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4.7 The beginning in the middle
In this session the focus is on some narrative ways in which the New Testament brings out how we are being involved by the God as valued insiders in adventure of Creation.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
God isn’t finished with me yet!
Discuss the popular one-liner that is sometimes used to excuse mistakes: God isn’t finished with me yet!
- What would it mean to “be finished”?
- What does this quip reveal about our attitudes towards our failures and imperfections?
- Is God’s attitude towards our failures and imperfections different than our own? If so, in what way?
Food for thought
- James says that in Luke’s account of the Passion, we see Jesus, the definitive Adam, getting right what the first Adam got wrong. What was it that Adam got wrong? What is Jesus getting right?
- The Gospel accounts reveal that the Creator Spirit is the same as the one who occupies the space of being a dead person for us out of love.
- What new pattern of desire does the Creator make possible for you by occupying that space?
- How does it feel to discover that the Creator loves you that much?
- What new pattern of desire does the Creator make possible for you by occupying that space?
- In Romans 8:19, we read about ourselves: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” It seems that Creation has been “groaning in travail” waiting for us, the sons and daughters of God!
- How does it feel to discover that you are a valued insider of the life of God?
- How does it feel to discover that everyone, even those whom you thought of as outsiders, are on the inside with you?
- How does it feel to discover that you are a valued insider of the life of God?
Wrap-up question
In what ways might God still be active in Creation? How might God be involving you in the ongoing work of Creation?
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In the last Unit, “A Little Family Upheaval,” James introduced the concept of “secondariness.” Our lives rest in and are dependent upon God who is always infinitely loving and forgiving.
Arthur Koestler, in his 1967 book ‘The Ghost in the Machine,’ coined the word: holon, which I think is related to James’s notion of “secondariness.” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)> I’ve written before in this forum about holons, which are entities that can only exist within larger, enveloping structures. Also, each holon is made up of smaller, dependent holons.
How do I connect ‘secondariness’ with ‘holonic’? God is the Creator. We are secondary. God holds us in existence within God’s creation of holonic structures that are designed to mirror God’s infinite love and forgiveness. We cloud these structures of God’s love, however, when we look to the social other, rather than the Other other, for affirmation and direction.
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Yes I remember your reference to ‘holons’ quite some time ago. James defines ‘secondariness’ as ” a moment of someone else’s presence towards me which opens up for me my own relationship, simultaneously, to my past and my future. When trudging along by myself, my past is behind me and my future is before me. But undergoing something in the present at the hands of someone who is much stronger than myself, I discover that who I thought I was and who I think I am becoming are both altered by the quality of that presence.” I don’t think is means ‘secondary’ in the usual sense, but as you said, that ‘our lives rest in and are dependent upon God who is infinitely loving and forgiving’.
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“God isn’t finished with me yet!” This phrase implies that God and I are separate and that God has some goal or end-state in mind for me. “… isn’t finished with me” suggests “failures and imperfections,” so also there must be successes and perfection. Apparently, both God and I are working on me. What separates us? I can fail, or succeed. What is my proper role? and God’s role?
In the Introduction to Essay Eleven James writes “… everything that is, is shot through with what I might call ‘secondariness’.” James goes on to say “This “secondariness” is not a form of diminishment, or being put down, but an accurate and objective sense of createdness, something which can in fact be relaxed into with gratitude.”
Rather than a mindset of “God is not finished with me yet.” I like to think of ‘relaxing into acceptance of secondariness.’ God is primary. Humanity is secondary. Gratitude is the key to relaxing into a relationship with God from our secondariness. And yet, what is gratitude? In a recorded lecture I once heard, Brother David Stendl-Rast http://bit.ly/2kQU4bb said that gratitude is ‘thankfulness in advance.’ Relaxing into acceptance of secondariness means being thankful in advance for new, fulfilling relationship with God and therefore our neighbor.
Relaxing is an iterative process. That is, we don’t move from the tight muscles of defensiveness to a willing acceptance of God’s gifts in one leap. No, gradually, over time, we drop our defenses, and in so doing we relax. Slowly we awaken to the beauty of the Lord in our surroundings, to our secondariness, thankful for God’s unceasing gifts to which we previously had been blind.
Rather than “God is not finished with me” a grateful, secondary life observes its surroundings and orients itself to God’s reconciling love. As we relax, we accept God’s love. Then as naturally as the falling rain, God’s love flows through us quickening the love of neighbor. An alternative to the phrase “God is not finished with me yet” could well be: Where now am I most loving toward my neighbor?
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“James says that in Luke’s account of the Passion, we see Jesus, the definitive Adam, getting right what the first Adam got wrong. What was it that Adam got wrong? What is Jesus getting right? How does it feel to discover that the Creator loves you that much?”
The Discussion questions for this lesson made sense but also engendered feelings of cognitive dissonance. I think it’s their seemingly great distance from my psychological and social world that bothers me. In my background, the Adam and Eve narrative has no direct or behavioral connection with Jesus. Maybe there’s a conceptual connection through the forgiveness of original sin. But a direct storyline connection, Jesus’s actions ‘literally’ reversing the consequences of Adam’s actions, no.
I see the Adam and Eve narrative as a model that’s useful for understanding humanity’s attempts to control conflict and to explain humanity’s consequent alienation from God. But, did the Gospel writers, knowing a relationship between Jesus and Adam as James explains it, craft their narratives with the Genesis model in mind rather than sticking to the ‘facts on the ground’? The Gospel writers crafted a narrative combining myth and reality, which I’ve known in theory, but until now haven’t thought about integrating into how I live my life.
This acceptance is both disturbing and liberating. The insight does not engender feelings of being loved, no, the moment of ‘liberation’ feels confusing. Abstract ideas, like Jesus reversing Adam’s sin, require time to percolate through my psyche before I can feel emotionally connected to them. I need time before I can live into new actions that I base upon my new understandings.
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Rich, this is about patterns of desire. Girard saw something unique: the story of Adam and Eve makes clear that the desire for the forbidden fruit that both of the garden dwellers experience is not an innate desire. Adam and Eve had just been reveling in each other. The man had just looked at the first woman and said “this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” and celebrated her. And then something shifts. The serpent comes on the scene and draws the attention of the woman to something else.
Eve gets her desire from the serpent. He’s the one that first shows the desire for the fruit. He asks her a question which is not factually true, and she corrects him. But even though she was able to mentally engage and not fall into his little trap, she still was changed by him.
Because she saw in the snake the desire for the fruit. Suddenly, she looks at it a different way, “When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it.”
It doesn’t stop there.The man sees the desire of the woman,and the next thing you know he’s eating it.
This insight is the foundational insight of Girard’s work: So this is how Jesus is the new Adam who “got it right”. He has given us a new pattern of desire. Does this make sense?
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In what ways might God still be active in Creation? How might God involve you in the ongoing work of Creation?
While I don’t know exactly how God might “… still be active in Creation,” I am free to “taste and see” bit.ly/taste_see God’s Creation knowing that Jesus said I am so much a part of God’s Creation that even the (diminishing number of) “… hairs on [my] head are all counted,” bit.ly/hairs_head
According to the news, just yesterday. Scientists found 3.77 billion-year-old fossils containing evidence of life on the earth. Fossil evidence gives us a sense of the distances between moments in geological time and those in our mundane, diurnal lives. And yet, God’s presence compasses both the geological and the ordinary. God’s ongoing work of Creation comprehends all past, present and future moments. Past moments, embedded in the deathless present, inform future creation within the eternal cycle of growth and decay. https://goo.gl/VZXb0A
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Well, Rich, In Romans 8:19, we read about ourselves: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” It seems that Creation has been “groaning in travail” waiting for us, the sons of daughters of God! I think that this is an ongoing process, Hildegard of Bingen the 12th Century Abbess who wrote so wonderfully about creation, echoes these words in Romans. She says that creation is constantly giving birth, which to us means that every generation learns another pattern of desire. Jesus is standing in for Adam, the human pattern of desire, or will, which is being drawn once more to the Father’s pattern of desire. (Genesis 3:19 and Luke 22:42, 44)
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