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 away from where we should be.  This much we know, and yet the tale of our attempts--often the most genuine and soul-scouring attempts we can muster--to understand our plight is also a tale perfused by the too-horrid-to-admit fact that we insist on an intellectual path to understanding the futility of our intellectual paths.

None of this is particularly profound--the need for "faith" or for "childlike innocence" and the like is a ground trod routinely by the preachers, yet of course this ground is revealed upon simple observation to be a mass of shifting, sandy strata.  If "childlike innocence" is the matter at hand, why then would a Catholic of successive generations of upbringing entertain a conversion to a preacher's Pentecostalism, or why would "faith" be expected to produce a conversion to Buddhism less readily than anything else?

Admittedly, then, an "approach"--always with the traveling imageries--to a conception of religious affinity must be based on some "something" that must be taken with imperfect warrant as a starting-point--such is the plight of humanity.  My blog writing has been an exploration of how the traits of humankind present bounds (or are they guardrails?) within which a religious journey may be undertaken with some appreciably exacting responsibility on our part.  We all come from somewhere, and we all lay momentary claim to the footprint's-expanse of each step on every journey--and always in every regard we can be mistaken.

It is of the greatest import, then, to relate how the teachings of Jesus address most intimately not the course or the goal of anyone's journey, but rather the ever-present experiential phenomena that characterize our existence.  To Jesus the most crucial factor of our journey to the indispensable kingdom of God is the realization that our steps are but phantasms, even as our actual progress is effectuated by the mercy of the God who guides us.  Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God being like the mysterious crop that grows who-knows-how as the farmer sleeps, and the intellectually-fascinated theologians nod in sage agreement even as they bind themselves tighter and tighter to conceits of thought that are anything but organic.

One typical description of the "let us reason together" conceit of the theologians is the notion of "linear" thought.  This or that premise leads to this or that conclusion that becomes then the next premise, and so on.  Every time, of course, the formula must produce the same result.  Or so we think.  Then Scripture-reading time comes, and with it a break from the premise-concluding, and the story is told of the fig tree that is saved from destruction by the gardener who begs one more year of indulgence (and manure-application) in hopes that figs will appear the next year.  Maybe figs will appear and maybe they won't, but if God's mercy is the topic at hand, then might not the tree be accorded seventy-times-seven such fertilizings?  And if the necessity of salvation (under threat of death and judgment at any moment) is the topic at hand, then what is the point of hearing about the Master-blessed ministrations of the gardener over a year's time?

Jesus describes steps of experience.  The theologians describe steps of logic.  The theologians embark upon (and, most typically, indulge themselves repeatedly upon) linear thought-excursions, even as the Gospel illustrations make plain the fact that each and every step of our thoughts is a self-referencing indulgence, a moment of childish enrapturement with what we think we have discovered.  Each moment arrives, and then captures our attention for some span, and then passes.  Each moment is roused, readied, reaped--even as each moment (and everything else we might possibly conceive as attached to it) exists timelessly, seamlessly, and in perfect context with everything else in the purview of God.

This God's-eye view of reality--unbounded by time or space or anything else--is the rightful realm of Jesus, and even within his creaturely manifestation he was at liberty to evoke the majestic sweep of Creation (itself an atom before its Creator).  While yet a mortal being in the fleshly nature that he shared with his companions, Jesus could simultaneously send Satan scrabbling away into the desert, and declare to his disciples that they might order about even the most massive peaks of Satan's "realm."  Jesus' disciples (as would be true as well for us) could hold onto some such saying of his for at most a moment, and then that moment would pass.  While yet we are wedded to the notion that the "linear" aspect of logic is present in the use of language, each word (indeed, each individual speaking and hearing of a word) is a moment as intrinsically organic and beyond reproduction as anything to which we might assign the word "experience."

That Jesus might speak a single word and encapsulate in its use the comprehensive scope of Creation, and that we might speak a single word (or a lifetime's use of words) and fail to describe even a single most mundane phenomenon, is scarcely even the beginning of the truth with which we are confronted in this contrast.  Creation itself is nothing to Jesus, and our attempts to describe Creation are as nothing.  Indeed, given the necessarily limited application of language to reality, and our necessarily limited capacity either for language or the thought behind language, it would be nothing more than requisite for us to consider each word--nay, each thought behind every word--to be a moment of Creation as profound as the original "Creation"-making that we pretend to understand.

As for the original Creation--it was "without form, and void."  Or was it?  Can that be as close as we might come to understanding a Creation before there was a Creation, a world before there was a world?  Even the ancients could postulate that things consist of smaller things, and that there are indeed "water" atoms that form what we call "water."  Yet the original substate of Creation was not merely void, but "without form."  Jesus says that we must be born both of water and of the Spirit--what can we claim to know of any of this, particularly in that we cannot claim to know the "particulars" of any of the original setting, of the "earth" and "heavens" and "water" and the ineffable Presence that the translators have had to picture as wind?

Yet for anything to be conveyed to our minds, there must be words (or at least the reproducible and recognizable phenomena that our minds categorize, even if in the simple attraction-aversion binary of the infant.)  We understand things because they are describable "things," and we call things "things" because they are distinguishable particularly from the rest of Creation.  Absent particulars, there is (for us) no understanding.  What, then, is the impinging reality of Creation as it is represented in the Genesis Creation story?  "Without form, and void" is nonsense to us, and the represented water and Spirit are beyond our understanding.  If there is a "Creation moment," it has to do not with what we can understand, but rather with the introduction of what underlies anything that we can attempt to understand.  The first and most fundamental element of our understanding is the existence of passing moments of attention, and those moments flash by us in the use of words--though in each flashing moment is an intrinsic element of the Creation phenomenon.  In short, Creation as a story begins when God says, "Let there be light."  The saying starts the story--the parceling of existence into graspable (to us) particulars starts the story.

Words are moments.  Words as used are "roused, readied, reaped."  For us to forget (and our limited capacities determine that we are bound to forget) our faulty understanding of our existence, is for us to embark (as from our first blossoming infantile awarenesses) on a journey away from the selves that Jesus would claim as his subjects--on a journey of becoming ever more awry.  It is not for nothing that the Gospels describe Jesus as co-equal with God and co-equal as Creator--it is Jesus' ever-new effulgence as God and his offer of an ever-new Creation that is extended as a parent-like grasp and is enfolded as a parent-like embrace of his children.  It is in the test of the Gospels' actual content (if being linear and logical is that upon which we will insist) that we find that the story of Jesus is not about what he speaks, but rather about how he offers continually experiences--however fleeting, as are all experiences--of newness and striking profundity.  And then our attention fades.  It is in our ever-growing (if we are wise to let that grow which will) acceptance of those moments as momentary, and emptinesses as important as well, that we proceed on the journey that has no directions.

Inside of Nothing

To say that the earth was "without form, and void" is to say that the earth did not exist.  In the beginning the earth existing was--to our understanding--the same as the earth not existing.  The waters, whether considered as a sphere-like conglomeration, or as an unaccountably-suspended stratum in some "flat-earth" conceit, was hovered over by a divine presence--this presence being an unimaginable buffer in some unimaginable way between the existence of "the earth" and the non-existence of "the earth."

"Nothing" as a concept--the "formless void"--is the default premise of the Creation narrative, and indeed nothing is more important for us to remember when we talk about the existence we experience.  The mere idea of God creating trackless expanses is, of course, an important idea, and we can entertain notions such as the idea that the universe trails off into empty quarters that, while understandable still as space existing in time, might as well be called "nothing."  Or we can imagine that our universe curls in upon itself and that such self-limiting traits define not an in-universe versus out-universe boundary, but rather the distinction between the something of the universe and plain "nothing."

In short, it is no more warranted to say that God created the universe out of nothing than it is to say that God created the universe inside of nothing.  The "out of nothing" concept is the more expansive of the two, calling forth acclamations of God's great power, we being dwarfed by the awesome edifices of Creation's dimensions and frontiers.  This is the human looking outward at the majesty of that which exists, the person looking at his or her tremorous, fumbling fingers and imagining God's mighty hand kneading and molding the granite mountains and the cavernous valleys.  It is only with a startlement--as though arrested by an invisible hand tugging at an invisible cord--that we are confronted by the gentle figure of Jesus telling us that--were we to possess an quantum of faith immeasurably small--we might ourselves toss the heights around as playthings.

This leads then to the notion of the teachings of Jesus seen in a universe created "inside of nothing."  What is most important about the "inside of nothing" conception is found in the fact that the bounded and internally-referencing vision called forth thereby is consonant with the logic of Jesus' assertions about the kingdom of God.  The true majesty of Creation is not in the sweep of its dimensions or in the grandeur of its parts, but in the ubiquity of the ministrations of its infinitely greater Master.  A universe created "inside of nothing" is a universe sustained not so much by the God who created "timeless" mountains that are not timeless, but rather by a Creator-God whose directives and whose minions serve ever to maintain the something against the ever-encroaching nothing.

In the "out of nothing" conception, a lonely planet of lonely people hurtles through an expanse that--no matter how much we say that God is "everywhere"--is an expanse evoked by imagery of longing and searching for that which must be found, and that which must be found is conceivable by us in its lack as a "something" of unsurpassed rarity.  When we think of our universe and therefore of ourselves as arising "out of nothing," then the indescribable experience of awakened consciousness is conceived by us as a prelude to a soul-life-or-death quest for something that must be found "out there"--even if that alien "out there" realm is one of internally-contemplated spirituality.  And then Jesus comes along and speaks of an all-necessary kingdom that must be found by us, though his references to an essential way to be traveled come without direction to that way, and his references to an essential gate to be entered are similarly lacking in guidance to that gate.

Yet Jesus speaks of the necessity of returning to that which must be found--and "returning" hangs on the potential that one knows the way.  Return we must to the consciousness-derivation that came upon us first as does the mystery of the source of the wind, and return we must to the first unpresumptuous awakening of the newborn.  All that was beyond our experience of our first moment was nothing, and then all beyond our first experience of touch might as well have been nothing, and then progressively did our consciousness "awaken"--and indeed what a horrid progression of our too-young-battered souls--to the world "outside."  In a newborn's moment too small to capture, too early remember, we are torn from a universe created inside of nothing--where God's all-present ministrations are without limit and press back in their effulgence upon the empty dark of non-existence--and we are cast into a universe created out of nothing--where creatures are scattered across crumbling terrains of despair in which the darkness of non-existence would be a blessing.

We are at first aware, and only then can we experience distances and differences in our world--the unfamiliar substrate upon which we first move away from this or that--and it is our lot that our movements will go always awry.  As for the prescription--there are no answers in the world created out of nothing, and there are no steps in our journey through the world created out of nothing.  Jesus invites us into a world created inside of nothing, where all coheres against the encroaching, enveloping annihilation--where as a necessity of that world's architecture, all questions asked in anticipation are answered, and all steps taken in faith are well-ordered.