Abutting the Dimensionless Kingdom

There must be any number of ways to get from the premise from which I must start to the ideas I must relate, so I will try for the simplest.

As to the premise, idolatry must be avoided, including even any conceptualizations we hold of the Divine.  Jesus says that blasphemy against the conceptualizable "Father" and "Son" aspects of the Divine will be forgiven.  Apparently that which is conceptualizable about the Divine is in potent measure to be reckoned provisional--and in potential idolatrous.

Idolatry resides as well in any assignment of the Divine to a context.  Jesus describes the absurdity of distinguishing between the gift and the context provided by the altar, and in a more generalized and elevated sense, Jesus describes the abode of the Divine only in the dynamic process of throwing open--and beyond conceptualization--every possibility.  Heavenly houses within a greater house, an eternity of taking turns in Abraham's bosom--these are not descriptions, but rather the defying of description of any creaturely-conceptualized context that might frame in blasphemous presumption the Divine.

At points such as this, I have been tempted to believe that piety would necessitate a contention that we are all a part of God--each of us an infinitely small part of an infinitely large God--since to ascribe to ourselves independent existence would be to place ourselves (however meekly) on conceptualizable dimensions in contradistinction to God.  Our being very, very, very, etc. small would make God no more than very, very, very, etc. big.  This limiting notion of "bigness" will not serve, of course, to describe the limitlessness of God.

Jesus, however, describes our existence in proper proportion--that is, without proportion.  The difficulty of persons--or of humanity, or indeed of all Creation--existing at all in proportion to a proportionally "bigger" God is a difficulty that does not appear in the teachings of Jesus.  As taught by Jesus, all time is as one with this dimensionless moment, all distance is as one with this dimensionless place.  Elijah might not be eternal, as the ineffable Divine might reckon such things, but Elijah existed in time and therefore in all time.  We might never have the necessary mustard-seed of faith to command a mustard seed to scoot over a tabletop, but no greater or lesser faith would be required to fling the mountains of Ararat into the sea.

I have come to see the development in my conceptualizations of our experience-lives as they relate to the teachings of Jesus.  At first I considered "arcs," such as the insistent, overlapping cycles of nature and our individual natures.  Then I reckoned such things in a more internally-organic way, as "tendrils," with which, tentatively, we reach out successively even as circumstances and stimuli press us forward.  Then I thought of those issuings-forth from us as "seed-pods," tendrils thickened between their tapered fores and afts by the amplitude of our engagement.  Those successive conceptualizations of our experience-lives have become in my analysis more and more internally insistent--and more and more mounted upon our proclivities to attempt to actualize ourselves within time and space.

And yet Jesus tells there is neither time nor space.  This dimensionless realm is the kingdom of God.  I cannot begin here to address the many aspects of the kingdom--or, rather, the many aspects of our lives that must dissolve in the focus of the kingdom.  It is all I can do to state an inescapable implication of Jesus' representation of the kingdom as dimensionless: that our strivings in the creaturely realm of time and space are characterized not merely by sinfulness, but also by its adhering counterpart--madness.

Thoughts--experiences spread over the dimension-templates that we demand exist--are delusions.  Words--experiences packaged and delivered across the breadth of our communal presumptions--are ravings.  Emotions--experiences leaping at us before we are ready for them and coloring endlessly our responses to endless new experience--are demons.  None of this is in opposition to the contention that thoughts, words, and emotions can be genuine or true.  What is opposed here, however, is the notion of a rationally-based faith or--perhaps, more importantly--the notion of a self-consciously "foolish" faith that can be furthered by rational argument.

Jesus leaves us with our devil-fraught experience-lives abutting the dimensionless kingdom of God.  That is the earthly set-up, and nothing else.  To cede our lives of travail to the flounderings of hopefully-better-than-completely-mad devotion to easing the travails of others (who, presumably, are yearned for by the kingdom) is the directionless true path to that ever-present kingdom which is found by the yearning for it.