Not What They Mean

There is something very important missing in how the western world in general understands religion.

There are usually taken to be three main components of what we call "life."  There is spiritual life, thought life, and physical life.  Spiritual life is, of course, taken to be of the most immediate importance to religion, and the single most pervasive notion abroad in the western world is the idea of faith versus works in Christian salvation ideology.  I say "idea of faith versus works" not because the matter is so simple, but because it is the fulcrum of so much controversy.  All the way from "living a good life" to "signing a prayer card after an unaccountable moment of ostensibly unmerited grace," the "way" in which a person can be saved is attached almost invariably in some manner to the "faith versus works" dynamic.

I will not attempt to address "faith versus works" in any more detail than to point out that there is a single detail of the argument that is ever-present.  Probe in any depth, and even the most works-oriented construction of Christian theology will arrive at the notion that, yes, it is ultimately God's sovereign determination to be merciful that saves the person--and one might even throw in the notion that God will save the well-intentioned person who never heard of Christ.  Whether it be the intention to do the will of a broadly-defined deity or even the intention to do well for its own sake, the germ of unaccountably present "faith" can be postulated as inhabiting the person of anyone saved.  One might say that the more non-committal term "grace" ought to be used to describe this merciful extension of God's sovereignty, but here we are debating over what term to use to name something that is important to our argument precisely to the extent to which it is both infinitesimal to our estimations and inscrutable to our conceits.  It is best not to make too much of any such distinctions.

If we skip over the middle element of the conventional trio of spiritual life, thought life, and physical life, we will see that our lives as physical beings are as infused with objectively-unaccountable experiences as our lives as spiritual beings are infused with objectively-unaccountable experiences.  We can learn all that is to be known about how our bodies work, and we can manipulate (and abuse) our physicality in many ways, but we can never place ourselves out of the reach of surprise as far as our bodies are concerned.  Once in a minute or once in a lifetime, our bodies (and the interaction of our bodies with our environment) can startle us, and can inform and shape our experience-lives in manners that we have not anticipated and that we can never translate with confidence to others.  Some experiences in our physicality can intrude upon us as though from above, just as some experiences in our spirituality can intrude upon us as though from above.

I realize that some persons will contend that they have no spirituality--and might contend even that "spirituality" does not exist--but for the purposes of my argument I can do nothing other than toss in as well the contentions on the part of some people that their individual physical life has no unaccountable elements to them.  Persons can say they have ultimate control over their bodies by virtue of their thought processes; persons can say that they can translate spiritually their apparent physical natures into some alternate plane; persons can say that physicality itself is an illusion--it is not my intent here to either denigrate such ideas or defer to them, but rather merely to employ what I will admit is my predisposition (and that of the western world) to the effect that we have spiritual lives, thought lives, and physical lives--each of which have their more-or-less understood aspects.

What I must describe now about our spiritual lives and our physical lives is the extent to which they are unsurprising, that is, the extent to which they provide established and familiar matrices upon which our larger experience-lives operate.  We can develop--indeed many of us cultivate--relationships with the elements of our spiritual lives to some extent to which they become reflexive, and this phenomenon is even more plainly established as regards our physical lives.  The things that strike us about our spiritual lives and our physical lives are those things that seem to come from nowhere--indeed, I know this is something of a tautology--but when the matrices of our spirituality and physicality have become "second nature," then it becomes a lively question (pardon the pun) whether or not we are really "living" them.  More importantly, it is surely not our ingrained attachments to spiritual or physical elements (which we cannot hope to examine or revise completely at every moment) that Jesus commands us to surrender in order to give up our lives. 

What Jesus asks us to give up is any tendency to attempt control of the interface of ourselves with unaccountable developments.  Any such change or challenge that we will be expected to embrace will come upon us as devoid of earthly contexts as does the experience of our very birth.  We can hope to study religion as we anticipate some spiritual awakening, and we can cultivate our physical natures as we anticipate some such challenge as God might make of us, but ultimately any confrontation we must endure with God's sovereignty will come upon us as unprepared as is the infant for the sunlight.

And so now, as might be expected, I will attempt to apply the above to the missing middle element of the trio of spiritual life, thought life, and physical life.  I will embark upon this bluntly by stating that we really have no thought life.  This should not be all that surprising, since I have as good as said that, for one, we have no spiritual life.  Surely our habits on the topic of spirituality do not deserve to be called "life," and our true experiences of spirituality are meant to be understood as blasting away anything that (at least at that moment) we would call "life."  In Jesus' teaching, what we have in any static moment is dead, and the enlivening of any moment of spiritual growth or progress exists merely to the extent our "selves" that do the living are annihilated.  The same is true of our nonexistent physical life.  Whatever we do is no more in substance than the momentary crumbling of decrepit sepulchers, and what is asked of us--either in terms of physical feats or of rallying ourselves to prayer--is impossible absent the unaccountable grace of God.

We have no spiritual life.  What we attempt to gain in spirituality slips from our grasp, and what we have once possessed and filed away is unworthy of mention.  Our spiritual "lives" are really enlivening by extension from God, experienced by us as we have allowed ourselves unaccountably to be overwhelmed by the life of Jesus.  Correspondingly, our physical "lives" are really enlivening by extension from God, experienced by us as we have allowed ourselves unaccountably to be overwhelmed by the life of Jesus.  In all other contexts we are in these regards mere creatures of reflexive response.

This is of the greatest importance in our so-called thought lives.  We can argue about whether it is really "thought" that causes us to lurch away from a source of pain, but the effectual non-existence of ourselves at that moment (as other than creatures of response, that is) is in no substantive manner different from that shadow of a "self" that lurches from the bed when suddenly aware that an alarm clock was not set the night before.  In the context of what Jesus teaches about "thinking," all such things are lacking not only in substance, but in life as well.  We must consider then, what Jesus might mean by thinking, and also what Jesus might presume is necessary for true thought to occur.

First, I must attempt to recapitulate what I have tried to describe above.  The western world can reckon (and most usually does) that spiritual enlightenment comes unbidden and unaccounted from God.  The western world can reckon (and most usually does) that a person's physical experiences come unbidden and unaccounted from somewhere--and this is evidenced by the strange (but usually heartening) parallel of science explaining how our bodies work and of science explaining how exhaustive our attempts must be to respond to individual psychological and psychosomatic responses to physicality.  In short, we treat the spiritual and the physical as understandable in terms of unanticipated events.  One the other hand, we treat the intellectual as springing from traceable and reproducible steps of logic, and if this sounds at first like the stereotypical preachers' diatribe against "materialism," that is only because recognizing the extent to which Christianity has fallen prey to this hiving-off of thought life has been of no profit to the religious and of no interest to the secular.

I can introduce this topic only briefly here, and it is done best by providing a few of the Gospels' chief examples.  A young man--who has obviously devoted himself to such matters--gives a good answer to Jesus, and Jesus responds by telling him that he is not far from the kingdom of heaven.  What better time for Jesus to tell us the final necessary step or steps?  And yet both we and the young man are given nothing further.  Peter upbraids Jesus for describing and accepting his future martyrdom, and Jesus responds that Peter is thinking in the manner of humanity rather than in the manner of God.  How does God think?  If "how God thinks" is a necessary topic of logical study, then the denominations might be credited with having pursued the matter vigorously over two thousand years--though it is of course lamentable that the greater bulk of horror of Christians upon each other--and upon the world--has had its perennial rallying points phrased in terms of "how God thinks."

Is it not perhaps the case that "how God thinks" is relatable--by his sovereign will--as ineffably as is faith in God?  Is it not perhaps the case that when we read a story or a parable from the Gospels we are drawn unprofitably to ponder what it means rather than what it contains?  I am reminded of the parable of the seeds scattered on the path and on the rocky ground and in the weeds and on the good soil.  Christians are intent on understanding the parable as presenting a "meaning" about how theologies must be sifted and sorted in logical manners (yet, unfortunately, with as many "logics" as there are denominations.)  Read the parable.  If it is about "how God thinks" in this or that "salvation economy," then is the potential believer the trodden path, deserving to be robbed of the seeds by the birds, or is the potential believer the shallow-rooted plant unfortunate enough to start on rocky soil?  What the parable really "says" is not amenable to logical analysis, unless one is to "logically" conclude that salvation is an ineffable confluence of preparation on the part of the potential believer blessed by a ratifying and consummating bestowal of mercy by God.

There is no "lesson" in this parable, unless it is the meta-lesson that all bestowed by God defies all logic.  The young man who gave the good answer to Jesus might have applied his accumulated skills to arrive at his next necessary step.  Or he might have relied on his accustomed skills and cost himself the wisdom that could come from adopting a differing methodology.  Or--blasted out of the skein of conceits he associated with his idea of wholesome existence before he met Jesus--he could have reached out his hand to succor the nearest suffering creature, or the one he could have helped most.  What would have been the "logical" step to the kingdom, if not this last "illogical" one?

And so, if in the final analysis being the soil is the same as being the plant springing from that soil, I must admit that my "plant" analogy seems to have run its course.  In my attempts to understand, I have written of arcs, tendrils, seed-pods, bursting of seed-pods--and now I must add also springing anew from the soil--as conceptualizations of our experience-lives within the teachings of Jesus.  These experience-lives happen in all their aspects at once, just as Jesus declares that the fields are always white with harvest.  In the teachings of Jesus there are neither times nor places.  I imagine that is because time-and-place assessments involve that which must be traversed in complying with the will of God.  There is no such time-and-place, and no planning or assessing in doing the will of God.  That is what the Gospels say, not what they "mean."