(This is a continuation of the previous piece, “Holy Saturday 2020 Thoughts”)

     Last Saturday, on the Holy Saturday of the Western Church, I undermined common notions of Christian absolutes. I pointed out the fissure that exists in the religious psyche, namely that a reductive mindset is inherent with bad character, the main consequence of this being that the common understanding of objective reality is problematic. I started out with describing what the poet does, and I ended with questions of the blackness Jesus entered upon his death. Today, on Eastern Orthodox Easter, I will return to the notion of the poet’s task in conclusion.

     Last week, I said: As a poet, I understand that the goal of writing is to tinker with viewpoints, to present things in a particular way. As knowing subjects, we all experience reality more or less differently. I hold that this holds the secret to understanding a Christian hermeneutic of rational renewal. It may come across as a postmodern claim, suggesting relativism, danger, and chaos—oh my! It does not need to be this way. What I showed on Western Holy Saturday is that the absolutist interpretation of Christ is consistent with destructive behavior. The idea that John 14:6—“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me—” is a command for being OCD about Jesus, or holding to beliefs that operate under an OCD reductivism, is actually quite problematic. The problem is not so much in Jesus’ teaching or in our interpretation of his words but in us. Our understanding of Christ as necessary for salvation and as the image of God can be framed in a “fallen way.” It is true that compulsive conduct under the guise of religious virtue killed Jesus, and therefore any theology of Christ that exhibits that compulsive pattern is likewise antagonistic toward Jesus. It is difficult to tease through the weeds here. Many have been burned at the stake for trying to understand it. Why is it that Christians feel the need to attack people for thinking something in a particular way? Even if they’re wrong, why, Christian, do you feel compelled to fight not just their thought but their person? Why is this? Did Christ himself show any feelings of compulsion to fight the pagans? Do you think he was bottling it up inside himself? Who did he show anger toward?

     Christ is an affirmation of the human person, and this includes our understanding of the world. A good kindergarten teacher will nurture their students’ understanding, even though they know how vastly incorrect the students are going to be. A good teacher treasures the little perspective of the child, their little drawings, their inspiration. It is not even an outward compassion, a false demonstration of kindness: a good teacher really loves and delights in the students’ minds. The teacher is not panicking or focusing on getting the students to understand the truths of physics or mathematics. The teacher wants to nurture the student wherever they are, so that they can grow closer and closer to the world outside themselves, knowing that there may never be an end to this process. Kindergarten is also largely about art and friendship, rather than correctness. Where did the idea come from that God is angry at the heretics for thinking differently? Is this combativeness from God or man?

     The poet constructs visions, and the diversity of visions a poet constructs do not by their existing abolish the reality of an objective world. If they did, reality would have to exist ultimately in our vision rather than outside of it. That’s absurd. Even though we cannot experience the world except through our minds, the world does not reduce to being something ultimately internal. This belief is produced through compulsive fear, not wise conduct, and should therefore not be taken as definitive, even though it has many good features. If we want to believe in love and a God of parental compassion, then we must recognize that the freedom in artistic subjectivity is not a threat to truth. For truth does not reduce to ideas but to the real things themselves. After all, the scriptures say that the Lord is our righteousness, that he became sin for us and we became his righteousness. Such a statement is not a mere exhibition of righteous properties or the imputation of properties. It is a statement about actual essences. Christ is our righteousness. Christ is our life. The truest thing we can know is not truth about God. The truest thing we can know is not the person of Christ. The truest thing we can know is the Spirit as our knowledge itself. The Spirit acts as irreducible knowledge between our representation and the things-in-themselves. We know the truth not insofar as our representation maps accurately onto reality, but whether or not our representation is derived through a process of loving openness. Our love, which is somehow entirely foreign and entirely our own, is the categorical enabler of truth. For if we are to have epistemic humility, we must acknowledge we will probably never know the bottom of anything, and even if we do, there will be an endless number of ways of approaching that understanding. What differentiates truth from falsity is not one’s momentary validity, but their invisible, indescribable, private qualitative approach to the real world.

     When Jesus died on that oft-mentioned Friday, the gospel writers wrote that the veil of the third Jewish temple, which separated the antechamber from the holy of holies where the ark of the covenant was stored, was torn in half from top to bottom. A quick ignition of the search engine surprised me: there doesn’t seem to be any extrabiblical evidence of this occurring. Now there is actually a decent amount of extrabiblical evidence that supports many biblical narratives. But for this event to not be recorded, during a time of Roman occupation and lots of renewed Jewish intellectual activity, is definitively fishy. Humans are scoundrels, and it seems equally likely that opponents of Christianity would cover up records of miracles as it is that Christians would piously fudge stories to pat themselves on the back. As a creative writer, I’ve been one to take all four extremes at different times: I’ve rationalized away the miraculous, and I’ve inflated facts with glory; I’ve been frank about miracles, and I’ve sanctified them. What strikes me as being true is not so much [whether or not I’m being analytical vs. spiritual about some circumstance], but [how well my understanding circumstantially translates between raw evidence and inferred themes]. A good thing like love might sound dead when spoken about as a series of chemical processes. Love can also sound false when spoken about as being a sort of metaphysical transfiguration of this physical caterpillar into a divine butterfly. Yet each approach brings something really vital to the table. A true understanding of love should appreciate both paths as complementary paths. So for me, to hear there is no evidence of the veil being torn other than the report of holy scriptures is not really all that bothersome. The truth of the matter is not reducible to what the dogmatic perspective would recommend, which is that the spiritual reality must be a hard fact as well. After all, Christ was the Son of Man and the Son of God—he did not exist in a merely objective or spiritual world but both, and consequently it is true to say the veil of the temple was torn whether or not it was actually torn. This is not to deny the miraculous in entirety; it is not a statement about fighting over facts. It is to recognize a truth about Christ and the world. When Jesus died, what happened was that the veil of the temple was torn. If it was a fact, great. If it wasn’t a fact, that’s fine. Christ is the archetypal story of man in the cosmos, and his reality is bigger than facts. Neither is this to advocate against evidence-based approach, which is a very dangerous and foolish thing to do. This is to affirm that we infer themes from evidence and ascribe them as being real. The general patterns about morality and the human experience lead many (or perhaps all, implicitly) to the idea of an archetypal man representing God in the cosmos who is born, serves, suffers, resurrects, ascends, returns. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection have more to do with what everything means in a holistic sense rather than a [scientific vs. spiritual] sense. His reality embraces both scientific and spiritual ideas, for it was the dualism between physicalism and spiritualism that killed him. Whatever truth we can derive from the Christian narrative must be fundamentally weirder than either of these paradigms or anywhere along a spectrum between them, because the narrative of Christ’s death recommends against a hermeneutic along that spectrum.

     The gospel writers also say the sky was darkened for several hours around noon during Christ’s crucifixion, as if a solar eclipse was happening. Makes sense to me. Some Christians have done research into astronomy and have found there was a solar eclipse in April of 30ish AD, and they’ve narrowed it down to a few weekends. It seems plausible there was a solar eclipse during Christ’s crucifixion. If there wasn’t an eclipse exactly when he was dying, that’s okay. The proximity of the eclipse to his death makes it feel parallel. The essence of anything is spread out across multiple places and times, and that’s perfectly okay. In fact, we spend most of our lives understanding things in this way. No one would define themselves as being reducible to who they are right now, for instance. We are an aggregate of many states. The four rivers of Eden are spatial disconnected from one another, but related in that they all feed early river valley civilizations. When we remember things, we remember them in little networks of associated events and patterns. Assertions of reality are meant to be used fluidly and in line with the form of memory, so that through our nonlinear psychological nature we can gradually work toward concrete understanding, not so that we can combat with others about details as if we ourselves were reducible to an inventory of sequentially itemized ideas. It doesn’t do Jesus injustice to relate the veil, the eclipse, and the crucifixion as being one simultaneous event, even if their classical Newtonian reality wasn’t shared, because they encapsulated something meaningful and true about the meaning of the raw evidence. They all spoke the truth of what Jesus was. It is as if the evidence is yawning open into inferences, and that Christ is a sort of exceptional example of evidence speaking for itself: we can hardly understand Christ apart from human interpretation, because he himself and his entire story is about the human narrative; and yet, his life-arc transports our minds into the depths of the human psyche and launches it out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, away from a anthropocentric dogmatism. He, by being an anthropocentric model of the universe, leads anthropocentrism to its most basic elements and thereby opens the mind to a world outside itself. He is the cosmic anthropic axis. Thence he redirects the mind from a reductive human reality into a human reality of otherness.

     The poet and the artist knows this already. The human interpretation and perception are true because we are naturally human, and we have no other reality, though by knowing this we come to know the outside world better. Our integrated visions of the world and the self lead us out into a broader world, but we know it by an irreducible experience rather than by this or that idea. We can thus know the world in many ways, even though it is not knowable in itself. In that multiplicity, the poet finds better and worse ways to craft something to be a vessel for the vision. The poet can create a meaning and a form to convey something quite intentionally, or the poet can relax from consistency and run about through the Dionysianly wild flux of thoughts. But the convention for what determines truth or not is not the style of description or the pattern described, but the openness to what is really objective and to what is really subjective. Through evaluating the vision’s effectiveness at producing wholeness in the world we determine whether or not the bridge is well-built, and thus cut through truth and error, reality and illusion.

     The fact that Christ’s water sprung from Israeli aquifers does not mean that the water flowing down the Ganges from the Himalayas is not also water. Christ said, “I am the water of life,” but the only water the Jews knew was Israeli water. Their particular water is particular to their world, what they knew. This does not make their water the less water—it is not a rejection of objectivity by relativism—this actually reinforces that their water is objectively true and valid. Jesus is the water of life. What is so especially lovely about Christianity, in my eyes, is that it is true on multiple levels. Christ’s assertion of his identity with God is true and consistent with moral conduct and scriptural interpretation from both orthodox and liberal perspectives. Christ is for Jew and Barbarian, there is no partiality. If Christ’s universality only extends to demographics, Christ is a small god, at risk of being killed by human ideas. But if Christ is capable of transcending even the law’s curse of death, he is not threatened by human understanding. After all, he it is that would not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering flax. Perhaps we Christians should consider his personhood as a stronger token of his authority than his affirmation of our liturgical Amen’s. We are fickle and frightened creatures; if we let go of our attachment to our form as Christians, with what are we left? Yet it is to this that Christ draws all people: the separation of life from the body. To avoid the disintegration of our faith, our Christianity, our implicit understanding of everything, is to circumnavigate the crucifixion and forestall any hope of resurrection. We Christians must go where Christ has gone, and by his example we can have hope we will be given a new body, a new form, that is like and unlike our old body. But to find that newness, we must in the course of life die to an old, compulsive self. And if we find it, how great will be our joy, how vast our hope, how bottomless our kindness!


April 19, 2020
San Luis Obispo