The Mystical Ladder, for Husbands

Note: this is secret mystical knowledge, for men alone.  Let the deacons now show the women out and let the doors be shut.

Stage 1, the New Convert: If  I talk to her about it, I can understand why she is crying and help her understand why she doesn’t need to cry.

Stage 2, the Cloud of Unknowing:  It is not possible to understand why she is crying.  I just have to go hide.

Stage 3, the Apophatic Union: She does not actually understand why she is crying, she is not interested in understanding it, and therefore I do not need to understand it.  One slight movement toward her, in almost any area of her life, will evaporate the tears.  It was easier than I ever imagined.

the Everyman sentiment

“He’s Everyman.”  “She’s Everywoman.”  We hear this comment about politicians, and it is supposed to be a compliment.  We have the sense they are “like us” in some way, so they can understand us.   And this is construed to be good.

But it actually can mean opposite things, depending on who is speaking, and it usually is just a cipher for “he is going to give me money.”

If this candidate is Like Me in that they want to “keep government off my back”, that would have certain policy implications.   “He has run a small business, he understands what a burden taxation is.”   But if this candidate is Like Me because he knows what it is like to have to “try and make ends meet”, that can have opposite policy implications.   The first Everyman might take less of “my” money; the second might send me more money.   These two policy paths are eternally at war with each other.   So much for politics; language is simply one weapon of many for collecting the guns and therefore the money.  (see Orwell, George.)

***********************************************************************************************

I guess I’m a weird consumer of fiction, in that I don’t muster much interest in characters who are “just like me”.   I actually live with me 24/7, so the last thing I want to see on the page or the screen is…me.   I’d actually like to see characters who are better than me.   Weird.    Give me a screen depiction of Michaelangelo and that is an interesting 2 hours;   I haven’t slightest idea why I would want to watch myself paint for 2 hours.  I’ve seen it already.

The writer of Hebrews tells us Jesus was tempted in all things so He could be a good priest, able to sympathize with His people.  So Jesus is Everyman is one sense then, but — imagine what attraction the Gospels would hold if the main character were Just Like You.   They would immediately never be picked up again.  The very reason the Gospels have grasped Western civilization by the neck and won’t let go is because here, finally, we have a character who is not Like Us.

Did we ever really lack for figures who would sympathize?   Is that the part of His portrait that captures us, that we finally have somebody who will pat us on the head no matter what?   I’m afraid of the answer, actually.   But I don’t think the main thrust of the Gospels is intended to be the sympathy we needed more of.

So Jesus is like us enough that He hasn’t lost touch with us, but all the charm is in His difference.

Watercolor: Casey the Labrador Retriever

Watercolor: Casey the Labrador Retriever

Casey was our practice child, before our son came along.    She was with us for a little over 10 years and her death was quite a loss.  It’s watercolor and colored pencil, from a photograph.    Some glare upper right from the glass.

Watercolor: bird nest

Watercolor: bird nest

I just finished this one…some muddy parts, but overall I’m getting better, which is all we can hope for.

“conscience” in Hebrews 9.14

When we hear the phrase “purified conscience” our Western reflex is to think of sin, or guilt.  Sin, if we have a Judeo-Christian background, or just guilt if our reference is more generically secular.    Religious or not, our experience is that something bad gets “on” the conscience, and must be removed.

Not so, here.   That which is being removed is “dead works” — those formerly positive sacrificial obligations of the Law, which have now been rendered superfluous by Jesus’ sacrificial blood.

So the conscience, here, is not a ledger that registers bad marks which must be removed, but is a table of positive obligations which must be…removed.

Now You Don’t, Now You See It

It is hard to say anything about creation ex-nihilo, except that we observe it. One instant nothing exists; the next, it does. There is little reason to either assert or deny such models as “the Big Bang”, though evangelical Christians get all worked up over them. The Big Bang is simply a backward extrapolation of observed physics, and why should that be objectionable? What are physicists supposed to do, stop the model at T minus 6,000 years and insert the Creator?

“Ex nihilo” doesn’t mean nothing existed before the creation existed; the Creator is eternal.  Similarly, every human choice is ex nihilo.  The personal organ of volition exists before the choice, but to analyze the choice itself  — in the sense of the meaning of analyze as “break down into parts” — this is not possible.   Such an analysis  is one of the moments of logical tail-chasing in human thought.    You think you find something interesting,  but then you discover it is…your own tail.

There is an element of the pre-existent in every decision, but there is a new element in it as well, or it would not exist at all.  The precursor elements can be analyzed but they are not interesting.   That state of being which exists as the result of any human decision is precisely what is interesting, and happens to be precisely what is,  formally and literally, out of nothing.

So all the parts of human choices that are interesting we call ” freedom of the will”,  and the parts that are not we call “bondage of the will”.   (Insert centuries and tomes of vitriolic debate here, none of which means a damn.)

So the question of “ex-nihilo” is really the question of free will.  Human action looks exactly like divine creation ex-nihilo.   We can observe it, but the response called for is an act of the synthetic organ, rather than the analytical organ.   Our  response is a wholistic response — one gestalt leaping into being in front of another.   Not “let’s break this down into constituent parts so we can understand it better” but “how shall we act in response to this act? “