry so-and-so thirty years ago and I have never doubted it" would be met with an internal eye-roll.  People's thought-lives just don't work that way.

To address the immediate problem that bedevils me--the problem of debating the proposition that none of us can truly stand as a single spokesperson of our raucous inner households--is just part of the larger problem of addressing life in general on the same terms.  The teachings of Jesus are superficial and stilted--at least in effect--when we have a superficial and stilted view of ourselves.  We have to tell ourselves and everybody else that human beings are roiling, squirming masses over which our identifiable moment-by-moment selves are at best exhausted managers.

Awareness and the Problem of Cause

The "Aware" in "Aware, Away, Awry" is the collection of innumerable and interminably-appearing jolts, shocks, disturbances, or what-have-you's that attend all of the self's exposure to information.  Nothing in the life of the mind comes smoothly, and even our contemplations of spectra or scales in ideation must be drawn up by us consciously, as momentary constructs that dissolve as soon as our attention is drawn to any particular of experience.  Information is introduced to our attentions, and information bit-by-bit is tossed and batted about by our faculties of contemplation.

Nothing about this need be alarming to the religious thinker.  "Thought" itself can be understood by us only as a process, as "this meaning that" or "this leading to that" or "this bringing to mind that."  The germ of this in the Abrahamic conceptualization is the description of the thought-processes of God as between a speaker and a listener--"Let there be light," for example, or "Let us."  Of course, in these idealized instances of the thought-processes of God, there is understood to be perfect communication in perfect efficiency, such that that which is spoken is perfectly related, and related as though it were already known.  There are no shocks.

Our thought processes, on the other hand, are characterized by disturbances, from the most minimal to the most disruptive.  Indeed, the very notion of thought processes presupposes a locus of consciousness at work--and for each of us the inception of the locus' workings is by definition rooted in a beginning we cannot recall or understand.  This is the primordial shock.  To the experiencer, the phenomenon of experiencing is effectively uncaused.  Moreso in perplexity, and infinitely remote to each person's understanding, is the existence (even in the most mundane of interactions) of other conscious beings.

Do other persons experience existence as we do?  Even if ourselves and others can be characterized as thinking persons of perhaps divided attentions and perhaps warring impulses, can we escape the notion that being a conscious entity must be a binary proposition?  Either an entity is conscious or not--and being deprived of an outwardly-assessable criterion by which to determine consciousness or not, we can state that nerve activity and the physical displays attributed to nerve activity are supported--caused, we will say--by myriad natural factors, but we cannot say that consciousness is caused if we cannot say (absent error-laden assessment of the thought-outworkings of the subject) when--and therefore under what conditions--consciousness is "caused".  We exist as conscious entities because we exist as conscious entities, and we credit the existence of other conscious entities because we credit the existence of other conscious entities.

I say this primarily with attention to the "First Cause" argument for God's existence.  The ancients could watch billiard balls (or their ancient equivalents) knock against each other, and idealize what is of course the most "commonsense" of observations: things cause things.  The conscientious religious observer (as well as the conscientious non-religious observer) to the First Cause argument can usually make two salient observations.  First, extrapolation of everyday experience (or even of strenuously-collected experience recordings) is just that--extrapolation, which, if it is applied as though it were some kind of "law", would neither more nor less rule out an "uncaused" Big Bang singularity (or pulsing of singularities) than it would rule out an "uncaused" Creator.  Second, which is of rather more "religious" quality than the first observation, is the inescapable fact that the "First Cause" proponent has thrown all into the basket of "everything has a cause," when (particularly in the Abrahamic conceit) what is being argued for finally is the existence of a miracle-making (and therefore "uncaused"-phenomenon-making) deity.

"Aware, Away, Awry," in this instance, delves simply further into this latter inconsistency.  "Awareness," insofar as it is experienced, is at bottom uncaused, for the simple fact that "awareness" is a facet (realized only when something is bounced off of it) of the uncaused consciousness.  Of course, in this analysis "uncaused" is a proposition of philosophical conjecture, used by this perplexed writer to describe the ineffable quality of consciousness (appraisable only by the bearer and translatable only by imperfect communication) which might in substantially equal parts be conjectured as wholly natural in origin or wholly supernatural in origin.  In this analysis, not only is it held to be silly that "First Cause" might be used as an argument for a God who vigorously defies the naturalist's contention that "everything has a cause," it is held to be even more silly that conjecture about the "First Cause" of everything ought to be the province of loci of consciousness that know nothing about their own origins and know as little about the origins of their fellows.

I am concerned about the First Cause Argument (as I am concerned about many other things) on the basis of the violence it does to the listener, especially the novice and the young.  People make contentions about things like the First Cause because those people (to whom I do not want to attribute raw or reprehensible fault) are comfortable with making (either overt or implicit) assertions about what it is to have a thought life.  The merest moment of reflection (which is no small feat when beset by societal disincentives) will inform the human being that he or she arose--as Jesus describes--from a mist of inception, and that he or she is comprised--as Jesus describes--of warring or at least jostling components.  The undivided, foundationally-secure self directing undivided attention to some philosophical contention is a monster of the philosopher's invention.

Similarly, the philosopher of religion is all too apt to get up a counterfeit of real human thought--as I have said, a counterfeit, anti-Jesus intellectual monster of the philosopher's conceit, a monster that thinks it knows itself at bottom and that thinks it knows or feels or experiences or does anything as a perfectly singular locus of consciousness.  Invariably, the "God" that this philosopher conjures up is a monster--equally so if this version of God is one of incomparable benevolence or incomparable wrath (just to show one breadth of comparison.)  Whether the "God" that the philosopher champions to his audience is an attractive one or a forbidding one is of little consequence, since what is really going on is a process of the pontificator attracting the audience to a nifty, ultimately unenduring version of their thought-lives, and forbidding the audience to level with themselves about how their thought-lives really present themselves.

A perfect example, as I understand it, is to be found in the lamentable pattern of adults hounding misbehaving children to explain "why" they did something they ought not to have done--when quite often those children simply do not know why they did this or that.  Terrified at being in trouble, and not wanting to seem further disobedient by challenging the adult who maintains that surely the act was done for some describable reason, the child will rather make something up--perhaps even some alarming fake motivation.  This torment is bad enough, but the child left to his or her own thought life after the fact is likely to convince himself or herself that the invented, simple motivation wrung by them from the adult is the single way that the child "really" is.

And so the adult human being, wishing--as so often we do--to have an internal and external presentation as a single, coherent consciousness-possessor, is liable neither to address the fundamental experiential issue of being "uncaused," nor to address the perpetual pressures to seem single and coherent throughout life--to the person's detriment.  One is reminded of Jesus' admonition (that the denominations have never been able really to address) that a person apparently cleansed of demons--as though that pristine state could ever be attained other than in self-delusion--is liable to end up with more and worse demons than before.

Aware, Away, Awry in Action

The story arc of "Aware, Away, Awry" in its particular applications has to do with the occasions in our lives in which any of the constituents of ourselves are shocked into awareness--with the absolute requirement in our analysis (which the theologians would like to forget) of considering that we lag in our apprehensions behind such initial shocks.  Things impact themselves upon us, and we react--but we must remember that "reaction" is a cumulative process, a process of the various parts of our experiential selves being shoved against each other.  If there is anything logical or expected (that is to say, linear) about our thought-progressions, this takes place in reality not as a type of contiguous process, but rather as a process analogous to a collision transferred thorough a line of coupled rail-cars.

The analogies are difficult, but so is the process that one might like to describe.  It is no wonder that Jesus presents the continual tasks of believers--who, in their daily lives, will be relegated disproportionately to low-end and menial tasks under supervision--to be the continual tasks of believers represented as stewards of households.  All of us are the stewards of our households both without and within ourselves.  As we attempt to process our inchoate experiences up to the most explicit of our understandings and potential verbalizations, we are deluged with chances for error.  This is the type of responsibility that bears upon us, even including the most intimate of private experiences, in such manner as responsibility is ostensibly borne by managers "in the real world."

In the real world, much of management is done poorly.  There are many reasons for this, but among the most prevalent is the perpetual managers' insistence that underlings "ought" to respond reflexively to duties, and--as virtually every employee has witnessed on some occasions--there is the reflexive managers' perennial complaint that "you just can't get good people anymore."  While of course it is often a cheap maneuver to attempt to define words by their derivations, it is entirely true that a wholesome approach to management involves the root of "hand," understood as to "handle."  A manager is responsible for anything and everything, regardless of whether it is to be handled directly or indirectly.  The good manager that Jesus describes does not merely budget for the servants' meals, but rises from his or her table of accounts to ensure that the servants are truly fed.  The bad manager that Jesus describes, who eats and drinks and beats the servants, is not overseeing a household in which nothing happens, but rather a household in which the things that happen have been placed by the manager out of his or her hand, as though they would happen properly by themselves.

These bad things are also the type of bad things that happen when we ignore the process behind "Aware, Away, Awry."  We want to have simple solutions to the things that vex us in our lives (think of the theologians' endlessly-touted "simple" salvation economies), but in a nearly-invariable pattern we actualize that "want" by pretending--against all evidence throbbing away in our momentary lives--that we are the single and dispassionate observers of ourselves.  Even when we have undergone great trauma, our chief tendency on this score (toward which we are pressed greatly by society) is to try to engineer in reverse a storyline along which our singular selves have passed.  We compile a story of our individual soul's journey, and then we must flog our memories and our lingering, multifarious impressions into acceding to that story.

We have many and varied and conflicting moments of awareness.  We move away from them in the innate remoteness among parts of ourselves; in the distance to which parts of ourselves recoil; in the passage of time and of circumstances from the original moments; and in our predisposition to view ourselves as singular, experienceable wholes.  We go awry in the process.

An fitting example of this in the theological pursuit is the standard sort of analysis of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  The theologians want the parable to be simply about the joy in heaven when the lost are found.  The parable in Luke is preceded by the short and happy parables about the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, and it is unsurprising that the standard notion of the Parable of the Prodigal Son is that it is merely the concluding of that comfortable threesome.  However, the Prodigal Son is followed directly by the Parable of the Unjust Steward and (soon thereafter) the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus--two parables that deal with a person's responsibility to a household (whether defined as material or familial), and in length and complexity (not to mention perplexity) they would be more fitting partners in a tri-fold sequence with the Prodigal Son.

What cannot be forgotten about the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the fact that this--the younger--son does not really change.  The younger son endures great trauma and feels great emotion--but he leaves the household to obtain what he feels is a more favorable lot, and he returns to his father's household as a second choice.  He goes after much food, he ends up with little food, and he resolves to content himself with the (apparently quite ample) rations of his father's servants.  He goes after drink and (apparently) female companionship, and he has every prospect of such things in at least moderation if he returns (after a calculated rehearsal) to become one of those servants.

If the overarching theology of the analysis of this is pure Calvinism, then in terms of salvation it is mere shadow-play, or at most it is a directive on how the elect might obtain more favor from God in this lifetime.  Of course, Christianity does not really function on such terms, and so we are left with standard analyses to the effect that it is a salvation-drama, one that describes the process of salvation writ large.  Unfortunately, the apparently pivotal declaration that the young man in the pig-pen "came to his senses" or "came to himself" (or however it is translated) does not equate to actual moral sorrow.  The inheritance was his to squander, and he is apparently entirely qualified to be one of his father's hired men once the squandering is over.  The unwarranted idea that the young man's singularly-described "self" has changed must be squeezed out of the narrative.

But that the young man is hit with something in himself that he did not expect, or at least calculate upon?  Now that would fit with something recognizable in human experience, and something that might lead to salvation.  A part of the young man rises up and confronts him.  If this is the story (or the beginning of the story) of his salvation, then it presents in enigmatic narrative form a picture of the unresolvable debate about faith versus works.  Did the young man correct himself, or was correction bestowed upon him?  If we reckon that human beings are bundles of jostling components (or, as in our metaphor, multitudinous internal cohorts requiring diligent management) then the distinction between "correct himself" and "correction bestowed" becomes immaterial--as does the ridiculous notion of faith versus works.

Of course, the theologians cannot countenance such interpretation, and so we are left with the (empty-husked) story that the young man came to repentance and salvation--though if he ever expresses an internalized sorrow (rather than social or familial shame) it is hidden from us.  For all we know, he woke up with a hangover the next day and "came to his senses" and realized he had better start wheedling what he could from his father while the old man yet lived--after all, it's not as though the young man went to the far country, contrived to embezzle an additional fortune from the pig farmer, and then--struck with guilt--donated both fortunes to feed the nameless starving pagan multitudes of that nameless land.  That story--especially when we got to see what his awaiting father thought of it--would be one of salvation.

As it is, we have not cause--in any roughly discernable notion of Christianity--to know that the Prodigal Son was saved, but that does not stop the theologians from assuming that it is a simple tale of how individuals must act eventually before God.  The theologians will, however, entertain the notion that we do not know how the angry older brother responded at the end.  The story, as Christianity relates it, is open-ended at that point--though that just goes to show that Christianity has not been listening.  The older brother claims that he has never failed his in duties to his father, and his father ratifies that contention by saying that the older son will ever be with him and will inherit all.  If the father--taken as a figure of God--says that the older son (so often called "Pharisaical" by the theologians) has never failed in his duties, then the theologians have some explaining to do--though, in light of the fact that the father is definite that his elder son will rightly claim all, we cannot by any reasoned analysis conclude other than that the most likely candidate for the older of the two sons is Jesus.

The Jesus-figure, apparently, is angry.  Jesus was often angry.  That Jesus would feel anger in some part of his human self would be no more than a logical expectation of the out-workings of his human nature.  To have a part of oneself respond reflexively to some stimulus is only human--and yet Christianity would have us be un-human constructions of our own conceit.  By that conceit, we are singular, integrated beings--as though we might have a God's-eye view of ourselves.  By that conceit, we can look at such things as a very humanized parable told by the God-man Jesus and twist it freakishly to suit our arrogant theological leanings.  Everything human about the Parable of the Prodigal Son would warn us that the younger son might be full of as-yet-unconfronted tendencies, and everything human about the Parable of the Prodigal Son would console us that the merciful father figure has rightly entrusted his elder son to do the right thing.

The younger son is responsible for the household of himself, and in that household will arise many and varied tendencies.  The father is responsible for the household of himself and his family and his servants, with all the complexity that will entail. And the elder son is responsible for himself and all the household has--his being entrusted with the care of all, including his challenging younger brother, being the greatest responsibility and the greatest affirmation one might imagine.