What We Have Piled Up

I will try to run through three contentions rather quickly.

First, perhaps the most important negative consequence of us humans pretending we can actually "own" our impressions or immediate responses to instantaneous developments (a pretense I have tried to describe before) is the fact that such pretense includes by virtual necessity the invocation of a personal history of thoughts and behaviors to try to make it believable that a thought or impression is voluntary rather than not.  With every unbidden phenomenon that we are tempted to understand as explicably caused within ourselves, there is a corresponding collection of contrived memories and postulated rational explanations.

This phenomenon causes us to cast before ourselves an array of unnecessary explanations.

Second, perhaps the most revealing connection we have with our origin as created beings is in the fact that our impression-schemes are tied up with polarity, that is, from our first experiences onward we view the world as in front of us (or, in a minority of persons, experience a sightless world most acutely through the sense-concentration in facial areas.)  Just as (as I have described before) the nascent Big-Bang universe must have included fault-lines such that the initial expansion divided into this or that particle here rather than there, our experiences from the very first have been divided such that (as an example) we have been presented with experiences from the fore more acutely (and, we imagine, more securely) than from the vulnerable rear.

This phenomenon causes us to cast before ourselves an often arbitrary concentration of attentions.

And third, as social beings we harbor the possibility of unattended rear-guards in our communal conceits even as we surround ourselves with what we assume are circumspect and well established thought schemes.  In this third regard I will offer an example from the "Judeo-Christian" heritage.  Such an example is more complicated than the notions I have offered above, but such I believe must be the nature of the thought schemes we hold as peoples.

In the "Holy Land," there were numerous geographic vistas presented to the communal awareness of the people of the Levant (and particularly Canaan.)  These vistas, unfortunately, were usually conceptualized as potential sources of hostile invasion--though occasionally more benign visions were entertained.  To move clockwise on the map, there was Egypt, a fertile land of reckoned accessibility although either Sinai or the Philistine coast had lurking dangers.  Then there was Philistia itself, with its brooding possibility of further intervention of Mediterranean Sea Peoples.  Then Tyre and Sidon, and above them an Asia minor set to burst forth with Hittites, Greeks, or Macedonians.  Then the eastward arc of the Fertile Crescent, with its seemingly endless list of invaders.  This is not the end of the list, though speaking glibly of "India" in this conceptualization is usually contrived.

As if to make my point before I even get to it, there are vague references to "Cush," which is one or more places roughly to the west and south of India, or east and south of Egypt, or both.  "Sheba" one might thrown in as well, approximately in the area of Abyssinia (or it it Yemen?)  To conclude our circumnavigation (and we have, it must be noted, included in the proximity of Israel/Judah the lands of Moab, Ammon, and Edom/Idumea), we must reckon that the only great unknown of conceptualizable potential was the vast forbidding landscape of Arabia (characterized typically by maps of the Roman Empire that show the imprint of a vise-grip only to the east and west of the great interior of the Arabian peninsula.

That Arabia included features of vibrant civilization is beside our point here.  These features were, apparently, lost to the conceits of the ancient Levant, and--if ever considered--the conceptualized prospects of that "wilderness" were as shifting as those proverbial "shifting sands," making that terrain the assumed (though not perhaps geographically correct) haunts of the descendants of the untamed and contentious Ishmael.

What is important here is that the scriptural heritage concerning us is one of peoples in the region of Israel confronted with a sweeping vista of swelling and falling confrontations and fortunes, while there was ever a rarely-considered and lurking hinterland of nameless menace--the great Wilderness that stood as the backdrop of a lesser collection of wildernesses closer at hand.  Sinai and the "wilderness of Judea" could be traversed, but then there was the Wilderness--existing more in postulation (and in the generic fever-dream constructions as a fitting playground of Satan) than in understood reality.

I mention this third contention--exemplified by the great Wilderness conceptuality--because it was part of my wonderings about the convoluted (and really unnecessary) postulations about the ostensible geography of early Genesis.  "Where" such things occurred would probably be all-but-impossible to figure out (and we have the world-wide Flood proponents to provide the notion of a convenient scrambling of mountains and valleys), but it is perhaps most important to consider not so much "where's" of geography as "where's" of conceptuality.

The location of Eden, particularly considering the four mentioned rivers, does not have to be any more than a relatively central location in the Scriptural landscape--and there might certainly be less apt intimations of centrality than the surrounding of four rivers.  Then Adam and Eve went east of Eden, which might as well as anything have been lower Mesopotamia.  Eden, then, might have been at some relatively northern aspect of the great Arabian desert--lying to the west of fertile Mesopotamia and perhaps lying on ground blasted by a spreading curse attending humanity's expulsion from paradise.

In the midst of the cursed land would be the tree surrounded by fire, though--to fulfil God's intention to sequester the Tree of Life--this fire-ringed spot might be quite small.  The reader might be guessing that I am going to put forward the cute notion that the remnant of cursed Eden (which might not be so much as noticed or visible by any other than those chosen by God) could be no other than the Burning Bush, seen by Moses in the appropriate spot in the general vicinity of the harsh near-Arabian Midian of Moses' father-in-law.

This spot visited by Moses is described quite enigmatically by the scripture as "holy ground"--a curious description indeed for a spot never, apparently, to be visited again nor described as ever being encountered by any means whatsoever by any person whomsoever.  The holy ground of the burning bush lives in the scripture as phenomenon rather than as a place--a description that applies as well to Eden.  That the two locations might be identical is not nearly so important as the fact that their descriptions might be identical.

Lurking, then, in the background of the Scriptures is what has been--even for many of the most ardent believers--an unresolved and even unconsidered prospect.  The progress of Christian belief has been wedded to the notion of the necessity of time as a matrix of conceptuality.  Jesus, as I have described, frustrates persistently conceptions of time (or place) as integral to saving belief.  Jesus describes God taking care of even the little birds.  And Jesus describes the demise of little birds, something that--presumably--would not happen if God had not decided to include such innocents in the curses on humanity.  It is the reader of the Gospels, however, who might decide that there must be some Solomonic solution to this dissonance--and the variations on this notion of theodicy are endless.

But what if there is no "God takes care of the little birds even as he kills them" problem?  (And I am not talking about any nonsense like "it is the sin of Adam and Eve and all of us that kills them"--God is sovereign.)  The answer, I believe, is not that the curse is in force now, but rather that it is happening now, and by "now" I am talking about time as Jesus presents it.  Abraham is living now.  Elijah is living now.  God through Jesus is giving life to all creatures "now."  God is bringing down the curses on Creation "now."

The curses are spreading from Eden now even as Eden is being blasted now.  There is no time-frame in question here.  And, by logical extension, there is no place in question now.  A major problem with us as humans is our tendency to imagine we are categorizing and conceptualizing (and, let's face it, capturing and containing) our existences when every niggling voice of our internal life tells us we are trying to do the impossible.  We are past every experience of time (and place) that we try to understand and that we try to understand as still being before us--when the moment has passed and we have had to move on and we would (were we honest) admit that we really do not know from moment to moment and step by step what we do, or why.  But instead we busy ourselves with trying to keep our rationalizations of our actions before us, as though we might by shear will sweep up our experience-lives in mounting waves before ourselves, imagining in that sometime, somewhere, we will sort through the accumulating mess.  Or we try to "get over things" by pronouncing without warrant that we understand them, or that we can insist on being "understood" about our actions solely because we have voiced some rationalization.

This is a fundamental dynamic of our lives as we try to understand them in light of the teachings of Jesus.  The life that seemingly spreads out before us on a matrix of time and space is really a life that is being created in all its aspects at the once.  To take a step in Creation is to take a step in a new Creation, even as that very human (and therefore troubled) step is a step into a newly troubled Creation.  Both things are true--they are not components of an amalgamated "truth," just as our merciful and just God is not some amalgamation of mercy and justice.  Some aspects of this reality then become unsurprising.  Jesus tells us that we have heard the biblical definition of murder.  Then Jesus gives us a new definition of murder.  Both are true--moreover, both are being voiced at this moment.  When Jesus speaks of a trained scribe taking out from a storehouse things new and old, he is not talking of a process of synthesis, for that would result in things, hybrid things, newer still.

Jesus is confronting us with wave-front of ever-new reality.  We can never travel through that swelling prospect as we ought, but we can at least try.  Our chief problem is that we refuse even to try what Jesus asks of us, instead conjuring up a counterfeit exercise.  We invent our own wave-front.  To repeat what I wrote above, we cast before ourselves a array of unnecessary explanations.  To repeat what I wrote above, we cast before ourselves an often arbitrary concentration of attentions.  And to say again what I intended about the immediacy of realities imposed by God's attentions to us, we (ignoring that immediacy) cast before ourselves a mounting wave of attempted pronouncement about our largely inexplicable selves--succeeding in wasting ourselves rationalizing things we scarcely own while failing to even see (beyond the trivialities we have piled up) the larger vista of what God can expect of us when he can expect us to rally to such things.