The kingdom of Edge

Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.

                             Pirsig

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of god would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘there it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.  

                                                                                                Luke 17:20-21

Bear with me as I delve into the religious again…

I’m well aware of the Greek influence on Christianity.  Not just the subject/object chasm of God as Other, but also the whole set up of heaven and hell (and purgatory?), and a hell within hell, demi-gods and all that.  Yet, I still struggle to understand how Christians maintain it all when the Bible is available to all of us.  You can sort of excuse an illiterate populace or one that has to hear the scriptures through the intervening priests, but we are this side of the reformation, damn it!  Can we avoid calling what and how we have been taught to believe as brainwashing?  Ok, so I’m feeling a bit pissy right now, but what is all this business of harps and clouds and pearly gates and streets of gold and God’s wrath needing to be satisfied to get your ticket in and thrones and crowns and what not?  Oh yeah, that insane dream by John…

Well, what about looking at the Gospels that wrote accounts of Jesus?

The kingdom of God/heaven is…

Like seeds growing into plants.  Like an illuminating lamp.  Like yeast.  Like a treasure you give everything else up for.  Like fishermen sorting out good and bad fish.  Like a king forgiving debts of his servant only to have the servant not forgive those who owe him money.  It’s something to be received or taken away if you don’t produce fruit.  Like a vineyard where people get paid the same amount no matter how long they’ve worked.  Like a king who invites the poor people off the street because the upper-class don’t care to show up.  Like virgins who fall asleep or stay awake while waiting for a wedding party.  Like servants who use their masters money to make more money and are rewarded and the servant who was too frightened to do anything with his money is punished.  Where the first are last and the last first.  

Just try and put that in a box.  Clearly these passages can be interpreted in many ways, but to make the kingdom of God a place, and a place that you have to say the sinner’s prayer in order to get in?  Really?!?  Okay, done complaining—hopefully.  

My first knee-jerk response to re-reading these parables, is that these are a rabbi’s form of Oriental koans.  A koan being what a zen master might ask a student to get him thinking.  I think it is usually in the form a question and there is no real good answer, but it gets the mind to leap out of its normal structures or paradigms in order to become more aware.  Nothing new, but it gets me thinking about edges again.  And that’s the common theme here, it seems.   Several seed parables where death has to come in order to bring life.  Lamps and light are all about the edge with dark.  Yeast, an inner edge, a supersaturation.  Giving everything up for a treasure speaks for its own edge.  The edge between what is Good and what is not Good.  The edge of forgiveness seems to me like dancing on the edge with precipices on each side.  On one side you have the abyss of your own hard heart and the other abyss is void of justice or accountability or even courage.  Yet Jesus demands his followers to dance on that edge called forgiveness.  I could go on, but you either see it or you don’t, I’m not sure explaining it helps.

So my kids, who have had fellow classmates tell them they are going to hell for different sorts of reasons that deal with church attendance and sinners prayers and all that magical stuff…, ask me about life after death.  So I tell them about my near-death experience where I felt outside my body looking down.  And that pretty much people from all cultures have such tales and lights at the end of the tunnels.  So I say that it sure seems like something of us goes on.  I usually leave it at that because I don’t think they would get much out of my speculations.  But here are some thoughts.  I do believe that your being can have more “mass” so to speak.  Like the concept C. S. Lewis plays with in his The Great Divorce.  To put it in biblical terms, it would be what is left after the refining fire.  I think trying to live on the edge of reality uses a certain “muscle”, or faculty within us, and that ‘muscle’ grows with practice.  Thus relating to others in a way that sees and interacts with the part of them that is behind the veil, whether it is with forgiveness, or laughter, or a serious confrontation concerning a detrimental pattern that needs to be broken.  Or maybe it’s simply holding them while they cry.  Or exploring grand metaphysical musings.  Or looking at them in the eyes.  Telling stories.  Making love.  In fact, making anything beautiful.  All this “grows” your being.  All this has a chance to be part of that which will last, which will make it through the fire.  Every now and then, the tensions hold and you are riding that wave, maybe even gracefully, and you’re connecting with someone, deeply.  You get a surge of insight into their gestalt, their sense as a whole and how they fit in with yourself and others, and you feel an outpouring of love from your own self.  Thrilling, very dangerous, yet wide awake and alive.  You don’t have to look far to find people saying love is perilous.  Sure there is chaos not too far in front of you, but you sure as hell don’t want to stay back in that static water behind the wave.  The edge is worth the effort and failures of getting there.

Chayei Olam, the Hebrew for ‘eternal life’ has been argued by some theologians to mean a life that is concerned with things that last; eternal things.  That fits well for me.  Living on that dynamic edge is to be in the kingdom of heaven.  The kingdom of heaven, in this sense is in the edges where one is in touch with the pre-intellectual Reality.  So when you die, it seems to make sense that something continues.  And I believe it is that something that knows how to reside in the edges.  So if there is a where to heaven, I think it would be in those moments of deep connecting and interaction.  I like to believe that somehow, after death, a part of me will carry on and continue to participate in those moments where an edge is ridden.