Just some bizarre, rambling and (to some) possibly incoherent thoughts as one might expect from me following another ridiculously long - nearly four-month? - sabbatical. Or if you prefer, consider it a further exploration of certain points and themes raised in my last post but one. Anyhow:
As I understand the Scriptures, we humans one and all come from one God, whether we like Him or not, who also made all the other creatures of our common universe, whether we like them or not. (And we humans can be quite finicky about these things). Neither does the story just go on from there, forever and ever - open-endedly, as it were - as if our Point of Origin, did we so choose, might be one to which we will never return, even as we continue to move onwards and upwards, to bigger and better (yet strangely God-free?) things.
Rather, the point is that, just as we've all come from God, so one day we shall all return to Him, whether for mercy or for judgment. Please note, then, that the bounds of this whole cycle - its starting- and end-points - are not just one and the same God, but are both quite involuntary: we did not choose them, and again, we may not even much like them. We may indeed wish we could go much farther - or even infinitely far - to places supposedly unbounded by God. And the whole time doing it pretty much on our own: with our Maker barely a memory, or having left Him once and for all "in the dust," as they say. But we have no choice in the matter.
On the other hand, I've been told, on good authority, that as we become reconciled to what we can in no wise change - when we choose to embrace, with love, That over which we have least power or control - we sometimes encounter a kind of blessedness altogether unique: one containing a core of rapture, indeed, so not of this earth as to be both "boundless," and boundlessly satisfying.
But if that be so, then clearly our human problem lies not with our start or finish - our Alpha and Omega, so to speak - but with what happens, and what we choose, in the meantime. I.e., between our birth and our death. In a nutshell, our common problem is this: In our various highly individual journeys of return to the God who made us, we often run into other gods along the way, many of whom represent themselves as being either the real terminus of our journey, or as some genuine if not indispensable help in getting there. Almost as if the God were using them as tentative-yet-necessary intermediaries, or guideposts, or way-stations of refreshment and renewal, to help and speed us along. And yet we know, quite to the contrary, that His Word is altogether adamant in its warnings against precisely that: against following, not just gods other than the Creator and Redeemer of Genesis and John, but even "an angel from heaven" (if such a thing were possible) come down to preach to us some other gospel of supposed redemption.
Right now, though, I'd like to draw your attention to one very specific and distinct "other god." I would like to pray with all my heart our Maker's protection - for all of us - against one kind of very familiar, most ingratiating, and possibly ubiquitous deity. One so familiar as to be, as often as not, some version of our own "best," or most sacred, or heroic, or productive or progressive Self . Plus - as if all that weren't enough - one who very generously bothers to meet us half-way, as it were. And all for no other reason than to hasten us on down the right Path. As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?
So what is my prayer?
God save us, I pray, from the kind of god who, no matter how well-intentioned and compassionate he may be - and however much real, tangible power he may be able to gain over maybe the better part of the universe - nonetheless did not create it. And so is not really capable of understanding it. At least not in what we might call its real depths: those strange, often hidden deeps of meaning, resonance and longing ("secret as the soul") in which it too both desires, and finds its only satisfaction in, its Maker. God save us, in other words, from that god in relation to whom the Universe itself, just because it is powerful, yet rarely if ever seems benevolent or compassionate, can only be one degree or another of obstacle. Or competitor. Or enemy. Indeed, one suspects that the relation between them - between this god and this universe - can only be one of the most hardened enmity, and that for two reasons. First, because on the one hand, again, this god did not create this world, and so has no hope of really getting inside it - getting to know it "from within itself," so to speak. Yet on the other hand, he clearly is (or at any rate seems to be) the hands-down moral superior of this most cruel, uncompassionate creation.
At the same time, precisely because this same god, no matter how he may love or want to help us, did not create us either - any more than he created the world - neither can he really get inside of us; his life cannot flow through us, because our own life hinders it. We can never be his vessels, or his members, but at best only his partners or his instruments. Or at worst (some would argue) his puppets. Indeed, it may be contended that - even if one assumes him to be completely "outside of" us* - still, he depends no less on us than we on him, and possibly more so. As powerful as he is or is able to become, his power shall always be limited by what he did not create, and so cannot ever really know the heart and soul of. Neither can he ever be secure and without fear in his relation to the universe, in the way that, say, its Maker is; indeed, precisely because he can neither satisfy its desire nor gain its trust, there is but one way he can "overcome" the creation's enmity: it is through power, and ever more power, control, and ever more control.
*Never a safe assumption in any circumstances.
But while this god's power is clearly limited, we humans can, if we wish, extend it. We may have no more hope than he does of understanding this creation - at least not apart from the grace of its God. But we can nonetheless be partners with him in his project of taming and subuing it. Or failing that (and remember this is - at least from one standpoint - a most unruly, wicked creation), we can terrorize, eviscerate and beat it into submission. Much as you would any rudely obstinate and dangerous monster. After all, it may be argued, since when has want of real understanding - of anything - ever really interfered with Man's ability to control it, to utilize it, to turn it to good, sound, productive purpose. Oh, granted it has sometimes. But not, surely, when that purpose is comprehensively, technologically rational, unpoetic, unromantic, unsentimental, and above all, soundly utilitarian? Which is to say, when Rational Utilitarian Man is the One most utterly in control, both of himself and of his surroundings. On the other hand, if even our most rational purposes sometimes turn us to violent methods - due, again, to the obstinacy/unruliness/wickedness of the universe - or seem unduly harsh or cruel even to ourselves and to our neighbor: honestly, what else are we resourceful humans supposed to do? Be oppressed, so as not to oppress? And who is to blame us? or stop us?
The problem, as I see it, with this kind of god is that he cannot stop. He seems to be humble enough, because of his poignant awareness of his own insufficiency, and because he's forever imploring us to go beyond him. In a sense he's a very American sort of god; his first, his foremost, perhaps his only commandment is threefold: "Impress me. Surprise me. Surpass me." The implicit point being that just as he is not enough, but needs us to complete and go beyond and make him redundant, so do we in our turn need other things, that we in a very real sense have made (or at least much more than he can be said to have made us), to complete and go beyond and make us redundant.
Are you with me so far?
But here to me is the most galling thing: The more has-been, obsolescent, redundant we all become - this modish yet all-too-soon-outmoded progression of gods - somehow the less we seem able to subdue, or pacify, or control, or even conciliate (much less be reconciled with) this growingly obstinate universe. Or even just this earth. Which latter no doubt will become the very soul of compliance and cooperation once we mere unenhanced humans - or most of us - have been duly superseded, and its new overlords are free to take our progress-so-far to the legendary "next level."
Now you can make of that likelihood whatever you like. For my part (and to return to my original prayer) I say: God save us from any intermediate, transitioning, ever-so-kindly-tentative god or series of gods. Yes, even when they all boil down to nothing more than our "very best" selves doing their best - or to that "sacred self" in each of us which most longs to please, or be closest to, or even "most like" God. God save us from that zealous deity who, however much he may strive or presume to love both God and man, cannot ever really (which is to say, lovingly) understand us humans: can never know us as me, but only as I; never as passive, or receptive, or contemplative, but only active; never as creation, but only as creating; can never know that inmost wellspring of need and longing, in you and me and every creature, which is all that waters and irrigates, solaces, refreshes and renews even our seemingly most independent creative acts. And just because he cannot know that in any creature which only its Creator knows best - cannot know its peace, but only its fear, defiance, ambition, aggression - so naturally he looks out on all nature, whether human or subhuman, and sees only a war of all against all. Hence, too, his own strange peace, which somehow always seems to resolve itself into one or another degree of violence, suppression, distortion, disfigurement: both of "nature," and of our own nature. Even as this same god proceeds, with the "very best" aims and intentions, to wreak or expedite the sort of havoc - climatic, economic, geopolitical, thermonuclear, what have you - which comes every month, every day* closer to the doorsteps of each one of us.
*Or am I once again grossly overreacting? After all (as I've been told more than once), one singularly brutal and ugly global summer does not a climate-crisis make.
In short, God save us from that god who, as often as not - at least when he's not your and my most bravely self-transgressing, self-transcending Egos in disguise - is really the Devil. Which is to say, that One who, while he's not inaptly termed the god of this world, nonetheless did not create it, and so can never redeem it.
On which note, once again, if I may:
Pray for the peace and sanity of Kyiv. And the return to sanity of Moscow.
But above all,
God deliver, cleanse and and heal America.
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