CAN SUPERNATURAL BE REAL?
Part of the reason I no longer serve a congregation is that even UU’s are not tolerant of all heresies. This is proper, since some heresies are destructive and, anyway, to develop a worthy heresy one must react to a standing and popular doctrine.
Right now I’m not just reacting to Christianity, but also the ideas from embodiment theory that challenge the conviction that scientific rationality is a privileged access to what is reality — if there IS a reality, which some rational scientific realists who study brains question with validity. We can only grasp what we can map out in our brains and some things don’t map. Science and religion are conventionally seen as opposed to each other, but both are faced with the problem of dependence on human minds.
In this piece I want to think about how human the figure of Jesus was, since he had a long history of mythic existence as savior of one sort or another before the idea that he was “fully human” ever developed. The debate over how human Jesus was lasted about four hundred years after his presumed existence 2,000 years ago. At that time the idea of what human meant was entirely different from our ultra-modern idea of a person as a colony of cells in a developmental process-arc from birth to death, like any other creature except for being able to think about ourselves and how we see the world, therefore getting into arguments.
Jesus’ relationships centered on a dozen men with whom he shared a kind of debating society that also ate together. This was a Jewish tradition. It didn’t become “communion” (which chooses food metaphor — bread and wine as flesh — over the arguments) until Jesus forecast his death. He was “first among us” in their view. In addition, he had many individual relationships with others, like Martha and Mary, or the family of Lazarus, or other people identified in stories. He even visited and spoke to people after his death. And he could argue with both God and the Devil. One supposes that these last were the only relationships that were equal.
In the human world he had to be the first, the most powerful, the wisest, the most chosen among a chosen people, because that meant he was — in that society — vulnerable to an excruciating death, a sacrifice for the purpose of demonstrating he could live again, not just make Lazarus live again. He was super-natural.
Sex pertains. How could any human being, male or female, enter a shared and penetrating moment with a supernatural being? If one gives up the idea of fertility, it’s clear that humans can have sex with creatures or even machines. But also penetration is not necessary for orgasm/climax. One needn’t even be awake. Is that what happened to St. Theresa? A night visitation? There are many stories of djinns and demons coming in the night to invade sleepers, secret lovers who disappear when the loved one lights a candle and a drop of hot wax hits the visitor. It is not allowed to know the supernatural visitor.
This sort of epiphany story is unsolvable. It happens in the minds of persons who may be imagining, though committed to the reality of what their brain and gut tells them. So I’ll pick out just one aspect of erotic relationship to think about. What is the nature of reciprocity between two persons when one of them is clearly at least partly supernatural?
A certain group of people work with a theory referred to in shorthand as S/M. S stands for sadism or dominance or sovereign — not always a matter of imposing suffering — and the other stands for masochism or acceptance of domination or compliance — most commonly because of weakness or devotion (which some consider to be weakness.) So from this one can have the fancy and rather fertile idea of Jesus as both sadistic in his superiority and masochistic in his suffering. The point is that he presumably didn’t have to suffer crucifixion — he could have transformed or evaporated. The Gnostics suggested that it was all an illusion, which is an idea that had more strength on the eastern side of Eurasia.
I’ll go farther and pick up the idea that the Old Testament God is based on human relationship to a supernaturally sadistic entity, a ruler without remorse, who nevertheless chooses some people to favor. They claim it is because of their virtue.
Jesus’ New Testament “good news” is that he does not act on his superiority but comes to suffer with all other humans. One theological way of saying this is that when a child dies, God as Jesus suffers with the child, indeed has the child within him as well as being in the child.
Theodicy is the persisting problem of an all-powerful theos who is supposed to be loving but lets evil persist and even dominate in the world. Is he an S or an M? Why doesn’t he just fix it? The suggestion to an atheist is that he doesn’t exist. But if one is accepting vulnerability and persisting in faith/love even when sacrificing life itself, then one is still in relationship, right? Like Job.
But maybe one’s “passion” for God is just unrequited love. Maybe the supernatural is just not that into you. Maybe he’s like Rhett Butler and doesn’t give a damn. The hardest to accept is that he’s just in your head, both the S/OT God and the M/NT Jesus. The indifference of the universe is the hardest thing of all to accept. It doesn’t even care enough about control to rape a human to make a human son. When the universe destroys humans, it doesn’t even notice.
Control of the universe is never more than partial, temporary and conditional, but maybe that’s true of relationships with other humans as well. Some of us seem oblivious to other people while we’ve just seen others (S) pursue with relish the destruction of whole categories of people. This is not indifference but a passionate hatred determined to eliminate them as felt too much, too hated to exist, too scary to the destroyer (M).
If humans are an embodied map of their trajectory through time/space and if — as is recommended by a Bible passage — the purpose of our creation is exactly that map and our “enjoyment” of it — which I would change to “attachment” to it — and others would say was “love” — then even an imagined relationship might have sensory dimensions, perhaps as arousing as whatever was felt by Saint Theresa. This would be worth devotion. And the stories.
