Tuesday, September 10, 2024

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Speaking of Nothing

We are going to go astray.  Our paths are going to go awry.  From the first moment we become aware of a world around us, we are going to go ...