At Best Exhausted Managers

I need to address a difficulty I have in sharing my views about the gospels.  To be fair to myself, I suppose that my notions about us human beings and our thought-lives would be difficult notions in any event, regardless of my religious beliefs.  It happens that my religious beliefs include a belief in the primacy of understanding ourselves individually as households of jostling personality-elements, but those religious beliefs are not attached necessarily to the criticisms I have of our tendency to see ourselves in contrast as single, integrated perceivers of our thought-lives.  The commonplace notion we have often of ourselves as "individuals" is attended unfortunately by the conceit that the self-perception we have of ourselves at any given moment is a comprehensive perception.  It is not.

We have things in ourselves that are below the surface, and we have things in ourselves that surprise us.  None of this, of course, is generally denied.  We accept that we have a subconscious, and a store of things that we have forgotten momentarily, and perhaps things we have repressed.  What we do generally with these realizations, however, is inherently problematic.  We think of ourselves as individuals with flaws, or fissures perhaps, but we assign to ourselves nonetheless the status of possessors of ourselves.  Even the standard Christian insistence on seeing ourselves as not our property because we were created and (hopefully) ransomed by the divine merely assigns the titular ownership of our self-images to another.  None of this addresses in substance the potential implications of our lack of total cohesion.

If we are not totally coherent in our status as individuals, then the question remains open, whether we are viewed properly as individuals with partially disjointed elements, or as collections of partially-joined individuals under the headship of a self that is actualized not in individual realization, but rather in the realization of self-submergence into the role of custodian.  And of course, any mixture of the preceding elements will have the same implications for us: Any allowance that we are each of us comprised of interacting individual wills--any allowance of this in the slightest degree--will stand in implacable binary opposition to the disallowance of this notion.  There can be no mixing of "we are individuals composed of parts" and "we are composed of this individual in part, and that individual in part (and perhaps more)," such that the latter notion does not obliterate the former.

In common interaction, this does not really amount to anything more than the assertion that we do not really know ourselves.  Also in common interaction, however, is the notion that it is anywhere from impolite to presumptuous to abusive to throw that assertion at one's fellow participants in debate.  In virtually every scenario, it would be entirely logical to participate in debate with the common understanding that a person's stated beliefs were held by him or her in such coherence and totality that they would be accepted at face value, and that their genuineness and thought-out quality would be beyond question.

This is all very civilized, of course, but it is not true.  The "I accept that you believe your viewpoint such that your belief is unquestioned in this debate" assertion is certainly an assertion likely to engender respectful discourse, but it is an assertion that is also a convenient social construct, and it does not sit well with any comprehensive definition of "truth."  It is, after all, the responsibility of participants in debate to question themselves constantly about their own beliefs, and about the genuineness of their own beliefs.  It's just not polite for other people to intrude into that business.

The problem for me arises with the notion that any philosophical contention can be a subject for respectful debate, yet I find myself drawn to the idea that people do not speak directly for themselves as individuals, but rather as spokesperson-managers of "households" of jostling personalities.  This idea, of course, makes it surely an awkward undertaking to introduce said idea into debate.  Embarking on a debate with "I accept that you really know what you believe, but I want to argue that none of us really knows what we believe" would seem to be a trifle difficult.  Couple this with the assertion--which is really a compliment to one's debate opponents--that each of us in any debate will question constantly whether we individually really believe what we say we believe, and the whole scenario can become difficult indeed.

I am thinking of this particularly because of a recent post in P. Z. Myers' Pharyngula.  Myers writes:

When I say what I am, that I’m an atheist, believe me. I’ll return the favor by accepting that you actually sincerely believe in your goofy mythology.

 Myers also writes:

One last thing I really detest finding in my mailbox: mindreaders. You know the type: they tell you that everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, or that all humans are hardwired to seek god, and therefore they know deep-down that I actually believe in their god already. No. Humans throughout our history have been looking for explanations for phenomena in the environment — we are pattern seeking animals. If we can’t find a pattern that fits, we tend to invent one, and god is just a one-size fits all stop-gap explanation that people have stuffed into the lacunae in their understanding of the world. I’ve never found deities to be satisfying. I do find people who try to tell me what I really think to be irritating.

I do not think it would be unduly presumptuous of me to extract from Myers' post that he believes humans are "hardwired" to be "pattern seeking animals."  Insofar as Myers is addressing the desire for religion to be found (at least in part) in the outworkings of unsurprising information-handling in sentient beings, the point is well taken.  Ordering, categorizing, predicting, and extrapolating from a limited amount of available data is how our minds work.  Making convenient over-generalizations, unfortunately, is also how our minds (and psyches) work--hence any number of insipid "evidences" and "proofs" of the existence of the divine.

Unfortunately, we are also hardwired to see patterns in ourselves.  We have a set of physiological tools with which to interact with the world, and whatever momentary consciousness (when, at least, we are awake and conscious) happens to hold sway in that experiential cockpit defined behind our eyes and between our ears is who "we" define ourselves as.  All other elements of ourselves are at least crudely rank-ordered below our "real" selves.

We have no warrant to seek to impose our will (or to seek to impose a pattern) on the elements of ourselves, as though those elements were foreign to ourselves.  Neither have we warrant to impose will or pattern on the elements of ourselves in the pretense that such elements are seamlessly parts of ourselves.  We know that such things are ludicrous.  And yet the expectation of civilized debate is that we would accept without question someone's assertion that "I decided on atheism thirty years ago and I have never doubted it" or "I came to belief in Christ thirty years ago and I have never doubted it," while an incidental assertion from a debate participant that "I made a decision to marry so-and-so thirty years ago and I have never doubted it" would be met with an internal eye-roll.  People's thought-lives just don't work that way.

To address the immediate problem that bedevils me--the problem of debating the proposition that none of us can truly stand as a single spokesperson of our raucous inner households--is just part of the larger problem of addressing life in general on the same terms.  The teachings of Jesus are superficial and stilted--at least in effect--when we have a superficial and stilted view of ourselves.  We have to tell ourselves and everybody else that human beings are roiling, squirming masses over which our identifiable moment-by-moment selves are at best exhausted managers.

Awareness and the Problem of Cause

The "Aware" in "Aware, Away, Awry" is the collection of innumerable and interminably-appearing jolts, shocks, disturbances, or what-have-you's that attend all of the self's exposure to information.  Nothing in the life of the mind comes smoothly, and even our contemplations of spectra or scales in ideation must be drawn up by us consciously, as momentary constructs that dissolve as soon as our attention is drawn to any particular of experience.  Information is introduced to our attentions, and information bit-by-bit is tossed and batted about by our faculties of contemplation.

Nothing about this need be alarming to the religious thinker.  "Thought" itself can be understood by us only as a process, as "this meaning that" or "this leading to that" or "this bringing to mind that."  The germ of this in the Abrahamic conceptualization is the description of the thought-processes of God as between a speaker and a listener--"Let there be light," for example, or "Let us."  Of course, in these idealized instances of the thought-processes of God, there is understood to be perfect communication in perfect efficiency, such that that which is spoken is perfectly related, and related as though it were already known.  There are no shocks.

Our thought processes, on the other hand, are characterized by disturbances, from the most minimal to the most disruptive.  Indeed, the very notion of thought processes presupposes a locus of consciousness at work--and for each of us the inception of the locus' workings is by definition rooted in a beginning we cannot recall or understand.  This is the primordial shock.  To the experiencer, the phenomenon of experiencing is effectively uncaused.  Moreso in perplexity, and infinitely remote to each person's understanding, is the existence (even in the most mundane of interactions) of other conscious beings.

Do other persons experience existence as we do?  Even if ourselves and others can be characterized as thinking persons of perhaps divided attentions and perhaps warring impulses, can we escape the notion that being a conscious entity must be a binary proposition?  Either an entity is conscious or not--and being deprived of an outwardly-assessable criterion by which to determine consciousness or not, we can state that nerve activity and the physical displays attributed to nerve activity are supported--caused, we will say--by myriad natural factors, but we cannot say that consciousness is caused if we cannot say (absent error-laden assessment of the thought-outworkings of the subject) when--and therefore under what conditions--consciousness is "caused".  We exist as conscious entities because we exist as conscious entities, and we credit the existence of other conscious entities because we credit the existence of other conscious entities.

I say this primarily with attention to the "First Cause" argument for God's existence.  The ancients could watch billiard balls (or their ancient equivalents) knock against each other, and idealize what is of course the most "commonsense" of observations: things cause things.  The conscientious religious observer (as well as the conscientious non-religious observer) to the First Cause argument can usually make two salient observations.  First, extrapolation of everyday experience (or even of strenuously-collected experience recordings) is just that--extrapolation, which, if it is applied as though it were some kind of "law", would neither more nor less rule out an "uncaused" Big Bang singularity (or pulsing of singularities) than it would rule out an "uncaused" Creator.  Second, which is of rather more "religious" quality than the first observation, is the inescapable fact that the "First Cause" proponent has thrown all into the basket of "everything has a cause," when (particularly in the Abrahamic conceit) what is being argued for finally is the existence of a miracle-making (and therefore "uncaused"-phenomenon-making) deity.

"Aware, Away, Awry," in this instance, delves simply further into this latter inconsistency.  "Awareness," insofar as it is experienced, is at bottom uncaused, for the simple fact that "awareness" is a facet (realized only when something is bounced off of it) of the uncaused consciousness.  Of course, in this analysis "uncaused" is a proposition of philosophical conjecture, used by this perplexed writer to describe the ineffable quality of consciousness (appraisable only by the bearer and translatable only by imperfect communication) which might in substantially equal parts be conjectured as wholly natural in origin or wholly supernatural in origin.  In this analysis, not only is it held to be silly that "First Cause" might be used as an argument for a God who vigorously defies the naturalist's contention that "everything has a cause," it is held to be even more silly that conjecture about the "First Cause" of everything ought to be the province of loci of consciousness that know nothing about their own origins and know as little about the origins of their fellows.

I am concerned about the First Cause Argument (as I am concerned about many other things) on the basis of the violence it does to the listener, especially the novice and the young.  People make contentions about things like the First Cause because those people (to whom I do not want to attribute raw or reprehensible fault) are comfortable with making (either overt or implicit) assertions about what it is to have a thought life.  The merest moment of reflection (which is no small feat when beset by societal disincentives) will inform the human being that he or she arose--as Jesus describes--from a mist of inception, and that he or she is comprised--as Jesus describes--of warring or at least jostling components.  The undivided, foundationally-secure self directing undivided attention to some philosophical contention is a monster of the philosopher's invention.

Similarly, the philosopher of religion is all too apt to get up a counterfeit of real human thought--as I have said, a counterfeit, anti-Jesus intellectual monster of the philosopher's conceit, a monster that thinks it knows itself at bottom and that thinks it knows or feels or experiences or does anything as a perfectly singular locus of consciousness.  Invariably, the "God" that this philosopher conjures up is a monster--equally so if this version of God is one of incomparable benevolence or incomparable wrath (just to show one breadth of comparison.)  Whether the "God" that the philosopher champions to his audience is an attractive one or a forbidding one is of little consequence, since what is really going on is a process of the pontificator attracting the audience to a nifty, ultimately unenduring version of their thought-lives, and forbidding the audience to level with themselves about how their thought-lives really present themselves.

A perfect example, as I understand it, is to be found in the lamentable pattern of adults hounding misbehaving children to explain "why" they did something they ought not to have done--when quite often those children simply do not know why they did this or that.  Terrified at being in trouble, and not wanting to seem further disobedient by challenging the adult who maintains that surely the act was done for some describable reason, the child will rather make something up--perhaps even some alarming fake motivation.  This torment is bad enough, but the child left to his or her own thought life after the fact is likely to convince himself or herself that the invented, simple motivation wrung by them from the adult is the single way that the child "really" is.

And so the adult human being, wishing--as so often we do--to have an internal and external presentation as a single, coherent consciousness-possessor, is liable neither to address the fundamental experiential issue of being "uncaused," nor to address the perpetual pressures to seem single and coherent throughout life--to the person's detriment.  One is reminded of Jesus' admonition (that the denominations have never been able really to address) that a person apparently cleansed of demons--as though that pristine state could ever be attained other than in self-delusion--is liable to end up with more and worse demons than before.

Aware, Away, Awry in Action

The story arc of "Aware, Away, Awry" in its particular applications has to do with the occasions in our lives in which any of the constituents of ourselves are shocked into awareness--with the absolute requirement in our analysis (which the theologians would like to forget) of considering that we lag in our apprehensions behind such initial shocks.  Things impact themselves upon us, and we react--but we must remember that "reaction" is a cumulative process, a process of the various parts of our experiential selves being shoved against each other.  If there is anything logical or expected (that is to say, linear) about our thought-progressions, this takes place in reality not as a type of contiguous process, but rather as a process analogous to a collision transferred thorough a line of coupled rail-cars.

The analogies are difficult, but so is the process that one might like to describe.  It is no wonder that Jesus presents the continual tasks of believers--who, in their daily lives, will be relegated disproportionately to low-end and menial tasks under supervision--to be the continual tasks of believers represented as stewards of households.  All of us are the stewards of our households both without and within ourselves.  As we attempt to process our inchoate experiences up to the most explicit of our understandings and potential verbalizations, we are deluged with chances for error.  This is the type of responsibility that bears upon us, even including the most intimate of private experiences, in such manner as responsibility is ostensibly borne by managers "in the real world."

In the real world, much of management is done poorly.  There are many reasons for this, but among the most prevalent is the perpetual managers' insistence that underlings "ought" to respond reflexively to duties, and--as virtually every employee has witnessed on some occasions--there is the reflexive managers' perennial complaint that "you just can't get good people anymore."  While of course it is often a cheap maneuver to attempt to define words by their derivations, it is entirely true that a wholesome approach to management involves the root of "hand," understood as to "handle."  A manager is responsible for anything and everything, regardless of whether it is to be handled directly or indirectly.  The good manager that Jesus describes does not merely budget for the servants' meals, but rises from his or her table of accounts to ensure that the servants are truly fed.  The bad manager that Jesus describes, who eats and drinks and beats the servants, is not overseeing a household in which nothing happens, but rather a household in which the things that happen have been placed by the manager out of his or her hand, as though they would happen properly by themselves.

These bad things are also the type of bad things that happen when we ignore the process behind "Aware, Away, Awry."  We want to have simple solutions to the things that vex us in our lives (think of the theologians' endlessly-touted "simple" salvation economies), but in a nearly-invariable pattern we actualize that "want" by pretending--against all evidence throbbing away in our momentary lives--that we are the single and dispassionate observers of ourselves.  Even when we have undergone great trauma, our chief tendency on this score (toward which we are pressed greatly by society) is to try to engineer in reverse a storyline along which our singular selves have passed.  We compile a story of our individual soul's journey, and then we must flog our memories and our lingering, multifarious impressions into acceding to that story.

We have many and varied and conflicting moments of awareness.  We move away from them in the innate remoteness among parts of ourselves; in the distance to which parts of ourselves recoil; in the passage of time and of circumstances from the original moments; and in our predisposition to view ourselves as singular, experienceable wholes.  We go awry in the process.

An fitting example of this in the theological pursuit is the standard sort of analysis of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  The theologians want the parable to be simply about the joy in heaven when the lost are found.  The parable in Luke is preceded by the short and happy parables about the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, and it is unsurprising that the standard notion of the Parable of the Prodigal Son is that it is merely the concluding of that comfortable threesome.  However, the Prodigal Son is followed directly by the Parable of the Unjust Steward and (soon thereafter) the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus--two parables that deal with a person's responsibility to a household (whether defined as material or familial), and in length and complexity (not to mention perplexity) they would be more fitting partners in a tri-fold sequence with the Prodigal Son.

What cannot be forgotten about the Parable of the Prodigal Son is the fact that this--the younger--son does not really change.  The younger son endures great trauma and feels great emotion--but he leaves the household to obtain what he feels is a more favorable lot, and he returns to his father's household as a second choice.  He goes after much food, he ends up with little food, and he resolves to content himself with the (apparently quite ample) rations of his father's servants.  He goes after drink and (apparently) female companionship, and he has every prospect of such things in at least moderation if he returns (after a calculated rehearsal) to become one of those servants.

If the overarching theology of the analysis of this is pure Calvinism, then in terms of salvation it is mere shadow-play, or at most it is a directive on how the elect might obtain more favor from God in this lifetime.  Of course, Christianity does not really function on such terms, and so we are left with standard analyses to the effect that it is a salvation-drama, one that describes the process of salvation writ large.  Unfortunately, the apparently pivotal declaration that the young man in the pig-pen "came to his senses" or "came to himself" (or however it is translated) does not equate to actual moral sorrow.  The inheritance was his to squander, and he is apparently entirely qualified to be one of his father's hired men once the squandering is over.  The unwarranted idea that the young man's singularly-described "self" has changed must be squeezed out of the narrative.

But that the young man is hit with something in himself that he did not expect, or at least calculate upon?  Now that would fit with something recognizable in human experience, and something that might lead to salvation.  A part of the young man rises up and confronts him.  If this is the story (or the beginning of the story) of his salvation, then it presents in enigmatic narrative form a picture of the unresolvable debate about faith versus works.  Did the young man correct himself, or was correction bestowed upon him?  If we reckon that human beings are bundles of jostling components (or, as in our metaphor, multitudinous internal cohorts requiring diligent management) then the distinction between "correct himself" and "correction bestowed" becomes immaterial--as does the ridiculous notion of faith versus works.

Of course, the theologians cannot countenance such interpretation, and so we are left with the (empty-husked) story that the young man came to repentance and salvation--though if he ever expresses an internalized sorrow (rather than social or familial shame) it is hidden from us.  For all we know, he woke up with a hangover the next day and "came to his senses" and realized he had better start wheedling what he could from his father while the old man yet lived--after all, it's not as though the young man went to the far country, contrived to embezzle an additional fortune from the pig farmer, and then--struck with guilt--donated both fortunes to feed the nameless starving pagan multitudes of that nameless land.  That story--especially when we got to see what his awaiting father thought of it--would be one of salvation.

As it is, we have not cause--in any roughly discernable notion of Christianity--to know that the Prodigal Son was saved, but that does not stop the theologians from assuming that it is a simple tale of how individuals must act eventually before God.  The theologians will, however, entertain the notion that we do not know how the angry older brother responded at the end.  The story, as Christianity relates it, is open-ended at that point--though that just goes to show that Christianity has not been listening.  The older brother claims that he has never failed his in duties to his father, and his father ratifies that contention by saying that the older son will ever be with him and will inherit all.  If the father--taken as a figure of God--says that the older son (so often called "Pharisaical" by the theologians) has never failed in his duties, then the theologians have some explaining to do--though, in light of the fact that the father is definite that his elder son will rightly claim all, we cannot by any reasoned analysis conclude other than that the most likely candidate for the older of the two sons is Jesus.

The Jesus-figure, apparently, is angry.  Jesus was often angry.  That Jesus would feel anger in some part of his human self would be no more than a logical expectation of the out-workings of his human nature.  To have a part of oneself respond reflexively to some stimulus is only human--and yet Christianity would have us be un-human constructions of our own conceit.  By that conceit, we are singular, integrated beings--as though we might have a God's-eye view of ourselves.  By that conceit, we can look at such things as a very humanized parable told by the God-man Jesus and twist it freakishly to suit our arrogant theological leanings.  Everything human about the Parable of the Prodigal Son would warn us that the younger son might be full of as-yet-unconfronted tendencies, and everything human about the Parable of the Prodigal Son would console us that the merciful father figure has rightly entrusted his elder son to do the right thing.

The younger son is responsible for the household of himself, and in that household will arise many and varied tendencies.  The father is responsible for the household of himself and his family and his servants, with all the complexity that will entail. And the elder son is responsible for himself and all the household has--his being entrusted with the care of all, including his challenging younger brother, being the greatest responsibility and the greatest affirmation one might imagine.

Awry Greatly or Less So

The "Aware, Away, Awry" progression is the progression of our response to circumstances.  If religion encompasses all circumstances (for who could imagine it otherwise?), then the foundational premise of religion is simple.  Our understandings are all relational--nothing existing in our conceptions other than in some context--and we are not the authors or originators of the relation-schemes that confront us.  The foundational premise of religion is simple--relational experience.  Only the divine might exist in the absence of relational experience.

So we respond to our circumstances, and our circumstances respond to us.  If a proper relationship to God is what matters, then nothing else matters.  The delineation--in our thought lives--of the elements of our circumstances is identification that is as flawed inevitably as any attempt we might make to sort out the proper relationships among elements that we ourselves have identified and labeled.  We can call ourselves puny and fleeting in the scope and ages of Creation's space and time, yet in the very speaking we are pronouncing ourselves the lords of our thought lives.  Space and time--to say nothing of the visualized Creator we see as making space and time--do not dwarf us in the manner boasted of by us in our false humility, if we have accorded to ourselves the presumption that space and time exist in other than our perceptions.

Things happen to us, but it is not piety to try to sort out the proper relationship among the "things," the "happenings," and the "us"-conceptualizations.  This sorting-out impetus is familiar to us, but it is not piety, even when we exercise ourselves in the attempt to do sortings-out correctly.  All we are doing is sifting through things we think we know--while Jesus is confronting us with the fact that we do not even know ourselves.  As I have described before, we are the unlocatable and indefinable caretakers of the thought-schemes that impress themselves upon us--"caretaking" being the logical default approach to anything that we attribute to God's creation and cannot--godlike--place outside the sphere of our concerns.

And of course we do our sortings-out incorrectly most of the time.  All of the time, actually--when we consider that even this or that "correct" thought or action on our part must be in some respects flawed.  We become "Aware" of things, we move "Away" from them in our very first--flawed and context-seeking--responses to things, and we go invariably "Awry."  In Christianity, this sorry progression plays out in the innumerable, always-flabbergasted-that-everyone-does-not-recognize-the-simple-formula, ultimately indefensible "salvation economies."  Some of the greatest minds of Christendom have expended themselves in such manner, characteristically bemoaning how humanity is baffled by the sublime "foolishness of the Cross," and drawing out great theology-schemes explaining God's lordship shown in his mastery of time and space.  And all the while the time-space-and-whatever arena of God's lordship is nothing but the fancy of the brilliant theologian.  And all the while the truth of God's singularity--his existence outside of context and his sovereign and ineffable possession of the truths of all elements--is a truth as available to the greatest fool as to the greatest genius.

This hunger for--and, as I have written, consumption of--the perceived elements of existence is all-pervasive in humanity.  We devour time and space and all that exists within them--that is, in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, we devour even our savior and Creation-mediator, and our salvation rests on whether or not we will accept this simple truth.  We can have the God who nourishes us--approaching warily the table of his bounty with the washing of our neighbor's feet never as complete as it ought to be--or we can devour in the maws of our conceit all the things he seeks to nourish us with.

We can choose to go greatly awry, or less so--but go awry we will.

Away on Journeys of Conceit

There is one aspect above all that must be related about the "Away" element of "Aware, Away, Awry."  "Away" refers to the person progressing beyond any "Aware" moment of unanticipated and unrehearsed experience.  The person becomes aware of some experience, and moves away from its immediacy, and such distancing can be described in terms of time and space--but it would be folly to imagine that the phenomenon of moving away from some galvanizing stimulus is a "moving away" that can be viewed as in an arena of time and space.  Time and space are not dimensions that--for the purposes of our present understanding--can be understood as templates for the "moving away."  Time and space are consumables, reached for by us as surely as any object of desire, and seized and digested by us surely as any draught or morsel.

We do not need time or space--nor do we need to be bounded by time or space--any more than do the angels.  We simply believe we are so bounded--and then therefore are indeed bounded--because we believe we are so.  If we possessed merely the infinitesimal faith that Jesus describes, we could surely make the peaks hurl themselves into the depths--and we could command the waters of our environment to saturate our bodies in perfect hydration.  "Living water" might be a metaphor used by Jesus, but that does not change the fact that the woman at the well might have availed herself of all the water necessary for her life without visiting the well ever again.

Of course, the moral implication of "Away" as a hazard to our eternal fates is of immeasurably greater importance than the earthly implications of faith.  Even the descriptions--easy enough when looked for--of time and space as optional consumables do not change the fact of our precarious state regarding our relationship with God.  What is important--and what cannot be missed--about consumption with its attendant appetites is how it lurks as a subtext to every understanding we can have of our experiential lives.  The story of the Woman at the Well (especially as it is rendered a standard trope of apologetics) is a perfect example of such subtext, so easily missed.  When the woman asks for the living water, Jesus tells her to return with her husband.  Jesus' directive is not perhaps the most sensitive he might make--he knows full well she has no "husband" to retrieve.  Jesus is launching into a morally-charged exchange.

Jesus at the well is also launching us into a realm in which our capacities of conceptualization are tested.  How often have the moralists said that the "husband" directive is intended to convict the woman of her sinful state--setting up nicely the theologians' offering of this or that salvation remedy.  Of course, any notion of proper sexual relations is tenuous when extended to our conjectures about the mores of first-century Samaria--and we are usually conjecturing as well about that particular woman's past.  She has had five husbands--what of it?  Might she not have been five times widowed?  And if she had five divorces, would it not be stated properly that she had only ever one husband, along with four invalid marriages?  And if she were perhaps past child-bearing (or perhaps even past conjugal relations) would the notion that she was living with a man outside of marriage carry the connotations that the moralists have wanted to attach?

This is the woman who is told she might have living water and never thirst again, if only she would ask for it.  This is the scene in which Jesus tells his disciples that he has food (by implication not regular "food") they know not of.  This is the scene in which Jesus tells his disciples that their notion of waiting for a harvest is a notion that ignores the ever-harvest-time of God's bounty.  The logical implication--would we but allow it to fall unimpeded--of the woman's domestic state is that the woman is acting on a hunger for what a relationship with man might bring her.  Her marital state could be "correct" by all the moralists' criteria, and yet be an unwholesome consumption weighing on the woman's soul.

All of our existence is a scrambling to consume that which we imagine we cannot do without.  Unless we understand that the very foundations of our perceived existences (the like of which I intend by throwing in "time" and "space") are themselves not foundations but rather hungered-for consumables, we will never understand the moral distance between ourselves and our Creator's conceits.  Jesus sends the pairs of disciples out to find the houses in each town in which to light, and the text tells us not how the disciples are to ascertain the true worth of those houses.  Jesus tells the pairs of disciples how to leave the towns--in blessing or in condemnation--but he does not tell them how long to stay.  Little things like time and place seem to mean nothing in the larger equation--though Jesus does tell the disciples that they will not finish their tasks in any event.

And even when the disciples do return from a missionary journey, the greatest exclamation Jesus gives out with is a description of Satan's fall--a description of an event generally understood as having happened in the primordial past, and in a place essentially inconceivable.  Virtually every "time" and "place" in the teachings of Jesus is immaterial.  Elijah is coming, and already has.  When we imagine that time and place are framework elements--rather than consumable particulars--of our existences, then we worship time and place.  We can at best be calling God the master of time and space, after we have in our conceits shaped time and space as minor deities.

God allowed Noah to eat animals, even as Noah was allowed to not eat animals.  God allowed Adam's family to eat of the plants of the earth, even as Adam and Eve and all the other ancestors of the woman at the well (and all of us) might in the merest of faith subsist on no food at all.  God allowed Adam and Eve to eat of all but one of the trees of the Garden, even as they might have done without any food at all.  God allowed Adam to eat, even as Adam truly needed--if Jesus is to be believed--nothing but God.

We experience the surprises, the shocks, and the traumas that impress themselves upon us, and we seek in succession to impress ourselves upon our environments.  We are most ourselves when we are confronted by things we do not comprehend, and every attempt at comprehension of--or confrontation with--that which besets us, no matter how satisfying our response might seem to us, is a moving away from the genuineness of the initial moment.  Comprehension--in the logic of Jesus' teaching--is an outworking of appetite, and every element of existence that we subject to our mechanisms of comprehension is something we ingest or imbibe, something we make a part of ourselves.  The net result is always a "moving away"--a journey of conceit that entails every intimation of hazard we can imagine.

Aware of Instantaneous Fragments

There are three elements of the "Aware, Away, Awry" approach that are understood necessarily to eliminate all of the myriad ideas of "salvation economy."  The "Aware" aspect of our analysis describes the instantaneous fragments of our existence in which we are confronted by phenomena before we can assess (or try to assess) them.

Of course, the phrase "instantaneous fragments" might be picked apart as internally inconsistent--does not "instantaneous" imply "involving no time," thereby implying also no dimension as a "fragment"?  Of course--also--this is silly.  The fact that our imperfect capabilities of perception can admit of no exposure to anything involving "no time" is in itself merely a fact contributing to the prudent assessment of our capabilities overall.  If our inability to assess dimensionality in its infinites--either absolutely small or absolutely great--disqualifies us from discussion of any absolutes, then the "God" of any religious topic is reduced by necessity to merely some effusively-described idol.

Yet we become aware of things suddenly.  We come to understand those things in time (and in the space that is the context of our points of reference.)  Merest prudence tell us that each succeeding step in our analyses is prone to error, and the cumulative effect is most likely to be an increase in error.  To congratulate ourselves for having "worked around" what we imagine is a complete tour of all relevant aspects of a belief system (such as Christianity) is to delude ourselves into thinking that a pure distillation of reason has allowed us to nestle into the comfort of our version of that belief system's premises.  (One need merely taste of the idiotic apologetics for Adam and Eve's expulsion in conservative Christian children's books.)

Next we will look at the "Away" aspect.

Lacking Comfort and Saying It

The progression in thought from "Roused, Readied, Reaped" to "Aware, Away, Awry" is plodding and virtually unstoppable.  In regard to "Roused, Readied, Reaped," our biologically-mediated experiential lives are understandable in terms of arcs or cycles, either returning to familiar ground, or at least putting us through familiar-seeming paces of beginning-middle-end routines.  We can tell ourselves, for example, that we have grasped linear narratives of such wrenching situations as the fall of Adam in Eden or the falling away of the disciples in Gethsemane, yet we grasp nothing of those stories if we do not identify ourselves with the waking, writhing, and withering away of our heroes.  That is the pattern of honestly understandable experiences--not linear narratives.  Adam was thrown into his experiences with the sin-germ eating at him already, and his rise, reign, and fall were pregnant in his essence always.  The disciples were lurched awake and found their minutes-long career of brave defenders of Jesus collapsing even as their master was bound and led away.  So also do we process the experiences of life, much as we would like to pretend that we are erecting edifices of our lives-long progress.  We are as feckless as the disciples when we are falling asleep, and we are as newly-arisen and undefended as Adam when we awake.

And, in equally unstoppable fashion, any attempt we have to honestly process life's experiences--even seen by us as conceptually (if not ideally)--rhythmic, is frustrated by the stubborn fact that the future lies before us.  Our cycles or arcs are seen by us only in our fancied anticipations, or in what chances we might have for retrospective examination.  Really, our arcs of experience bend and flail off into the future as they will--these are the "tendrils" I have described in terms of "Aware, Away, Awry."  We watch our experiences, and our accomplishments (or at least our effects), and our more-or-less identifiable selves, careen off into the future.  This is our lot, as our souls seek to herd the unruly collections of tendencies and of transient self-identifications that comprise the shambling households within our souls' individual compasses--the households for which care we will answer to God.

And so, truly seen, we are indistinct creatures, as changeable in substance as the child is changeable, so that the parents (no matter how blessed--or how proud--they feel in their roles) cannot but look at their adult children as persons who have stolen away their toddler selves from their parents.  Only in this vein can we hope to understand the otherwise mystifying attitude Jesus has toward persons.  When Jesus calls Peter blessed, and then calls him Satan, we cannot escape the conclusion that the one-and-the-same person Jesus is addressing is really two different persons.  All that matters is the person of the moment--the person of that instant in the soul's flight.  The Jews who Jesus would describe as children of Abraham were in the next moment children of the devil--as surely changed in their substance as they were in their attitude.

This, presumably, is why Jesus does not dwell on the notion of the permanent person--human beings are persons of their moments, with their uncharted, beckoning futures.  The moralists will never cease to note that Jesus told The Woman Taken in Adultery, "Go, and sin no more"--as though the woman in her next moments, days, and years could be conceivably tended with other advice.  Jesus heals a man and then tracks him down and tells him to stop sinning, lest something worse befall him.  There is no past for those people, and there is no future except the uncertainty that faces us all--the uncertainty in which we might become different persons to God, amenable or not in any given moment to the beckoning of salvation which knows no moment but the now.

So it is not surprising that Jesus performs the staggering miracle of raising a little girl to life, and then--rather than basking (or allowing the child to bask) in the glory of the miracle--instructs those present merely to give the girl something to eat.  Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead--from the several days' dead--and one would expect a moment of rapturous reunion followed by days (or at least hours) of celebration.  Instead Jesus merely instructs that Lazarus be freed from his funeral wrappings.  Yet this is the Jesus who most famously "wept."  For whom, then, was Jesus weeping?  For the lost (though to Jesus merely "sleeping") Lazarus?  Jesus knew just where Lazarus was, and Jesus knew just what would happen to Lazarus--resurrection.  Jesus also knew, of course, what would happen to Lazarus overall.  Was Jesus weeping because the just Lazarus was to be subject once again to the trials of life on earth?  Can we think that Jesus did not know that evil persons would conspire to send Lazarus to the dead once again?

In this ever-heightening emphasis on care for other people is to be found a great tragedy of our experience.  To ask to care more and more for other people is also to ask to feel their sufferings more deeply, so that the soul of the person who wishes to be empathetic can be overwhelmed rather than buoyed up.  The equation of trying to care is merciless, extracting from the person more and more even as the person seeks to put more and more into it.  For us, of course, this is as nothing compared to how we might (attempt to) understand what Jesus felt.  Jesus attempted to give all, even as he knew we could give him nothing back.  Here we must come face-to-face with the reality of the Crucifixion as a torment.  Jesus could not have failed to know what sufferings people would endure for the glory of his name (or what they might endure thinking it was for the glory of his name.)  But there is precious little of such zeal shown for him in his hour of need.  Those who stayed by his side (or in the shadow of the cross) were those who would have been reckoned of little account by the Romans, and Jesus' main companions abandoned him, and all of the theologians' cant about Nicodemus and about Joseph of Arimathea is no more impressive than those two privileged gentlemen's skulking.

The Jesus who promised that he would not leave his followers without a Comforter was himself denied a comforter.  The beings created in God's image--even those precious few given by the Father into the care of the Son--deserted Jesus in his sufferings.  Jesus near the end cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Jesus did not ask, "Why are you torturing me?"--and in this fact might be found the true scope of Jesus' suffering.  Jesus was left alone in such manner as no mere human being might--that was his torment.  The torment of physical suffering on Jesus is properly to be called "unimaginable," and yet Christianity has had no difficulty imagining torments endured by "the saints" that seems almost to be designed to leave the Master in the shadows.  Much of such recorded saintly acceptance of horrific torture is undoubtedly true, but in part the point seems to blunt itself.  Chief among such examples is the story of Peter, who is held in all the more regard in that he sought to make his voiced inferiority to Jesus a spectacle in his upside-down crucifixion.

And of course the saintly canon of torments endured for Christ has to do with the giving up of life voluntarily--sometimes after tortures as great as those recorded for Jesus, even as it is recorded that Pilate was surprised at the brevity of Jesus' sufferings.  Nonetheless the evangelical radio vibrates endlessly with praise for Jesus having given up his life (usually phrased as giving up his life "for me")--while yet the same airwaves are crowded with praise for mere mortals who have given up their lives "for him."  To read the gospels, however, it seems that Jesus was only too ready to "give up the ghost."  It seems a triumph of blessedness when he exclaims, "It is finished."  And, of course, this is the Jesus who says that he lays down his life, and he takes it up again.  The whole "He gave up his life for me" fascination rings hollow.

Jesus set out to do things in his earthly ministry, and he was really alone but for God, and we cannot imagine the loneliness he felt when his father seemed far from him--just as it is true that trying to have connections with other people only sharpens a person's awareness of the gaps and misalignments, such that the distances seem to outstrip the experience of closeness.  We, however, have Jesus.  The greatest of the "however's", however, is still ahead of us.  The real implication of having Jesus is the conceptualized necessity of having nothing else.  "Having" is an experience, and experiences come and go, and experiences trail off in their anticipation into the future.  Add to this the realization that the actualities of life must fade and wither in the light of divine immanence, and a person is faced with the grinding equation that everything that gives meaning in this life must be seen more and more as futile.

In the teaching of Jesus the counterpart of life being really nothing is the affirmation that we are really nothing.  "We" do not have to hold to contentions that we exist, because we are assailed continually by those alien, rebellious "selves" of which our souls are mere caretakers.  And those selves stretch themselves out against the harshness of the future before we are aware of it--this future having innumerable turns and hazards.  Of course the landscape of the future need in no way reflect the assessments God has of our journeys--our real journey is one of seeking closeness to God, and the landscape of that realm is not discernable.  It is not for nothing that Jesus tells a young man who seeks the truth that he is not far from the kingdom of God, and then follows it up with no further instructions--for it is the desire that is the journey.

As I said above, "having" is an experience, and experiences come and go, and experiences trail off in their anticipation into the future.  The "come and go" is the "Roused, Readied, Reaped," and the "trail off in their anticipation" is the "Aware, Away, Awry."  The journey of salvation is a letting go of the self (which is really a letting go of the mental hoarding of the self) to confront whatever comes next--in a continual endeavor to do that "letting go."  The initial and repeated task of self-abnegation is the "easy yoke," and the winding path of confronted eventualities is the narrow way.  This is in sorry contrast to that twisted-around thing called Christianity, which forces the believer to bear a deadly burden of self-conceptualization, and seeks to make the journey bearable by setting out some program of sacraments or similarly-scheduled recitations that one is saved by one great moment of conversion.  So in this sorry contrast is the believer stacked under the burdens that Jesus saw typified in his day, and so also here is the believer led to believe that one can be led on a broad and easy way to salvation.