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.

Abilities and Opportunities

The conceptual mechanics of human perception are extremely important in attempting to grasp the teachings of Jesus.  Some elements of those mechanics can be apparent simply through our mundane experience.  We have notions of ourselves as single-point loci of perception that exist on an unending scale of time and in an unending expanse of space.  We can remind ourselves of the latest conjectures about time as a manipulatable thing, and we can remind ourselves how physicists and astronomers have postulated awesome curvatures to space, but that is not the same as to assume that we can impose those concepts upon our perception traits.  Time goes on as ever, and the horizon stretches out as though flat (or bumpy-flat) without end.  We can look at a distant mountain and tell ourselves that we have established that we see only the top four-fifths of it, and we can squint into the distance and see a ship's sail as if partly submerged, but such enterprises are us exerting ourselves beyond the immediacy of our perception-lives.

Our perception-lives, then, constitute of necessity a mere fragment of any appreciation we must cultivate about our surroundings.  It is important that we maintain balanced estimations of our perception abilities.  We are not, as I have described, mere loci of perception, poised most conventionally central to the eyes and ears and surveying Creation in 360-degree aspects on every tiltable plane.  We are created with limitations to our perception, though of course we must reckon that some increments of perception are granted to us.  To invert conceptually the conceit of ourselves as quintessential receptors of all that surrounds us, there is the opposing notion of ourselves possessing infinitesimal pin-holes through which we peer at our universe, as though a complementary universe of darkness constituted the virtual all of our inner lives--we being creatures of pervading internal darkness to whom the flickers beyond the pin-hole are but phantasms.

No, we are creatures who can in part perceive that which constitutes existence external to us (just as, as I have said, we can in part perceive where we end and where our surroundings begin.)  We can, as Jesus admonishes us, attempt the "singleness" of vision that allows us to be filled with light, rather than to be filled with the darkness--that seed-bed of our fallen and twistedly-arising conceits--that slides into the vacuum created by our wavering attentions to truth.  The important thing is that "singleness" of vision corresponds not to notions either of omni-competent perception or of squinting through a sensory pin-hole.  Rather, the vision we possess (that is, the perception-realm we possess) is as a hazy-edged bubble, important to recognize in its intrinsic limitations as well as in how its limitations bind up any conceptual lives we possess.

Our time-and-space-bound experience-lives are paralleled by our time-and-space-bound conceptual capacities, and it is crucial always to cultivate an awareness of the pull of those fetters.  An apt example is found in an (otherwise puzzling) passage from Luke.  Jesus is speaking of the necessity of "hating" one's family and one's self, and of the necessity of taking up one's cross and following him.  Renunciation is the theme here, and Jesus ends with, "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."  What is remarkable is the fact that, between the hating one's parents part and the "cannot be my disciple" part, is what seems to be a digression about prudence.

In this apparent digression, Jesus speaks of a builder who must reckon if he has money enough to erect a tower, and of a king who must reckon if he has soldiers enough to repel a more numerous enemy.  Better to abandon a plan to build a tower if careful attention would show there are not funds enough for it.  Better to avoid war than to go into battle with insufficient forces.  More particularly, the builder is shown to be wise who does not invite ridicule upon failure, and the king--the less fortunate of the two examples--is shown to be wise to attempt to placate the invader.  In both parables, prudence is indeed indicated, yet the parables themselves involve attempts on the part of the protagonists to avoid loss, either of face or perhaps of a kingdom itself.  What have these parables to do with the notion that one must forsake "all that he hath"?

The answer is both extremely simple and extremely frustrating.  "Possession" as a fault involves a stable state (or, more properly, a conceit of a stable state) held onto by the possessor.  Both the builder and the king are treating their possessions as elements of active schemes of consideration--the effective aspects of nominal possession of things by those two men are found in how they treat those things.  A more usual type of "biblical" example is the virtuous householder, whose concern for the responsible use of his "possessions" makes those things mere props in the drama of the householder's attempts to do the will of God above all else--in the extreme examples of such householders, it might be said that they "possess" such things not at all, and are servants of humanity at large in how they tend those things.  Certainly the wealthy in the Western World have been only too eager to embrace such imagery, even as they embrace most often the opportunity to enter through the eye of the needle.

In the extreme polarization of such examples, one wealthy person might be a renowned philanthropist, and another might be a renowned miser who (recognizing a certain reality about the grave) gives everything at the end to charity.  Economists and social scientists might make a great game of looking at each such wealthy person in turn, and arguing the relative value of their bequests, but whether or not those wealthy persons were indeed "possessors" of their wealth might be gauged as effectively by how graciously they treated their household staffs at each passing moment.

More important than the idea of actual possession of things being a function of a stable state (and of "true" possession being a matter of how such things are treated) is the underlying conceits we have about stable states themselves--these conceits constituting (frustratingly, as I mentioned above) what are most often our most treasured possessions.  We will have it be the case that this-or-that can be described in this-or-that state, and when we are forced to admit that any conceit of ours must bow before the majesty of the divine, we fall back still on the notions of "this-or-that" described state--in this case, the "state" of God.  Maybe everything is contingent upon the will of God, we will say, but in the same breath we try to will into existence describable aspects of the divine.

A fascinating example of this is found in John, wherein it is stated (in an admittedly bewildering passage) that there was as yet no Spirit.  Unsurprisingly, the translators have been in agony to manufacture logic by which the passage might be held to say that the Spirit had not yet been given, but the ancient texts are as impassive and unyielding as ever.  However, only an insecure--and especially impious--mindset would require inventing language that is not present in the text.  It is no more respectful to the divine to say that God has existed forever as to say that his existence is outside of time (and the notion that he existed "before time" would be simply silly.)

Moreover, God is deserving of being respected, and then (and only then) is God to be described in respect to any criteria--and we always show this latter respect in pitiful fashion.  We don't know what we are talking about.  God is, and was, and our understanding of "is" or "was" is as immeasurably inadequate as if our understanding was that God always "happens."

We cannot even handle the fact that our own life "happens," because we do not truly observe our life happening--what we observe is a tumble of shuddering conceits based on imperfect perceptions, and that understandable (to us) thing we call "life" is something we have constructed.  Our understandings of our lives consist of things we consider major or minor, of things we remember and things we forget, of things that happened in earlier and hazier days and of things we anticipate in hazier days still.

The Gospels themselves consist of many things (or perhaps it would be better to say display many aspects) that we can recognize in terms of how life happens.  The three gospels that seem to purport to be ascertained biography consist--surprise, surprise--of often differing "takes" on similar events.  The remaining gospel, which seems to have an altogether different emphasis, has some quite different "takes" on events.  Again, surprise, surprise.  The gospels have beginnings and endings that seem to be tacked on, and this business of differing chronologies shows up most strikingly as the gospels wrap up.  Some elements seem to have been inserted, and then the question arises whether the rest (or parts of the rest) of the New Testament have been tacked on--probably the most important question of how the gospels "wrap up."

And so the Gospels themselves echo the very thing that impinge on us as life happens--things major and minor, things remembered and things forgotten, things hazy in memory and things hazy in anticipation.  I don't think that any person can look at the Gospels through anything other than the limited and cloudy "bubble" that I described above, and it is certainly open to the reader of the Gospels to opine that the books' contents seem to be viewed as through "bubbles"==here acute and insightful, here not so, here evocative and meaningful, here not so.

What is important to consider is the extent to which the teachings of Jesus reflect an anticipatory understanding of the readers' legitimate concerns.  Why can't you decide for yourselves what is right, Jesus asks.  You have heard this-or-that was said, Jesus says.  In a given situation, would you yourselves not do this or that, Jesus asks.  You, being evil, would do this-or-that for your children--would not God do the same for you, Jesus asks.  In each instance, life as a thing in motion, life as a thing happening, is what matters, and it is this dynamic of life that is the template for understanding Jesus' teachings.

It is in the face of the dynamic of life that religion comes to the test.  Take marriage.  For some people marriage becomes a nightmare.  It was not intended to be so, and to the extent to which the participants took it seriously, the notion to which Jesus subscribes--two becoming one--was at some point either the reality of the marriage, or at least the aspiration of the couple.  Then there is the possibility of divorce, and in Jesus' day there was the prescription for divorce in the Mosaic law.  Jesus, however, attributes this possibility either to Moses' invention or to the notion that the Law of God would be tailored in its inception to the baser attitudes of men.  One wonders why Jesus was not executed for that.

And still Jesus relates that marriage is to be indissoluble--except in some vaguely defined circumstances, circumstances to which one or another of the marriage partners might be driven, so that the very guilt-ridden anguish of the couple might forge their own provision of the law.  And while Jesus refers to the Genesis basis for marriage as indissoluble, this very Genesis describes (as the denominations ignore) marriage not as God's plan, but as the result of Adam's conceit.  Small wonder that Jesus describes marriage as something that a person would probably do better to avoid.

Ultimately, any inhumanity in the question of divorce as worked out in the Gospels resides in the failings of the couple or in the failings of the prevailing religiosity.  A bad marriage is a situation of anguish, and such things happen indeed in life.  What I intend to describe here is not the Gospels as an answer to the question, nor any answers to the questions asked about the reliability of the Gospels.  What I intend to describe here is how the teachings of Jesus, rather than simply reflecting the possible artifices of human authors, reflect instead an organic understanding of how human limitations work.

The first and most important test of the teachings of Jesus has nothing to do with whether or not they give answers to what people want to know.  The first and most important test of the teachings of Jesus is whether or not they draw upon the abilities and opportunities to understand existence that are the abilities and opportunities that we cannot deny, and which we must apply.

Blasted and Drained

Francis Schaeffer wrote a famous book, extolled widely in conservative Christian circles, entitled How Should We Then Live?  I submit that the most suitable title for a book about Jesus and his demands of us would be Why Should We Then Live?--and I am being neither literal (of course) nor flippantly disparaging (I hope).  The most disheartening thing about trying to evaluate institutional Christianity is the very fact that Christianity as an institution is engrossed in providing either sacerdotal or experiential mechanisms by which the believer can take the necessity--undeniable in Jesus' teachings--of forsaking life, and turn that forsaking into embracing.

This very un-Jesus-like Christian fixation on living the abundant Christian life is, as I have written before, an attachment possible when the believer does not understand "life" as Jesus does.  To die for Jesus or for one's fellows is "life," as Jesus would have it, and the deprivations of giving up this or that (or a lot of this or that) for the cause of Jesus--that is, "throwing one's life away," as the cynics would have it--is what it is to find truly "abundant" life.  Life truly lived is life lived by the parts of ourselves that we have surrendered gladly.

Humanity has not truly lived since a time before humanity was ever able to understand life.  This notion (a notion, which--pointedly--I will associate with the fleeting, disappearing, and indescribable experience-realm of the newborn) is a notion inherent in our present perception abilities.  We reckon Adam's enviable pristine state to be desirable in that it would be an escape from our troubles--but Adam had as yet to experience trouble.  What is here important to note about prevalent interpretations of the Gospels is the fact that the idea of Jesus "leading us back to the garden" is associated mistakenly with only either eventual salvation or with the more-or-less blessed state of being granted anticipation of that final resolution.

However, Jesus presents repeated recapitulations of the Eden-state as a template of his ministry.  In fact, those recapitulations are linked more closely than might be apparent at first.  Jesus responds to questioners sent by John asking if Jesus is the awaited one, and Jesus gives instructions to those of his disciples he sends out two by two.  In both types of instances Jesus describes the dead being raised to life.  As I have written before, a rather unseemly delight has entertained me with the notion that an unbounded move-mountains-with-a-grain-of-faith determination on the part of the disciples would in all of those instances involve all of humanity who ever lived being brought back with a single petition.  Of course, limitations are exercised in the situations--Jesus' ministry as described to John, Jesus' imparting of both instructions and abilities to the itinerant disciples--and it is precisely that set of limitations that shows that a re-creation of the Eden state is in mind.

The traveling disciples are sent only to the towns of Israel (such geography notable more for its physical rather than absolutely demographic quality) and the disciples are told to refrain from saluting people on the road.  This would seem to be associated with the enlivening and succoring of an idealized setting--a re-created Eden.  In this multi-partite Eden, there would be no infirmity, no disease, and apparently no death ("raising from the dead" being restricted apparently to those witnessed as dying, and experiencing momentary dying within the "Eden-population.")

This same sort of Eden-state is what prevails in the setting that Jesus describes to the questioners from John.  That the Gospel being preached to the poor is of such emphasis is not, apparently, because it was being withheld from all people, but because access both to explicit teaching, and to the chance to reflect upon such teaching, is restricted for those hard-pressed in our very un-Eden world.  And this Eden-recapitulation described by Jesus is as full of temptation as the first Eden.  Jesus expresses concern that persons exposed to his presence might fall away, and Jesus tells the traveling disciples to expect that some people and places will reject them.  Both the delights and the perils of Eden are being highlighted in these scenarios.

Something more, however, is being highlighted in the re-created Eden settings I have described.  The disciples are delighted with their successes, and in one instance they are greeted by Jesus' response (in a very recalling-the-Genesis-events way) of how he saw Satan fall from heaven.  Unfortunately, any association of "abundant" personal life to the situations I have described is precisely antithetical to what Jesus seems to be teaching.  The returning disciples are admonished not to rejoice in their successes, but in their favorable status in the invisible kingdom.  Indeed, it is notable that their missionary experiences, "lively" though they might be, are in a certain vein drained of what we might recognize as life.

There is a singular lack of agency on the part of the disciples in the description given by Jesus of their mission.  "How" they are to make any of the decisions, and "how" they are to undertake any of the actions, are described not at all in the text we have of the disciples' instructions.  The disciples are rendered almost empty-handed and almost naked on their travels, and their "supernatural" powers (temporary, it would seem) are as likely channeled through them as placed at their disposal.  In the end, Jesus grants them little more of an assessment of agency than if they had been mere witnesses.

We are creatures who navigate our existences in terms of proportionality and of reference, and who reckon our selves as contained in our bodies and our thoughts.  There is an intrinsic strangeness to us in being made to understand that we must seek to undo all the evils of our lives, and made to understand simultaneously that a lifetime of penitence might be dwarfed by a cup of cold water to a child.  There is an intrinsic strangeness to us in being held rightfully to account for our bodies and our thoughts--estranged, it seems, by an abyss from God--and being held simultaneously to account for failing to recognize our savior in a distressed human being near at hand.

We are not alone in our failings, as we witness in Jesus' assessment of John the Baptist.  John himself must be reminded that casting ourselves aside, not for some convoluted "salvation economy" of the theologians, but for the simple and unprepossessing performance of our rightful Eden-tasks, is what is required of us.  This simple and unprepossessing approach is not that of the accomplished and dogma-equipped believer, but that of the blasted and drained person who has watched himself or herself be siphoned off willingly into vain pursuits, and who calls upon Jesus to fill the voids and undo the damages.

It is perhaps worthwhile to note that, while the "beheading" story certainly does not show Herod in a good light, there is a singular lack of ratification in the various Gospels for John's choice of an individual sin to take particular exception to in a sinful world.  Certainly John made more of a mark in secular--to use the word perhaps anachronistically--history than did Jesus, but John was a human being after all.  Even from the outset of the John the Baptist accounts a dissonance intrudes itself.  The prophetic "voice" introducing Johns' ministry would (if the Old Testament Scripture be taken as controlling) have been a voice calling for a way to be made in the wilderness--with no speaker described.  In the Gospel accounts, we have John's "voice in the wilderness."

Whether in the recesses of Eden at first, or in the Judean wilderness at the start of the Gospel stories, our first points of reference must be people, places, and things--and the God of our worship can render such things meaningless.  To reckon that our lives--like Adam's life--are lacking precisely because they have things in them (and are "abundant" because we give things away) is our first infantile step toward the annihilation of our "lives" that Jesus championed and personified.

Strange Convenience

Jesus tells a young man that he is not far from the kingdom of heaven, and then provides him with no further guidance.  Jesus tells a another young man that all he lacks to gain eternal life is to do the single thing (and puzzling indeed that this might be called a "single" thing) of selling all he has, giving the proceeds to the poor, and following Jesus.  For each of these young men, the way to salvation is both indefinite and continual--the indefinite stretching off into the infinite.

Jesus tells us all that we must have faith, and then he tells us we have no faith, nor any hope of having any.  This indeed is the implication of the statement of Jesus that the merest mustard seed of faith would empower us to move mountains about.  The indefinite stretching off into the infinite is more than the indefinite stretching off into the infinite--it is a doomed prospect as well.

This, on the part of the denominations, is the most punctiliously ignored aspect of the Gospels--that the Gospels describe not a collections of insights about how to gain salvation, but rather a collection of insights into how that "how" cannot be explained to us.  The teachings of Jesus trail off into repeated illustrations of how salvation-yearning collapses into anguished pleading, just as the persistent widow petitions the unfeeling judge about the merits of her case.  By "doomed," I describe our own plight--if it is at all to be understood in terms of the widow's experience--as a situation of our own eternal cases to be resolved never in this life.  Before the end, our petitions never cease to rise nor cease to be ignored, and neither does the impassive countenance of the judge ever lighten.

And this last point is the key--salvation to be resolved never in this life.  Unfortunately, we do not pursue our elusive salvation typically in this life, but in a phony "life" of contrived considerations, just as we read the story of the persistent widow from afar, and we re-read it knowing the ending.  I am reminded of Paul's fascination with the idea that a truth about salvation (or not) is illustrated well by a pot being in no position to criticize its maker, or to complain about being formed for base purposes.  Within the merest relationship of the pot to its maker--that is, a relationship excluding Paul's presumptuous air--is to be found one of the most persistent and resounding cries of the psalmist and the prophet, that is, the offering to God of the notion that he has abandoned his creatures.  Moreover, Paul has not stopped there--having been provided as we all are with the Genesis description of a "very good" creation stumbling forth under curses, Paul then twists it all into a gruesome notion that God creates damned creatures anew.

It is extremely telling that Paul allows himself to be drawn into the trap of describing salvation experiences from the outside.  The pot is neither more nor less than it is made to be, but it is Paul who supplies the third element to the scenario--the human contemplator who sits in judgment of the metaphorical pot's utterances, just as the reader contemplates juror-like the widow's plight.  In each case the observer outside the parable can be observed and commented upon by another contrived observer, and so on into infinity.  Nothing about any of this (and precious little of theology in general) has anything to do with the essential and solitary immediacy of the salvation dynamic taught by Jesus.

The young man who has found insight will find it further within himself, and is provided therefore with no direction by Jesus.  The young man is his own landscape, and the extent to which he diminishes himself, so also is his internal landscape to become smaller and more traversable.  The rich young man who has followed the commandments and yet is beset by Jesus' demand that he sell all he owns is going to be (if he surprises the commentators, as the text allows) a poor young man facing yet another demand, and then yet another.  Salvation is offered to those men (and to us) if we travel along a way that says, "No way."

There is no way to salvation by contemplating it.  There is no way to salvation by following Jesus to it.  There is no way to salvation by faith.  The Jesus who is the Way is so not because either a roadmap or a metaphor is provided thus to us--Jesus is the Way because all such concepts are subsumed into his character.  Jesus is the point-source of all-present divinity who is separated from us by an infinite gulf that is as nothing to him.  Salvation is our yearning, but the very concept that there is some sort of illustratable salvation dynamic is an obstacle to us.  After the end, salvation is free.  Before the end, salvation is more costly than we can manage.

I can do little more now than demonstrate how my interpretation of salvation is at least holistic to the Gospels, in distinction to that of the mass of commentators.  All commentators have had to deal with Jesus' descriptions of the Unpardonable Sin.  Suffice to say that anyone who has ever been confronted with those passages has concocted images, however fleeting or insubstantial, pertaining to the Holy Spirit.  Since to think something is as bad as to say it (or at least prudence would so dictate), and since surely the mute or illiterate are not by definition exempted from the peril of the Unpardonable Sin, then this peril might be expected to haunt one and all.  I cannot say for sure what goes on in the minds or souls of others, but it is worthy of note that there is one topic (unsurprisingly, I would say) upon which the commentators are both agreed and generous--either the Unpardonable Sin could only be committed in Jesus' lifetime, or the Unpardonable Sin cannot have been committed by one who retains as yet any capacity to try to avoid sin.  A strange convenience is attached thereby to something that Jesus treats as supremely important.

We would do well to consider, however, whether we would or would not (called to give accounting for our lives) present any of our sins to the divine as "pardonable."  Is not the Unpardonable Sin, upon any recounting we might make of any of the sins of humanity, a capstone of truth about the awfulness of sin that is a truth that extends to all of our transgressions?  We make much of the mercy of Jesus, and of the ever-multiplying theories about how he says we can be saved, but rarely do we catalogue Jesus' descriptions of the manifold futilities of our attempts to avoid punishment for sin.  Unsurprisingly, we do not like to hear that some sin might never be forgiven, yet what manner of elasticity ought we to allow as the difference between the ideas of "never to be forgiven" and "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle"?  (And are any of us ever free from the temptations that beset the "rich" who are warned in the latter phrase?")

We don't know how to get to heaven.  We don't have any prospect of completing the tasks required to get to heaven.  We don't have faith.  We don't have the means to separate ourselves from the lures of the earth.  To think of ourselves as being more-or-less okay as regards our stature before God, while yet we allow a diluted notion of sin impossible to forgive to float above us in our conjured detachment, is to flood ourselves in horrid delusion.  All our petitions of God are impossibilities.  That we might be reduced to pathetic creatures wondering if some impossibilities are less impossible than others is probably not the worst way to begin.

In Which the Teachings Apply

The things of God are independent of time and space.  Our inability to conceptualize this reality makes plain the fact that we cannot hope to treat the things of God as time-and-space independent.  What we can do, however--and this Jesus indeed requires of us--is to reckon that our time-and-space limitation is no warrant to construct an effectual defiance of that realization by assembling some one or another view of our existence as constellations of settled points on smooth surfaces of time and place.  This indeed we do.  We think of ourselves as neatly localized persons in an idealized "now" of time.

When Jesus tells us that our hearts will be in heaven if our treasure is in heaven, we insist unfortunately (and predictably) on reckoning that what Jesus is describing is some optimal internalized heart-attitude as distinct from the attempt wickedly to encompass within ourselves the aggrandizement lodged in selfish desires.  We will at most charge ourselves with having set our minds upon the wrong things, but we insist that this galaxy of thoughts exists within ourselves--we are in this conceit point-centered personages by whom the passages of time and place glide as "out there" vistas.

There is no "out there" populated by beings with whom we interact merely at our internally-conceived interface between our consciousness and everything our consciousness perceives.  There is no "out there" time when we did good or ill from which we can draw present comfort or extract present warning--and there is no "out there" future but for the prospect of the fleeting and undeserved possibility of learning always to pour ourselves into the moment.  There is no "out there" place littered with amusements or distractions or--as we might hope--raw materials and possibilities for doing good things.

When Jesus says that our hearts are where our treasure is, he means it.  For us to attach ourselves to this or that is for us to cede a part of ourselves to that very thing.  In the un-plumbable recesses of the Creation moment--and in the realm of wonderings in which we might no more than almost tread--there lies the possibility of there having been untrammeled communion between God and Adam.  However, "the man"--that is, the humanity experienced by us in any manner we might assimilate--cannot possibly encompass of what that communion might have consisted.  We would do as well to say that Adam in that state did not exist, as to assert that we might conjecture as to his substance in that state--neither statement could surpass the other in sublime nature, or in blasphemy.

"The man" for whom it was not good to "be alone" exists in the Genesis account such that he must be viewed either as completely subsumed into his Creator or as being infused in part into those surroundings that captured his attentions.  There might have been untold eons in which he tended the Garden in perfect satisfaction, but again, the question of the substance of Adam's state while in perfect moral quiescence is beyond us.  If in the perfect will of God, all that would have mattered to Adam was God, and therefore we cannot understand the Garden (at least before the first unimaginably small murmurings of rebellion) as other than a setting described for us to introduce the narrative.

When we do come to understand Adam as being captured by the creaturely objects of his attentions, the narrative shifts immediately to the procuring of an "help meet" for the man.  Adam is not presented with a menagerie of potential new attention-objects, objects meant for his amusement that fail in this regard, objects that are allowed by God to pass aside as the narrative shifts to the idea that the man needs not diversion, but rather that which is encompassed by the sublime notion of "help meet." No, the animals are failed "help meet's," so to speak, and we are presented here with the first of a number of Scriptural opportunities for the amusement of puerile critics.

What ought to be seized upon by sincere critics of institutional Christianity (and what I have attempted to describe before) is the fact that the elements of "rebellion" exist in the Genesis account such that they are coterminous with any description of Adam as a creature possessing will.  The Adam who will not allow all of himself to rest in God is shown to collect himself into a locus of attention toward his surroundings, surroundings that (in the fashion we can recognize in all our times and places) are always cloying and needing refreshment.  This is the germ of rebellion.  What is most important to recognize, however, is that the business of human beings drawing themselves up into self-centered individuals (the prideful, God-defying imagery of the preachers' condemnation of humanity's futility) cannot be imagined fantastically to succeed in that very endeavor of personal drawing-up into discrete beings.  We sinful humans are no more "individuals" than we have ever been, and we are not "individuals" in the Eden account--we are subsumed into God or we are subsumed into the fusion of persons expressed by the scriptural recounting of the "help meet" process.

This is one of the most important aspects of the conceptual terrain of Genesis, and of the Gospels.  Conventionally, our attentions in interpreting the Scriptures are ever and always drawn to the imagery of the puffed-up person, the person who stuffs himself or herself with the pleasures of Creation, the person who fills himself or herself with evil thoughts and evil desires.  We would be fortunate--though undeservedly fortunate--were that the only type of imagery that can define us.  What is most important when looking at the Genesis account, however, is the giving-away of ourselves, the imparting of elements of ourselves to other persons and other things.  The idea of the evil person who is draining, or devouring, or who robs others of opportunities and of the support they are due, is but one aspect (and not necessarily the chief aspect) of our evil tendencies.  The continual revolution of the Scriptures, however, is the perverse and unintentional "generosity" we display when we exude essential elements of ourselves into our surroundings.

Our selves are not our own, but neither are our abilities selfishly to command our intentions (as we might imagine) in times and places to deny elements of our selves to others, or to other things.  Adam is presented with Eve.  Theologians might argue whether, after Adam calls her flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, it is God or Adam who says that for this reason the man and the woman shall become one flesh, but for our purposes the distinction is immaterial.  Either God made that determination, or he made the man who made that determination.  What is really important here is the denominations' unfortunate determination to limit the shared-person imagery of the first coupling to the greatest possible (and most fleshly) extent.  In truth, Adam and Eve share their persons with each other, and we all therefore share our persons with each other, and (as with our "treasure in heaven") we share our persons with whatever we have attached ourselves to.  Even more important than the question of what we grasp to ourselves, is the question of what we have dispatched elements of ourselves to--and the extent to which we lose, and risk, and deposit to the care of others our eternal fates is greater than we dare imagine. 

We marry someone, we entrust a part of our damnable selves to them.  We dally with someone, we entrust a part of our damnable selves to them.  We bear or sire someone, we entrust a part of our damnable selves to them.  We abuse someone, we place a part of our damnable selves at the mercy of their judgment.  This step-wise but logical decline from the bliss of the first union to the horror of thinking ourselves placed before judgment at the hands of those we have ill used, frightening though it might be, is a notion neither to be ignored nor to be decreed alien to the teachings of Jesus.  I will try to deal with this more later, but for now it would probably suffice to mention the Parable of the Unjust Steward, and the fascinating way Jesus describes a person's fellows as being empowered to shield him that person from judgment from above.

More to the point here is the simple mechanics of how Jesus' conceptualization of personhood differs from other New Testament voices.  To Jesus what matters is what comes out of a person, and he describes the intake of forbidden foods as immaterial.  His assertion that ingested food merely passes out "in the draught" is of course biologically questionable, but that is scarcely the point--Jesus' conceptualization of the human being as a source of so much is a conceptualization of the unquantifiable effulgence of the soul.  Contrast this to the (chronologically-challenged) fussing over dietary restrictions in the "early Church," who cannot but think of persons as body-bounded individuals.  To Jesus, the thoughts of adultery (which come "out" of the heart) defile not merely the sinful thinker, but defile as well the Genesis-defined personage of the marital union.  In the epistles, the sophomoric notion is offered that sexual sin is worse than others because it is introduced into the body.

Most importantly, our conceptualizations of ourselves in time and place are but trembling shadows, shadows defined for us by the comings and goings of our attentions, shadows that fall near to us or that extend in moments to our farthest horizons.  This is the realm in which we were born, and which we are born to.  This is the realm in which the teachings of Jesus apply--not in the setting of our most concerted attempts to define our times and our places and our selves within them.

Poised Upon the Instant

A person might decide to drag the tip of a paintbrush across a piece of paper.  At some point that person might decide to turn that continuous line into a written letter or a painted figure.  Also, at some point that letter or figure becomes something existing outside the will of the person with the paintbrush.

When that point arrives, only God knows.

I write this in opposition to the contention--meant to counter pantheism--that Creation exists separately from the Creator in the same way a painting exists separately from the one who painted it.  Of course, like all such mental pictures of the divine, this anti-pantheist painter-versus-painting analogy is tainted.  Along with the will of the painter, the painter's mere existence is inseparable from the creation.  Body heat affects the environment of the studio, as does emitted moisture, and certain of the painter's very molecules will become incorporated into the picture.

What is most important, however, about the weakness of the "painter" analogy is that very point of the transmission of the will of the creator.  Of this, only God knows.  Similarly, only God knows at what point his image of Creation became an existing, effectively-independent, creation.  And since Creation can be understood to have no existence outside the will of God, then in our understanding the act of Creation occurs always--as does every sovereign act of God.

As I described in the previous post, this phenomenon can be understood in terms of the teachings of Jesus.  The sparrow receiving the tender care of the God who feeds it is not betrayed forthwith by the God who notes the sparrow's inevitable cursed-Creation demise.  There is no proper understanding of "forthwith" in this application to be held by us, because to us it can only be that God's acts and determinations defy our conceits about time.  The sovereign act of Creation is ever-immediate, and the sovereign act of Creation's curse is ever-immediate.  The sparrow's vigor and the sparrow's demise are each phenomena of the divinely-encompassed Now.

Much of what I have found myself writing in "Roused, Readied, Reaped" and here in "Aware, Away, Awry" has dealt with this very idea--that the will of God has not been displayed in discrete dispensations, but rather in varied manifestations that, while waxing and waning in Scripture, have timeless expressions.  Adam's rebellion was greater or lesser, and Adam's cursedness was greater or lesser, but "Adam" as a concept understandable to us is not something that we can hold responsibly to be ever in entire concert with the will of God--unless we accord to Adam a title of "perfect man" that ought properly to apply to someone else.

Understanding God to be independent of time and space, we must hold that when God does something, the proper entry-point of this occurrence to our consciousness ought to be the proportion-jarring blast of its immediacy--so that the fact of something being wrought by God ought not to be appreciated by the manifestation of its existence, but by the ever-resounding blow of the hammer upon the anvil.  The God who created the mountains--indeed, created any such things that bring to us the imagery of such majesty--is the proper object of wonder.  The mountains themselves are as nothing, to be cast about by us at will--provided our faith be as monumental as a mustard seed.

This fusion of timelessness and immediacy is--will we but ponder it for a moment--a necessity of any musings about God's sovereignty.  This fusion of timelessness and immediacy is displayed for us repeatedly in Genesis.

God made Creation out of nothing--but we are not confronted by initial description of Nothing.  We are confronted by an imagery of space without content somehow surrounding a world without terrain.  The imagery does not purport to show a nothing that becomes a something.  What is the imagery provides is the experiential blast that would confront any finite witness to the phenomena.  The proper lesson of this imagery-choice has been ignored--nay, violently cast aside--by the religions of the western world.  Our chosen God is one who glides sedately through an eternity of time until he fills a space alongside himself with a blemish-free Creation.  Time and space coexist with this ridiculous version of God, until he decides to launch upon a farce about himself and a man imbued with imperfection who might enjoy the status of a perfect creation if only he would behave with a perfection he does not possess.

In the scriptural version of God, it is the blow of the hammer against the anvil that matters.  Time explodes into existence as surely as the text explodes with "In the beginning."  Space and non-space are blasted apart from God-knows-what to define each other.  Light's existence is described as initiated--or is it?  Light, as any ancient reader could know, could be "created" by human hands and, as any modern reader might know, photons as yet released (to say nothing of registered by optic nerves) would have existed in the primordial mix.  The explosion of light (as still today) was what mattered.

Dry land appears between the gathered waters.  Was the land under the waters, or was it created at that moment?  What matters is the blast of its appearance--the land always "existed," because the mind of its timeless Creator exists.  The plants and the animals are described as coming from the earth--the blast of their appearance associated by the reader with the immediacy of the reader's surrounding environment.  The creatures of the sea and the air are described as though they came from nothing--and of course they would seem to the reader to be expelled from beyond far-off vistas.  The lights in the sky need merely to be the gathering of masses that would, with sufficient bulk, harbor within themselves the mechanism of the continual creation (or reflection) of light.

My description here is not to provide some scientific (or science-y) rationale for the Creation Story.  What is important here is the striking lack of connection between the Genesis account and any time-and-space matrix for interpreters' extrapolation.  The true duty of the interpreter is not extrapolation, but expansion.  Any insipid theology can decide on this or that theory of God's will, and weave therefrom a story of God's relations with humanity by deciding which of any number of aspects of a purported God are understood to be operative in any time and place.  In truth, not only are all aspects of God pertinent to all times and places, but also all acts of God are presumptively ever-happening and ever-relevant.

Any critic of Christianity can cite Jesus' announcement of a new commandment to love one another as being a fundamental misrepresentation of God' longstanding relationship with people.  What must be understood is that in this context a description by Jesus of how people must behave is not understood in terms of God's longstanding dealings with people, but rather in the immediacy of God's timeless dealings with people.  Every commandment of God is ever new, and every hearer is ever and always in Adam's stead, with the glow of God's approval and the blast of God's disapproval poised upon the instant.

It is one thing to note, as I have often, Jesus' disregard for humanity's concentration on time and space.  It is important additionally to see that aspect of Jesus' teaching in the context of the particular Scriptures on which he relies, and also in the context of the reverential approach to the character of God that Jesus presumes.

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.

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."

The Most Generous Orthodoxy

The various conceptualities about what constitutes a "gospel"--some of which I have tried to deal with recently--lead to some interesting questions, such as, "If Jesus' hearers among the Jews had been provided with such information through their heritage such that they should have been prepared for Jesus' challenges--and to be sure Jesus takes them to task for not understanding the basics of where he is coming from--then might it not be said that the Old Testament as a whole constitutes a "gospel"?

And if it be said that the Old Testament as a whole constitutes a gospel, then are not the themes of humanity's relationship to God, and also of the essentials of salvation, themes that can be understood independently of a believer's attachment to the "name" of Jesus, Jesus in our postulated B.C. gospel being as yet unnamed?  And is not the sacrifice of deity to itself as a necessity of Creation's essential unworthiness a sacrifice that can be understood independently of the manner of the sacrifice, or the of manner in which that sufficient sacrifice is simultaneously unable to vanquish the sovereignty of the deity?  Are not the Cross and the Resurrection (of which so many Old Testament figures are held to be "types") not merely types themselves of more general truths?

Ultimately, of course, one is led to such conjectures as would include the idea that the great religions of the world--or perhaps even just the manifestations of "religion" as it might be thought to have circumspect and conscientious adherents throughout the world--constitute merely a multi-faceted faith system that is essentially one.  Certainly Jesus' assertion that he has followers we know not of raises some pertinent questions along these lines,

There is a corollary to this notion of universal faith--a corollary as distasteful to the denominations as its precipitating notion of such faith--and that is the idea that, if all religions are one, then under any potent scrutiny, each of these religions is a collection of essential "nothings" that is aggregated around that essential religious "something."  I will present here the idea that the Book of Malachi--not merely as an example but in fact as a quite salient example in that it is often taken as an introduction to the advent of the Christian messiah--is in fact a book dedicated to making nothings of what are conventionally taken to be great somethings of both Judaism and Christianity.

Malachi begins with an assertion of God's love for Israel and hatred for Edom.  This is, of course, a rather stern distillation of the Genesis story of hapless, untamed Esau and his favored brother Jacob--Jacob being, incidentally, an example of God's favor shown on a person who, absent that partiality, would be rightly adjudged a scurrilous character (to frame the matter quite charitably.)  Shown one of the greatest of all biblical visions at the place he would call "house of God," Jacob proceeds to impose upon his God a transactional relationship as a condition of following God.  Let a person make such a challenge to the divine before a priest or preacher today, and that presumptuous person would be chastised roundly.

In reality, the standard notions of Esau's supposed unworthiness are undercut even in the Genesis text.  Having neither birthright nor blessing, Esau is given nonetheless a "blessing" from Isaac that includes the notion that Esau will throw off his brother's yoke.  Indeed, Esau becomes a great nation and, in the picture given of his eventual reunion with his cringing, maneuvering sibling, there seems to be no reason (absent, again, the unaccountable favor of God) to think of Esau (the eventual Edom) as less than Jacob (the eventual Israel.)

And yet the book of Malachi has Edom held in the greatest disdain, accounted a "land of wickedness" with which God will be angry forever.  As it turns out, though, the Edomites as a people are not tied to that single land, and later they will relocate as the Idumeans who supply Judea and its environs with the House of Herod--scarcely the most noble of noble houses, it is true, but scarcely also the blasted remnant of Esau that Malachi must be taken to indicate.  Actually, the book of Malachi says particularly that what is meant to be indicated by the Jacob-versus-Esau depiction is the potency of Israel's God beyond the boundaries of Israel.  In essence, the Israel-versus-Edom parochial rivalry ends up being an instance of ephemera, paling in the light of the greater truth of God' sovereignty.  The particular falls away in the face of the universal.

Malachi goes on then to disparage the contemporary practice--or rather malpractice--of sacrifice in the Temple, holding it to be unworthy of God.  It would be better that no sacrifice be made at all, and this while the text maintains that God's name is feared among the nations, even as it is profaned by the practices prevailing in Israel.  The notion that God is Israel's God is here turned on its head, and Israel is shown as lacking in piety what the world at large is providing.  As if to add an insult, the priests--the beneficiaries of God's covenant with Levi--are held to be unworthy of their ancestor, who Malachi describes as having deserved God's favor for being a man of "peace and equity," even as Jacob's prophecy at the end of Genesis excoriates Levi (along with Simeon) for being violent and malicious.  Again, the particular falls away in the face of the universal, and in this instance the essence of sacrifice is taken to be unbounded by the precincts of the temple or by the edicts of the Mosaic law.

And then the men of Israel are taken to task for having married daughters "of a strange god."  Surely here the particulars of biblical parochialism are to be shown, one might think, as we revisit the matter of mixed marriages that so exercised Ezra and Nehemiah.  However, the notion of "a daughter of a strange god" does not equate by necessity to "a daughter of a lineage excluded by being not of God's people."  Having the testimony of the Book of Ruth at hand, the generation of Malachi--the book of Malachi that has God saying, "I hate divorce"--has also at hand the possibility of such "daughters of a strange god" being converted to Judaism (or at least persuaded not to perpetuate the beliefs of their youth.)  As if to underscore the point, this passage begins with Malachi asking, "Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us?"

And then the searing notion of the universal over the particular is laid upon the people, who are at once reassured that they are children of the forebear Jacob, and excoriated for being the children of the trickster Jacob:

For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.  Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them.

In short, the Book of Malachi is a marvel of the universal stature of humanity being run through the mill of particularized religion.  This is nothing more nor less than the corollary of the often-plumbed notion among theologians, to the effect that true religion leaps over the boundaries of particularized conceptions.  Of course, the essence of any denomination is in its particulars, just as the essence of any religion is in its particulars.  In any effort to claim hegemony over the universal truths of existence, while still retaining an institutional identity, many theologians will engage one upon the other in a sort of cosmic chicken, each straining to out-do the others in being more universal, while hoping that the others will fall away short enough of dissipation into generalities so that the winner can still effectively claim an orthodoxy of the most generous-minded sort.

No Time for Gospels

My previous contention that "John is many gospels" relies, of course, on an untypical use of the term "gospel."  In this I am scarcely unique, as it is one of the staple aspects of theologians to use "gospel" variously.  Perhaps most striking of these uses is the radio-preacher type of insistence that the "full gospel" consists of the entire Bible--the entire Bible, that is, as it is taken to include at every pivotal juncture some one or another reference (usually a reference that has escaped unaccountably the "Jews," or the "Roman Church," or whoever) and this reference is elucidated by the preacher as being yet another part of the "gospel."  This is where we get unsubstantial contentions of the sort that Jesus' foot pressed against the Cross is foreshadowed (for the properly discerning) in the snake's target being the heel of Eve's offspring.

This "gospel" does not suffer limitations even to the text of the Bible.  Preachers will preach to Jews about how various aspects of Judaism's written and unwritten heritages contain "gospel" truths that Jews have forgotten even as they have clung to mystifying traditions, and if a person so desires he or she might might subscribe to preachers' resources that find the essence of the gospel in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

And then there is the unedifying derivation of "gospel" from "good news" in the Greek (or, rather, in a simplistic reading of the Greek.)  Suffice to say that "the gospel" in its largest and easiest application is a phrase taken to mean "the message of Christian salvation"--though this will not obviate the difficulty of a rejoinder that is pregnant in all the talk about how Judaism has misunderstood the Old Testament message that--surely--told the few "saints" of the centuries B.C. how to be saved.  This rejoinder is of such a type as, "If the elements of the gospel are present in the Old Testament, and were presented thereby to the Jews, what then did they lack as far as conceptual resources (and moral obligations) regarding salvation when the Baptist appeared from the wilderness?  What was the ostensibly revolutionary teaching of Jesus all about?"

The essence of the institutional manifestation of Jesus' teaching--the "Church" described as variously and conveniently as is the "gospel"--is as a custodian of the covenant that Jesus describes as "new."  Unfortunately (if one is looking for a rationale for an earthly institution), Jesus does not hew to a conception of time that is either linear or consistent.  Abraham lives always; Elijah arrives always and departs always; Abiathar lives in the person of his father; a Jew who owns being a descendant of a people who killed the prophets is a prophet-killer himself.

"New," as a term applied to the covenant, is as if to describe a covenant that is always new, and that never appeared but from the first--the pouring out of Jesus' blood being one with his suffering for the Creation of a world that, being not God, is ever an evanescence of virtue suspended over an abyss of damnation.  And, of course, Jesus suffers for this damnation as surely as he suffers the pain of all of his creation.  This is a conception of "good news" that--held by mere mortals--must surely fall short, but at least it does not embrace limitations held as matters of misdirected faith.

It is important to note that the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Jesus' body and blood is not described by him as separate from a larger scope of time.  When Jesus tells the crowds that they must eat of his flesh, his is confronting them with the conceptuality then and there--he is not announcing some prayer meeting or convocation in which he will fulfill some promise to make the teaching henceforth applicable (to say nothing of comprehensible.)  When Jesus breaks the bread and passes the cup at the Last supper, his somber pronouncement that each of the elements "is" a manifestation of the covenant has great literary resonance--and it also does not include the conventionally expected (and ecclesiastically supplied) presumption that the giving of flesh and surrendering of blood is to happen on the paving stones and on the Cross.  Jesus' sacrifice for Creation is represented by him as occurring in time, and is actualized out of time.

For the purposes of our understanding here, it must be held, not that the term "gospel" is stretched out of shape by the preachers, but rather that the very application of the idea of the gospel is inherent in the breadth of the Creation to which it ministers.  This is an idea--the idea of human confrontation with the realities of existence as being of one cloth with the idea of the gospel--that I must attend to soon (along with my promised presentation of the remaining many "gospels of John.")  That gospels can be both momentary and timeless ought to be one of the foundation-stones of our understanding.