Approaching Divine Cause and Effect

Kellerman saw how she strove not to forget. She spent decades centering remembering and exposition of remembrance. Cutting off the present. Past experience touchstone of her daily experience. Unable to shake desire for striving, for distance between her pre-vision experiences (perhaps) and her present conditions (for sure) custom made, custom chosen catering to remembrance. Present impinges reduced to sustaining bodily needs. Reduced, fully. The body an impediment, a tool, a vassal for metaphor allegory in vision dissected again and again. In memoriam of some escape, as in escaped. Critchley argues it’s an intellectual striving, a rational action viewing, making sense of, expounding on a set of experiences so intense it changes the rest of ones future. It justifies wrapping one’s present around. And it’s a Julian or a Beatrice and it could be an Eckhart. But it’s rational. Counter resentiment, explicitly. It’s neither here nor there. But interesting nonetheless (thinking -in the present, to help approach the present and perhaps future -of Critchley’s elusive phrases around what it must’ve been saying, must’ve been like, currently saying, to sit with all women in Greek Tragedy played by men, written knowing men of many backgrounds, soldiers, could be would be playing them – that kind of interesting).

Exposition of cause and effect in liturgy runs counter to our everyday experience. Unless one centers a divine touched experience, enlightened existence. Meaning, stopping to take everyday at face value. Seeing things that aren’t there. Maybe he’s really bad. Maybe she’s really good. Maybe there’s a subtle wisdom driving it all. Subtle, we can’t see, unless we’re made to be shown, enscened in the hidden narrative revealed to its players, unmasked. Or there’s an afterlife where all accounts are settled. It seems the divine is made less powerful, less accessible, less real if its a secret society with its own special language, symbols meaning other than, reality a metaphor other than, a cut or bruise, or success wealth health evidence of underlying action by the true operation of the world, scattered clues. It seems to lessen. When Abraham or Moses (a miracle maker, perhaps a different category). When Abraham argues with the divine, where the Name matters, it’s an active encounter with the present with the future in discussion. Action in discussion, engaged. How would you scale that? Paint a picture of cause and effect driving an emotional and rational and other engagement with the present at all times, with all aspects of life, none cut-off from daily action daily needs and vice versa none un-engagable as being seen with a lens of divinity. Again a Name, matters. A lack of body, matter, for the divine disclosing how to engage. Leave sacrifice for animals. Save those of the will or a minor surgery before the will can have its way or is ignorable by parents (often caught up, in a wave of those first days, then later, in custom -as engagement with the future, committing at present with material passed forward from a community, yes a communion, without dark matter – though yes Elijah walks there…).

Cause and effect presented, described in order to drive engagement, full bodied, full minded, whole personed. Not to provide an explanation of the world. But to describe a mode of being. Use your mind. Use your emotions. Be in the world, fully and fully. You are strong enough, regardless of what has happened, what has past. You are strong enough, as can be those as are those as will be those around you. Strong enough to be in the present, oriented towards a future. Understanding, grasping the full that it’s all uncertainty ahead and even present, but we are made for moving forward into with all that, with uncertainty. Forging uncertainty. With uncertainty. With. Forging meaning moving through engaged. Only. Nothing more, nothing locking. Stay engaged. Without fear.

NEARBY SOURCES

Still in Mysticism by Simon Critchley

Beginning The Nietzsche Podcast “Gilles Deleuze: Ressentiment, Bad Conscience & Becoming-Active (Nietzsche & Philosophy, Part 2 of 2)“

FURTHER CONSIDERING

Sacrifice is perhaps the wrong word for how will is used. Self control as exercise, as strength. Strengthening? The will is not sacrificed here. Nor does the divine call for its sacrifice as in destruction or decreation.