Eyre Lines

In a group on Thursday, we looked at the parable of the Prodigal Son. Now, I’d sat through the sermon on this twice on Sunday (I was sticking around to sell Alpha launch tickets) and I’ve heard sermons on it at least twice this year previously, so when the group leader turned to me and asked “What new inspiration do you get from this, Chris?” my first response was to say that my new inspirations were all played out for this year, please ask me again in twelve months or so.

However, what I did was blurt out an actual new thought which had come to me. The Prodigal is one of the parables where it’s a natural thing to look at it from the point of view of each of the characters, father and two sons. I like looking at stories from the point of view of the different characters, and in some cases it can throw up a really interesting line of thought. What had come to me was “What about the viewpoint of the fatted calf?”

There was hilarity. There was dumfounded silence. There was “Oh well, it’s Chris, trust him…”

However, there’s much more to that with me than just a joke. I posted recently about some aspects of the “zap” experience and the new viewpoint this gave, how the boundaries of “self” dissolved and everything was in some way “me” (and even more to everything was God). I found in the weeks and months following the experience that I was having difficulty maintaining a view of animals as being different, unconnected, something other, something not to be concerned about. Hey, I’m English, and that came really naturally to me anyhow – we’re inclined to value our neighbours pets more than we do our neighbour, after all. I now had, however, a really good reason for taking this bond, this sameness and in a way this identity really seriously.

Obviously there is a difference. I cannot see the fatted calf, for instance, dwelling on the transitory nature of all things and finding comfort in something like “The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45) or the hope of heaven or resurrection. I can envisage something more like “Good grub, good grub, good grub, terror, pain, end” being about the sum of the calf’s reactions. But even if you don’t share my disindividuated viewpoint, the fatted calf is also one of God’s creatures, and an omnipresent God is present in the calf just as he/she/it is in you or me.

I went through a fairly extreme period of soul searching at that point. Should I be eating meat, and therefore complicit in the pain and killing of one of God’s creatures? I learned a little of Jainism around this time, and some very observant Jains go so far as sweeping the path in front of them lest they inadvertently step on an insect and kill it. Even an insect is, after all, one of God’s creatures as well.

This is already at the point where living in the real world becomes just about impossible, but I’m fond of “reductio ad absurdum” and kept up the thinking. What about bacteria? They’re also living creatures, and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t had courses of antibiotics at one point of another, or if I didn’t kill off a few bugs before I started preparing food. I supposed I could lean on sentience as the governing factor, but it seemed to me that this was a continuum and that I’d eventually have to draw an arbitrary line without any justification other than practicality. Then there were vegetables, also living… and eventually there were rocks. In which God was also manifest.

I eventually arrived at the idea that, in order to exist, I must perforce do things which were (from the point of view of some part of existence) evil. A new conception of “original sin” perhaps, which didn’t need to get as far as Genesis 2 and 3. Countless decisions I make rest on thinking of myself as separate rather than as part, and this in and of itself is “separation from God”, which is one definition of sin. The end of self is the end of sin.

But then, I thought, there is the idea of the world and everything in it as God’s creation, and God rather consistently saying that it was good in Genesis 1. Indeed, that is something which was also forcefully imprinted on me in the initial “zap”. And so somehow, the fact of my being here, forced to sin against God’s creation (which I see as God’s very self) in order to exist, is also, somehow, good. It is, it would seem, good that I exist, just as it is good that everything else exists – and were I the fatted calf, that would be enough. Most of the fatted calf’s story is, after all “good grub”, and the terror, pain and end is a mere speck in its lifetime.

I am aided in being able to take the view of the whole rather than the part rather easily, and from the view of the whole, the existence or non-existence of a part, the pain or joy of a part is of relatively small import, being in any event fleeting in terms of the atemporality of God. Ups and downs are two sides of a coin, you cannot have just “up”; without pain, there is no goodness in lack of pain, without death there is no goodness in life, in existence.

This is, therefore, as it should be (it is “good”), but could it be better, could it be perfect? If it could be perfect, would not an omnipotent God make it so? Now, I am not a fan of omnipotence as a divine characteristic, and Charles Hartshorne has usefully written in “Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes” a philosophical argument indicating that it cannot actually be so. John Caputo, in “The Weakness of God” has written a fine rethinking of Christianity in terms of God as an essentially weak force. However, I don’t think I need to go as far as that; the easiest critique of omnipotence is to ask if God can make something which he cannot move (or destroy, or take some other action against), and this exposes the fact that omnipotence cannot really be “omni”; there always have to be boundaries. At the most, we could say that God could do anything which it was possible to do; is it therefore the case that in creating (which I am obliged to see, due to my “all things are God, all things are within God” experience, as a creation out of God’s own substance), God has limited the scope of what he is able to do, whether by actual limitation or limitation of will?

I end up seeing the creation as the original act of kenosis, of self-emptying, thinking of the words of Phil. 2:6-7 “⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,being born in the likeness of men.” (ESV from Bible Gateway); thus the kenosis attributed to Jesus is a symbol of the greater kenosis of God. In that act of pouring himself out into existence, which I interpret as God becoming creation (thus, perhaps, “Original Incarnation”), God has thus potentially created the best existence which could then be created, given the individuality, the separateness of its constituent elements (that is not to say that this existence is the best existence there could ever be in the future, though; the elements within creation develop and evolve, and I do not think that is a zero-sum game even had Jesus not pointed to the Kingdom of God on earth as a present and growing actuality).

Returning to the fatted calf, it does not, as far as we know, have the capacity to do much more than “live in the moment”; it will not be asking questions like those I am asking. The mental apparatus to weigh courses of action and decide which is good and which is evil are, with the fatted calf, instinctual, not subject to conscious control.

I therefore arrive at the story of Genesis 2-3 and the “Fall”; I don’t see this as an actual Fall, that having taken place at the point of creation and being only a descent (or ascent) from unity into individuality. It does, however, involve the eating of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, specifically knowledge of good and evil.