Experience of Being Lost

There is a meme in atheist circles that can be illustrative for us.  This is the jibe to the effect that, in Eden, God lied to the First Couple, while Satan told the truth.  As for the "thou shalt not surely die" assurance from the devil, the denominations have had to insist that "spiritual death" (or some such) befell Adam and Eve, and indeed the experience conceptualized among humans as "living death" is common enough--and while one might argue endlessly about whether or not "life" and "death" are true antonyms, the question is raised to a greater pitch when it might be contended that Adam and Eve might never have had evidence, either direct or indirect, of "death."  Perhaps the matter might be more cogently--and revealingly--expressed in the contention that God lied to US in the Garden of Eden.

The First Couple, constructed as adults, were equipped presumably with a working vocabulary, and would have been presented with meanings and definitions independently of their own experiences.  The basics of their learning processes would have been initially binary--"yes" versus "no" being a template for the later (and less definite) "good" versus "evil."  The only real problem for the denominations--with their attachments to possessing humble-brag "simple" salvation economies--is to contend that the act of "rebellion" placed Adam and Eve outside of fellowship with God by attempting to appropriate his place.  "Knowing good and evil" is described as usurping God's role in judgment, and seeking instead to become one's own god.

What the devil really promised was for the First Couple to become "like God," with a knowledge of good and evil.  "Usurping" used then as a descriptor of the pivotal act--which was an act merely of trying to be like God rather than supplanting him--must be supplied by the commentator, just as the commentator must wrestle with the question of whether a life not worth living deserves better than to be called "death."  Nothing encapsulates a life not worth living better than does a life immersed in doubt of good versus evil.  To the Jesus of the agonized howl "Why?", physical death would have been a blessing, and he treats it as such.

And yet the denominations must insist that a throne-toppling motivation (either from Adam and Eve themselves or as pawns of Satan) is the thrust of the eating-of-the-tree violation.  Humanity was induced to want to know good and evil, and so lost their "innocence."  Of course the serially-unsatisfied, pre-"Fall" Adam might have been an adolescent, but he was no innocent.  Pre-"Fall," Adam and Eve were merely provided with an unmerited and revocable buffering from moral confusion.  The "knowledge" of good and evil about which Satan lied was not enough "like" God's to be the blessing Satan intimates.  This is apparent from the first.  Adam, with his newly-possessed moral "knowledge," presumptuously imposes the social stricture against nakedness on his marriage and against his all-seeing God--and effectively blasphemes his God in the process.

Anyone who so desires can say that Adam and Eve wanted to take the place of God.  Alternatively, anyone who so desires can say that Adam and Eve wandered from their initial wholesome experiences of God and into distressing and alien territory.  The "Fall," in this latter interpretation, is the moment not of initial wandering, but of the first experience of being lost.  It falls to the salvation-sellers to package the former alternative as some sort of notion of harrowing inherited depravity--humanity in a roiling and ever-unsatisfied state of rebellion--but that does not prevent their nurseries from expecting unfiltered delight from infants told that God loves them.

Jesus reaches out to gather all into his embrace, and invites all to become as little children.  This is the language of lamentable alienation, not of execrable rebellion.  While haughty presumption is indeed present with humanity, it exerts itself as a burgeoning fault, and Jesus treats it as such--as a festering, organic, spiritual malady, not as an all-pervasive curse.  Even in the most morally-decrepit ("ye, being evil") are the impulses of righteousness and mercy.

What really happened was Eve and then Adam, in concert with the devil and with themselves, beginning to construct the innumerable "kingdoms" comprised of the experience-realms of which we claim possession, and which we share with others.  That this wandering is at the base of our predicament is reflected in Jesus' continual invitation to the kingdom of God--an invitation without direction other than a desire for an experience-realm with God, forsaking all others.

The Worlds Among Us

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post in "Roused, Readied, Reaped" called "A Life is a World."  I have finally realized what I was getting at.  Our existence is conceptual--we stand before God not on the world of his making (in the moral calculus) but on what we have made of the world.  That is what Jesus was getting at--the kingdom of God that we might ever approach but never reach.  The approach--the determination of "Not my will, but thine"--is what matters.  That is why Jesus never tells us "the Way"--there is no "Way."  I would be ridiculous for Jesus to give a us path through the world, when simultaneously we mold the terrain in which we move.

Our lives--that is, the existences to which we hold and Jesus tells us to forsake--are our worlds.  That is the true tragedy of Eden.  "Did God really say . . . ?" functions most potently not as a forsaking of duty (for the first couple might have been admonished gently by God for millennia), but as the forging of a humanly-contemplated and therefore lesser reality.  Even now, we human beings--we of the "it is not good to be alone"--make our worlds out of our social interactions.

This is why, for example, it is ridiculous to speak of "natural law."  If it might be said that always and everywhere humanity has held that murder is wrong, then it might also be said that always and everywhere humanity has proclaimed various exceptions to that rule.  To say that such exceptions reflect a degradation of moral resolve is too easy a retort, since those exceptions can be (and often are) held to be moral imperatives.  It would be as apt to say, rather than that the "natural law" as apprehended by humans condemns murder, that instead the existence of conventions now approving, now condemning "murder" is the inevitable outgrowth of humanity's apprehension of its place in the natural order.

And it is the communal esteem for the existence of moral conventions that is the true foundation of our existences, our lives, and the conceptualized "worlds" against which we define ourselves.  Adam and Eve crouched in terror in a world of their own making (and they would have it visited upon them with a vengeance.)  And just Eve and the snake shared the making of a world of conceits.  It is indeed ironic that Scripture is held simultaneously to espouse the "natural law" of God seen in Creation, and also to declare that the Creation was gravely distorted by The Fall.

And so Paul writes to this person and that person about how the nature of God is seen in Creation.  Jesus is not fooled, and he is not so impious as to extrapolate God from the existing imperfection.  The "foundation" of the existence of Paul the apostle (though he fails to expresses it) is not the God-evoking skies, but rather the God-invoking communication (or anticipated or hoped-for or imagined communication) among people, or between people and God.  This is as much the "nature" of the "world" we inhabit as any ostensible concrete reality that Paul credits himself with estimating.

This is why, when a young man agrees with Jesus that what matters is love for God and people, Jesus does not tell him in what direction to travel next.  The young man holds within himself not merely the desire to travel the path, but the terrain of the path itself--a dimension-less realm of connections with others and with God.  This is why, when "two or three" gather "in his name," nothing will be withheld from actualization in the world defined by their communion.

This is also why we must relinquish our holds on our lives.  That which we reserve to the realm of ourselves can never be part of the commonwealth to be shared with others, or the kingdom to be shared with God.

Not So Foreign and Forbidding

And now, of course, we have to deal with the unfortunate typically Christian regard for Jesus-as-homunculus--the attitude, for example, that the Jesus who feels the anguish of every rape victim could not have been violated by Pilate's garrison, or that the Jesus who cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsake me?" meant something other than, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Christianity has not been able to squirm away from the realization that Jesus is fully God and fully human, but Christianity has been more than adept at shrinking Jesus into a theologians'-realm of limited and qualified interpretations of his statements.

This affects most acutely the "how" of salvation, and in an even more monument fashion than, for example, the way that Christianity can transmute Jesus' warning to the metaphorical steward (on pain of horrible punishment) into a finger-waggling at grace-assured "saints" (on pain of momentary embarrassment before the Throne of Judgment, followed by an imperceptibly-diminished experience of unimaginable bliss through eternity.)

The "how" of salvation can never be presented in some watered-down version of its psychological and emotional intensity.  Twice in the Gospels is the story told of Jesus being asked for his right hand and left hand in heaven.  Jesus says to the petitioners, "can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?  and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"  While "drink" can be interpreted as straightforward suffering (like how some Christians claim a portion of Christ's agonies by being forced to work the occasional Sunday for a secular government), "baptism" implies a discrete and transformational passage--and an apparently inescapable passage, given that none of humanity can claim beforehand the closeness to Jesus to which all must aspire.

Simple prudence, when deprived of group-think and the contrivances of winnowed "apostolic" inheritance, will dictate that Jesus--who said we might perform greater works than he--intended his suffering to be a pattern of salvation, not a commentators'-template of musings about substitution.  The Jesus by whom and through whom Creation was made (and is sustained) is a substitute for all--else the "very good" of the Creation be annihilated by the perfection of God.

And so we do not know the "how" of salvation.  Might we deduce that "how" if we understood the "who, what, where, when, and why" of our existences?  Who knows?  We know we don't understand such things.  The Jesus who said to "seek" did not tell us to stack ostensible "knowns" one upon another, as is done in insipid catechisms or the condescending "Let us reason together" prating of radio preachers.

The "seeking" of Jesus is a path, or a gate, or a pearl found while shopping for something else, or a treasure stumbled over in a field--or a parentage of ineffable longing grasped when the parentage apparently rooted in the things of the earth is seen to be as solid as the wind.  On the other hand, the "how" of salvation--and who knows how such longing arises?--is not so foreign and forbidding a challenge when we realize we don't really know anything else.

The Most Inexplicable

And so we approach the "how" of salvation, in the only way we possibly can. We brush aside the who-what-where-when's of our conceits, and we shrink from expounding on the "why's" that purport to explain the condition in which we were ourselves conceived.  We are left knowing nothing, if only for those raw primordial moments that comprise our grasping for God.

In this regard, religion is of little help, what with its endless peddling of explanations.  I am reminded of the deflating experience of hearing preachers expound on such things as this or that directive of the scriptural David to his subordinates, as though his was the voice of God or the prophets (when he wasn't raping or murdering, that is.)  Of course, this textual "David" is an interpreter's homunculus, possessing only such admitted attributes as will further the going argument.  Even at his worst, David-called-adulterer-and-murderer is condemned only as possessing the attributes of adulterer and murderer (with the blot of adultery extended directly to Bathsheba, surely one of the greatest power-rape victims in all literature.)

The biblical David and Bathsheba, when taken to explain "why" humans do this or that, are no more explicative of human existence than are the Adam and Eve of Genesis' Eden.  No human mind might comprehend the "why" of David's decline from man after God's heart to man after Bathsheba's charms.  None of us can claim to know what might suffice to drive David, responsible--Adam-like--for his people, to neglect so great a charge.  The only spiritually efficacious response would be a howl of anguish.

And then later Jesus loosed the most inexplicable howl.

Declined from Why to How

Our claims to know the who, what, where, and when of our existence are presumptuous.  That some persons might be relatively well-grounded in such things detracts only relatively from the succeeding calculus that affects us all.  That is, our sense of the existential "why's" and of the purpose-directing "how's" of our lives is dependent on the "who's, what's, where's, and when's"--yet our "why's" and our "how's" are more fundamental than the rest of those things.  A person might be possessed of no religion, and might therefore possess no creedal formulation of ostensible underlying, guiding "truths," but that is not the same as to allow that any personality might consist of a simple collection of facts upon which is borne an animating philosophy.  We are beings of basal, internalized, dispositions--the latter, "fact-based" personality I described would not be recognizably human.

And so we are left with our exasperating "why's" and "how's."  The "why's" are grappled with first by the theologians of Christianity, desperate as they are to stipulate terms upon which might be based "salvation economies"--the "how's" of the Christian religions.  The favorite of these stipulations is "the Fall"--the cataclysmic fruition of humanity's inclination to sin.

Of course, the mere inclination to sin, and the necessary incubation of that inclination in the First Couple (who dallied for moments or millennia--it matters not which--before eating) was sin itself.  This consideration, of course, renders uncertain the careful calculations of the commentators.  A neat "Fall" invites a neat Redemption or Propitiation (or any other substantively blasphemous, over-worked formulation one chooses.)  But as we have seen, Adam and then Eve were falling all along--and there is an obscene presumption in reading the Genesis account of God's gracious, gentle provision for Adam, noting what happens, and then describing as God's intended gift the progressively-worked-out accommodation for the man in terms of sex.  Was the serially unsatisfied Adam really created with an optimal, divine plan that he heave his naked rearview skyward as he and his partner made sweaty godlings of each other?  We are capable of great things, but from our very start as a kind our base nature was enough to make us look to heaven and ask, "Why?"

We will be left, then, with a grim yet unsurprising conclusion.  We know least of all the "why" of our creation, and not even the word "knowledge" can address our confrontation with the "how" question, that is, how can we be saved?

Goaded from Why to How

Adam was alienated from God from the first.  Adam and all his kind were hit with a string of curses.  The theologians want the curses to begin with "the Fall," but the theologians impose thereby a sterile silence over the moral lessons of Eden.  From the first, Adam yearns for that-which-is-not-God, and the story of Adam and then Adam-and-Eve is the unremitting story of cursing-for-yearning.

Wanting something even more than his insatiable eyes could see, Adam was granted "the woman."  This connubial arrangement was surely unnecessary for any simple purpose of giving the man companionship.  As John the Baptist might have said it, God could have made of the stones children for Adam.  As it transpired, the curse of sexual desire was imposed upon humanity.

That sex can be pleasurable, and that it can be part of wholesome relationships, are considerations immaterial to the realization that sex-capable humanity is burdened in a manner that does not encumber the sexless angels.  As a parallel, the human capacity for anger can be enlivening in noble causes, and anger can reside in fundamentally wholesome persons, but as a general proposition people would be better off without it.  Jesus, after all, tells his followers to be as cunning as serpents and as innocent as doves, not as wrathful as serpents and as innocent as doves.

And who would deny that sex is a cauldron of roiling impulses, poured out moreover as if a profane libation of ill-directed and unsanctified worship?  In its typical manifestation, sex is the physically overlording male crouching down as if transfixed by the protruding robustness of the nubile female.  And the female, ever aware of the intrusive insistence of the male, cannot be simultaneously unaware of the male's culminating submission to the female's allure.  God's heaven and the great chasm of space will make by contrast the mutual prostrations of the couple seem little more than the writhing of worms, yet their bowings unto each other are of no small magnitude alongside the dust-slithering of the serpent.

Scripture, of course, will tell what men and women have made of sex--as though humanity would need even that testimony to know how people use and misuse their urges.  About the only thing that could make the matter worse would be the conceit that the often fumbling and failing and frustrating (or, worse yet, for a doom-struck time, transporting) phenomenon of sex is divinely-ordained.  The insistence of some Christian sects on corralling and branding "God's gift" of sexuality--making it into a social-control apportionment dispensed by the denominations--is a practice of psychological extortion that would bring a blush to the most calloused of pagan temple-prostitutes.

What the pages of Genesis tell us is not the "why" of our existence, but rather the ineffable quality of the "why" questions themselves.  This is of the utmost importance if we are to approach properly the greatest of "how" questions--how to be saved.  We do not know from whence the elements of ourselves arise, and we cannot expect a formula by which to order those elements.  Much less can we expect any direction toward salvation that does not involve us casting ourselves from the unknown of our origin into an unknown in which God must exist.

John the Baptist asked of certain of the Pharisees and Sadducees, "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"  Who indeed--but it is the force of the Baptist's question, and not its answer, that serves its purpose--a deterrent to the hypocritical, and a goad to the truly penitent.

Scourged by Why

We describe our world with who, what, where, when, how, and why.  Jesus displays no care for such things.

Who?  Jesus does not care if Abiathar was High Priest, or someone else.

What?  The temple services might be said to have been always implicit in the day-of-rest Sabbath, but Jesus does not care.

Where?  The true worship of God will be irrespective of place.

When?  For Jesus, something might have happened and yet be expected in the future, such as the coming of Elijah.

Without a definite framework of who, what, where, and when, there can be no settled notions of why or how--and such unsettling is central to the teachings of Jesus.  The "why" of the human predicament is the claimed province of the theologians, and it can be seen how their fevered attempts to establish a causal basis for their pet theories has distorted the insistent thrust of the Genesis narrative.

For example, the theologians are powerless to face Jesus' positive enmity for marriage and family.  After all, Jesus describes marriage as permanent because the union of man and woman as "one flesh" was decreed from "the beginning."  What the theologians fail to realize is the fact that "the beginning" of human society was not an optimal divine plan--and cannot be expected to be treated by Jesus as though such a beginning was God's will.

Adam, in a great "why" that cannot be explained, was alienated from a simple communion with God--the "it is not good for the man to be alone" episode.  All else proceeds from this, and all else drags with it the rattling chain of the initial "why?"  Why was Adam not content with the garden?  Why was Adam not content with his animal companions?  The prophet Nathan did not scruple to describe a lamb as a wholesome part of a man's family--and only the subsequent and unnecessary mingling of flesh in Genesis can give rise to puerile sniggering about bestiality.

I say "unnecessary mingling of flesh" because there is no explicable reason why Adam would be presented with a creature that could think and feel like him, and would exclaim only about her fleshly attributes.  Not even a "blood of my blood and heart of my heart" were we given, but rather the base "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."

The theologians will have the birds of paradise singing rapturously at the appraisal of Eve by Adam, while it would be more appropriate to imagine the (marriage-free) angels weeping in pity.  The more unctuous of preachers will describe sex as one of God's great gifts, but it is stricken at its core by the great searing scourge of humanity--the primordial "why" of our alienation from God.