Roused from a Stupor

The prevailing scientific consensus about the origin of the universe is the likelihood of a few somewhat-differing takes on the "Big Bang."  The notion obtainable by the layperson of the very first origin of the universe is the essentially unimaginable notion of a point-source of incredible energy.  I am concerned here about only one aspect of this conceptuality, and I understand that the scientific community has not failed to consider this aspect.  What I want to consider is the idea that a single, otherwise-indescribable, unimaginably small entity--essentially an "infinitely small" energy source--burst forth for some reason.

If it were only the bursting-forth of the Big Bang origin that was to be considered, then the notion of creation from nothing could be entertained, as indeed was the case in the middle of the last century, when magazine articles appeared with notions such as, "Have Scientists Found God?"  Unfortunately (as I gather scientists have well considered) the bursting-forth of an unimaginable point-source is not in itself consonant with the beginning of the universe.  A point otherwise undescribed and thought to be attended by an expansion otherwise undescribed would only be a "larger point," of perfect spherical aspect and perfectly even expression throughout all other dimensions.   The expanding universe would only be an expanding manifestation of featureless dimensions--as much, in terms of "Creation," as no "Creation" at all.

Only differences and distinctions can make a universe, even if the first distinction were between two (or among more than two) infinitesimal particles.  The particles must have come from the sundering of the original substance, and there can exist no axes of sundering more likely than any others unless the original substance had either latent fissures (giving it an original, more-than-point-like architecture) or the original substance were from the start subject to external influences (giving it a merely subsidiary status in a more comprehensive "original" universe.)  This is why, as I understand, scientists will wonder what happened before the Big Bang.

So much for the Big Bang, as the popular magazines once tried to synonymize it with "Let there be light."  But indeed, the Genesis "Let there be light" is also not the beginning of the universe from nothing.  There was the dark, wild watery abyss--a physical description, no doubt, but a distinctly nebulous one.  Only then was there light, and only then might things have been seen.  Of course, just as an expanding point-source includes within its simple self no distinctions, so also does light in itself fail to make anything distinct.  Light blinds.  A photon excites a receptor.  An ancient's torch hurt an ancient's eyes.  Only by striking objects and by being gathered by observers do light rays "light" anything.

And the "Let there be light" was not, in abiding truth, the creation merely of light (which the human hand can make with a flint.)  "Let there be light" was the institution of the phenomenon of light.  The "making" of light was a succeeding process, and it proceeds still.  So also does the forming of continents, the assembling of constellations, the speciation and adaptation and generation of living things.  The notion of the origination of anything is a notion that escapes us, and it recedes by necessity (for persons who are so inclined) into the provinces of God alone.

The problem with awe at considerations of God's hegemony over Creation (the problem with us, that is) arises when we pretend there is cause to be amazed that the horizons of our thoughts must tip over into realms we must call divine.  The universe is big, and we say that God must be bigger still.  Of course, to call God "really big" is tinged with as much presumption as deference, and to call God "really, really big" is to issue forth merely an increment less presumption and an increment more deference, and so on with all possible "reallys."  A human being can crouch before an unexplored mountain and say that God must live on the other side of the mountain, and a human being can sit in a tweed suit at a conference table and prate about how God must exceed any humanly-imaginable concepts.

Inevitably, one must conclude that the very word "concept" is thrust presumptuously by us into the thoughts of the mind of God--leading, also inevitably, to the realization that we have no warrant to sully our pictures of God with "thought" or "mind" or any other thing that must be as foolishness on our tongues.  Our ability to entertain thoughts must face horizons near or far, and we are congratulating ourselves--and degrading God--by making so as to bemoan our intractable frustration at not being able to conceive of him.  There is a gulf between us and God (in thought as in just about everything else) but that gulf does not reside afar off, as though it were at the doorstep of the eternity and infinity over which he presides.

We are not agonized over our inability to see God on the horizon.  Where the horizon ends, so to speak, there is God.  Our failing to grasp distances becomes one with our failing to grasp the hand, so to speak, of God that stretches out over all distances--and we manage to flick the dirt of our presumption and our impiety at that hand.  Give us something that perplexes us, and we will say, "God."  Give us something that frustrates us, and we will say, "God!"  Give us something that we do not understand (or something to which we have not paid proper attention) and we will plug the hole with God.  As our lives trail off into ineffectuality, so easily do they trail off into our expectation of the God-presence.

The gulf between us and God does not exist at the far boundaries of our thoughts.  Jesus knew this.  People will go to the next world.  People will shed the constraints of physicality and become "like the angels."  Of course they will.  People in the next world will have abodes in which to do whatever people in the next world will do.  If it were not so, Jesus would have said so.  We can let our thoughts fall away and let the ineffable nature of God supply every need (or we can refuse to do so) but this is merely what is both logical and wholesome, and in addition it what constitutes God's end of the transit from us to the divine.

The gulf between God and us is at our end.  We know that we must make the right choices, and we know that we must strive to do the right things.  We know that we must make the right decisions, and yet we are afraid to make them.  Unfortunately, we want to believe that we can proceed from a solid ground of basic assumptions and find our testing by God in whether we proceed through all requisite steps--and so now looms the fantasy of a religiosity that arches unbroken across the chasm to the divine.  Whether this religiosity is active in terms of works or passive in terms of faith, the result is the same--futility.  The prosaic reality (deny it though we might) of our inherent facility to see God at the horizons of our thoughts is now replaced by a feverish and doomed determination to institutionalize that vision by stretching out our rickety concepts toward it.  And so we invent an entirely unnecessary gulf between us and God at his end.

The gulf lies at our end.  We do not have to decide that we are surrounded by innumerable horizons in innumerable dimensions that make up the residence of the divine--we swim in such murky waters, and in them we spawn all the horrors of our lives and of our societies--horrors of tribalism and bigotry and conquest that spew forth God-talk like the drunkard's vomit.  We have to decide, rather, to hear the voice of God in every sound and the sight of God in every glance.  We have to decide what to do in this moment and in this place.  For the Jesus-conceptuality of the divine, the great question is always the piece of bread, the cup of water, the kind word.  We wake and we sleep.  We are roused to action and we fall into torpor.  We do not "make decisions" for great causes.  Rather, for the greatness of God we make decisions always.

We decide, we decide, we decide.  In our waking and in our sleeping and in our actions and in our collapsings we do what we have been able to make ourselves do, what we have decided to do.  This is how we are faced by the gulf near at hand.  The disconnect we have from the will of God resides closer to us than our fingertips, and the leapings we make toward that will occur in the recesses of our experience.  We can think all we want, and then we act out of decisions we have made in stupors.  We act reflexively in the stupor of a moment, and then we decide whether our act was right or not, whether to apologize or not, whether to make amends or not, whether to determine to practice doing the right momentary things, whether to avoid such scenarios altogether in the future.  That is the kind of thing we really do, and we stumble and bump into each other as though in a stupor.

We sleep, and we wake, and we sleep, and then we are roused to do things for which we have gotten the energy and the determination we know not where.  Or we are roused from a stupor and are chagrined at our own stupidity.  Nonetheless, we do not make decisions without stupor as well as deliberation, and we engage in self-corrosive behavior if we pretend otherwise.  Jesus put up with throngs (and even with hand-picked cohorts) who stumbled as though blind, and he dealt at length (unsurprisingly, as we come to understand) with how people must deal with themselves and each other after having committed misdeeds.

That is how life really works, and that is how salvation works.  We can fall asleep drunk, or nursing grudges, or fixating on pleasures, or berating ourselves for misdeeds, and each of those choices has its perils.  We fall into a stupor, and we dream in a stupor, and we wake in a stupor, and we know not what will befall us.  In each of those moments, however, we might have our viewpoints reset, and our energies revived, and a new day's chances before us.  More importantly, just as Jesus teaches us about forgiving and being forgiven, we can train ourselves about what in life we must remain awake for--both metaphorically and practically.

Which They Had Decided

Pilate has a sign nailed to the Cross proclaiming Jesus "King of the Jews."  The Jewish authorities want the sign to say that Jesus merely claimed to be King of the Jews.  Pilate says that the sign will remain as it is--though if it is not held that the Jewish authorities (or at least those among them who wanted to curry an intellectual kinship with Pilate) could have claimed that "of course" their friend Pilate intended the unaltered sign ironically, then precious little of the theologians' fancies about any biblical statement might stand.  It is the job of theologians to act as though scriptural statements are meant as transcendent truths that carry their implications in terms of still other maxims--as though the organic whole of Jesus' teachings might be reduced to a collection of placards, sorted and stacked in terms of each denomination's philosophy.

An example of this can be found in some theologians' analyses of the statements of Jesus to the Rich Young Ruler.  Jesus says that the requirement for the young man to attain eternal life is to follow the Commandments and--with particular emphasis in the case of the young man--to forsake worldly goods.  Jesus follows this by telling his disciples how hard it is for a rich person to be saved.  Theologians, of course, can be found who will maintain that (in their favorite sortings of the placards of faith) "of course" what Jesus means is that the Rich Young Ruler, like all of humanity, must be saved by God's sovereign will exerted through the bestowal of unmerited salvation--"of course" any efforts of the young man to forsake worldly goods will either reflect a prerequisite "saving faith," or will be understood to constitute efforts toward securing post-salvation "rewards" (or both).  What the theologians in such instances will not do is treat the biblical persons in question as though they were complete human beings--the young man in such twisted analysis is not a complete person (like all of humanity) who will have competing and countervailing tendencies manifested in moods and moments of consciousness.  Nothing is more to be expected than that a person trying to do the will of God will alternate between moments of greater or lesser despair or assurance in achieving this or that, and also moments of greater or lesser despair or assurance in the nearness of God's mercy--yet an entire industry is built on sacerdotal dispensings of mercy that are, in the presentations of the denominations, as untenable in themselves as they are incompatible with each other.

This business of the horror-comedy of the theologians' stacking of "placards" is a business to be understood in contrast to the organic process I have described, a process by which our existences unfold in arcs, or more properly as tendrils, or more properly as seedpods, or more distinctly as seedpods ripe for bursting.  This "plant" conceptualization is, I will admit, as much as anything a conceptualization arising from my fitful wonderings.  We occupy, in ever-transmuting fashions, time and place--while yet we are tantalized by the prospect of relation to a divinity that transcends time and place.  Such a prospect--if a perfect scheme of analogies were ever to be known--might be better considered as something other than the twistings of a plant, yet I will not fail to note that Jesus stands with his disciples in a place where (to them) salvation is scarcely to be found, at a time when (to them) salvation is scarcely to be found, and tells them that the fields are "white, ready for harvest."

We are ourselves, in complexity and unfolding permutations, fields unto ourselves, vast rippling prospects of rising and falling--swelling and bursting and withering in our manifold parts in turn or (as our agonizing proclivity to almost-sense the timeless and infinite will impose upon us) "out of turn" as our self-conceptions would have it.  We want to be different than we are, or we are untrue to ourselves.  We want to have our existences on our own terms, or we are untrue to ourselves.  Most importantly, we aspire to that which is beyond ourselves, and are confronted with puzzles that are beyond our understandings.  The worst thing that we can do--and yet the commonest thing we do--is to hold that truth can be known to us in terms of statements.  And then another moment comes, and the way that we succumb--plant-like rooted to inescapable soil and bathed in inescapable atmosphere and infused with inescapable impulses--drives us to entwining ourselves with yet another statement, and then yet another statement, and so on.

Even then on Calvary again we are faced with this phenomenon.  We will never know, in the theological interpreter's sense, the least iota of The Good Thief.  Unavoidably, the Gospel testimony is mixed, and in a distinctly disquieting fashion.  Mark merely describes the crucified "thieves" as present, though some texts appear to have been tampered with, by the addition of the Old Testament theme that the sufferer will be counted among the wicked.  Matthew describes both of the criminals as abusing Jesus, and throughout the Gospel accounts the crucifixion is described in terms of the throwing-about of "son of God" in such loose fashion as to preclude the idea that discernable theology is at issue.  The only thing that the theological interpreter knows about the story of The Good Thief is that a story is told in the Gospel of Luke about The Good Thief.

What might have been the past, or the many and varied experiences, of The Good Thief?  This is not an empty question, because we can approach it with what little we do know about the man.  Somewhere The Good Thief came to understand the idea of guilt, and from somewhere he obtained the ability to pronounce guilt upon himself and to see persons as guilty in the eyes of God.  So much as this cannot be attributed to delusion, or to mistake, or to any particular theological view of Jesus' divinity or no.  That a Jew (or at least a person who knew the milieu of Judaism) would look to the Messiah as a portal to salvation is virtually a given, and in all times and places a yearning for attachment to figures of courage and rectitude has served--particularly in times of extremity and agitation--to satisfy in sufficient measure people's desire to feel themselves bound for salvation.  Jesus gave the man the assurance he sought (while also, apparently, giving him the assurance that the crucifixion experience would be over by sundown.)  That is all we know.

If, however, in the broad stretch of Church history, a theology were built upon what can be known about The Good Thief, it would be a theology of being afraid of God's displeasure, a theology of acknowledging personal guilt, a theology of Jesus being above condemnation, and a theology of seeking Jesus' remembrance when he comes into his kingdom.  This is all well and good, but it would differ in no important substance from someone asking the one of the  Apostles to remember him or her when the apostle mounted one of the thrones of a tribe of Israel.  If the theology of The Good Thief were presented in stark and impersonal terms to the prevalent denominations of history, it would be roundly excoriated as home-made, presumptuous, and futile.

In short, there is not a theology of The Good Thief, only a story of The Good Thief.  The person in question was as varied and as permutable as any of us.  The person in question, grown to adulthood and involved in as many things as necessary to be condemned (rightly) as a criminal, was the product and the producer of virtually innumerable moods and moments.  A follower of Jesus will believe that The Good Thief was assured (rightly) of salvation by Jesus.  What a follower of Jesus will also believe, however, is that salvation is a matter not merely of pursuing that which cannot be understood, but also of being borne aloft by equally mystifying tendencies to grasp for that which cannot be understood--in short, works and faith in their organic states.  This is as close as we might come to telling the story of The Good Thief in theological terms, since no other criteria are provided to us.

Jesus tells us of a kingdom that is as point-oriented as the finding of a rare pearl, as pervasive as the infusion of yeast, and as ineffable as the growing by night and by day of seed.  The basis of salvation is not the labeling by explanatory placards of a described Creation, but rather the embracing of God's transcendence as seen (or sensed, as the moment provides) in a Creation that even in its limitations is beyond our grasp and yet which grasps us.  This, as much as the story provides, and as much as the Four Gospels present, is the simplest of descriptions of the milieu to which The Good Thief responds appropriately.  The inappropriate response, by contrast, is that of Jesus' detractors, who more than anything decided what the labels "son of God" and "kingdom" meant, and proceeded to demand that Jesus satisfy the expectations upon which they had decided.

Seedpods Die

Seedpods die.  I imagine this seems a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, outside of horticulture.  Of course seedpods die--if by "of course" one means in the ordinary sense of a part of a plant becoming lifeless tissue as it conveys (successfully, it would be hoped) seeds to where they might germinate.  Simultaneously, of course, we would consider that the most ideal scenario surrounding a seedpod is one in which both the reproducing plant and the germinating seed would remain alive throughout--the seedpod, in its withering, would not in itself constitute a living being, let alone a living being lost.

But is this the language of Jesus?  Assume, at the start, that Jesus takes Genesis as his repeated source of "in the beginning."  The breath of life is a pivotal metaphor of Genesis, and--aerobic metabolism aside--neither the plants nor the fishes possess such breath of life as to be doomed by the flood.  And then there is Jesus' agriculturally insupportable contention that the successful seed falls to the ground and dies.  Neither plants nor seeds possess, in the teachings of Jesus, either life or the failing of life as anything other than in metaphors that beg their very contexts along with their implications.  The teachings of Jesus--in spite of centuries of patronizing cant about how they are earthy and simple--are teachings that ask the listener to manipulate mentally the described elements as if they were but overflowing vessels of effulgent truths.

It is no real surprise that Jesus, toying with notions of plants and seeds as living and not-living, would challenge still further our facility with metaphor.  Is it really a stretch to think of seedpods as entities in themselves?  After all, does not Jesus bridge the distance between the True Vine and the fruit of his desire with the metaphorical "branches" which are distinct living entities--his followers?  Insofar as we are enlivened and empowered by motivations--insofar as we are in our experience-lives indistinguishable from the lively seedpods I described in previous posts--then so much are we vessels of the effulgence of Jesus' teachings.

The pairs of disciples sent forth were seedpods ripe for bursting.  For some stretch they hurried and shouldered along roads to momentarily selected households, and then they burst forth.  So also might be termed the commission(s) imparted by the risen Jesus--commissions to baptize the world with the bursting-forth of Jesus teachings.

Jesus and Awful Madnesses

In the "first" story of Creation, the proclivities of humanity are described.  People since then have--as the story presumes--multiplied themselves and spread out over the world, littering the earth with their offspring without, apparently, the need for Genesis.  That the word "proclivity" is not particularly uplifting seems to fit the larger narrative, wherein Adam and Eve had the opportunity to remain in God's good stead without--as the narrative allows--either multiplying or spreading out.  Even the sordid generations of Babel had the impulses to raise an impressive workforce and would over time have burgeoned beyond all terrain known to them.

Multiplying and filling the earth are not in themselves moral goods.  The devil, understood in Genesis to have offspring, would be expected to spread with vigor his "seed" to every clime, though such offspring need have no more "natural" explanation than children of Abraham spawned from the stones of the Jordan.  Indeed, it would be expected that the devil--understood in Scripture to have practical if not actual ubiquity--would pack Creation with his minions.  That, meanwhile, this overburdened plane is stocked sufficiently with ever-attendant angels, defying all notions we might have of overcrowding, is of no pursuable concern to us.

Indeed, of most concern to us is any tendency we might have to imagine that there are ever vacuums of supernatural presence.  Jesus describes the situation of a person rid of a demon only to be plagued in short order by seven more.  We cannot entertain the notion that understanding the teachings of Jesus is possible in a mindset of purported calm rationality--a deist philosophers' backdrop against which occur intermittent and discrete appearances of the supernatural.  The most explicit sort of rationality that Jesus describes is that of a builder estimating the cost of a tower, or that of a king considering whether he can confront an army of twenty thousand with his own of ten thousand.  What would seem to be concerns of simple prudence are presented by Jesus as scenarios addressable only by total commitment.

Since concerns of prudence will weigh in this life upon both the saved and the unsaved, then we are left with the lesson that abiding concerns--those which bear upon the question of whether one will follow Jesus--do not admit of rational analysis.  It is at precisely this point in Luke that Jesus describes the salt and its lost savor.  What is subjective and unquantified--and as disturbing as the worthless salt thrown out to be trodden upon--is what is most important.  Moreover, it is the volatile and penetrating imagery of salt or fire (or "Everyone will be salted with fire") that sends us closest to the lurking madness of thinking we can understand this world of angels and devils.

As I addressed in my previous post, that amalgam of thought, words, and emotions that characterizes our relationship to reality is really a conglomeration of madnesses--madnesses saddled by the attention of demons.  One can throw this contention aside, and draw up a drawing-room's worth of cool-headed and respectable theology, but only by throwing aside Jesus' assertions about the devil-ridden realm that is the arena of his incarnation and of our carnal selves.  While it is true that Jesus acknowledges the existence of prosaic reality (and drives many of his listeners to distraction by asserting that God's gentle rain falls as readily upon the wicked as upon the righteous), Jesus maintains steadfastly a truth that surmounts all realms, and that defies all analysis: the integrity of God.

It is this issue--the integrity of God--that occupies the attentions of the devil, and there is no reason to think of the devil as fascinated with the damnation of humans.  It is God's vindicated boast about his servant Job that so engrosses Satan, not the person of Job himself (nor, inescapably, of Job's lost first crop of children.)  Neither need it be held that the devil is at all concerned about his own "children," who might have expected to be thrown into worse than pigs if Jesus yielded to the Temptation to possess the world as the devil's lieutenant.  And the notion that Satan would allow Jesus (or anyone else) to drive out his demons on any other terms is refuted by Jesus on no other score than that the integrity of Satan himself would be compromised thereby.

God is one, and if God is one, then this truth is as accessible in a world of wonderful and awful madnesses, as in a world of rational postulates more or less true.  Jesus confronts a world of madnesses, and he speaks to us in those terms.