Another wasted day, spent nearly the entirety of it asleep. The few hours that I was awake, I just reviewed some notes and read a bit. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of history in lending legitimacy to faith on the cosmic level. Not just in the sense that ancient traditions are afforded legitimacy solely by their endurance in broader memory; but more specifically the ways in which religious principles are so often, in so many systems of faith across the world both present and past (and probably future), grounded in what are astonishingly concrete and local histories.
You can still (and to this day, a not-insignificant number of people definitely do in the name of pilgrimage) walk the exact routes between locations described in the Bible; virtually all of the places are or at some point were real. Here’s the clearing where the angels descended to earth and had a picnic; here’s the mountain which God struck in two with lightning to deliver a point. Eden for all its mythical glory could just as well have been on the other side of the valley, visible beneath a satellite on Google Maps. So much of the Old Testament is just as much human record of history and genealogy, precise census of military might and territorial boundaries, as it is an outline for the practice of faith on a societal level; which is ultimately to say that all of this is a kinda curious thing to consider, that we still rely on these ancient pinpoints, so many of them no longer the same as they were described, fundamentally warped by territorial conflict and zoning codes and ecological erosion, can still serve as the tangible bedrock upon which our faith rests. There’s something at once oddly intimate, and also sobering about it.
All of this is to suggest that maybe it’s not us who changed after all. For all intents and purposes, it seems as if we’ve been more or less the same from the moment we were created: hopelessly vain, ambitious, brimming with pride and righteousness and envy, fickle and uncertain and stubborn. That’s not to say that we haven’t made efforts to change our circumstances, or that those efforts have gone without consequence: overall I think it’s undeniable to acknowledge that we’ve improved our living conditions, maybe even become more aware on a mass level of each other, ourselves, our fragility and vulnerability. But on a long enough timeline, all those changes still fit within our grand narrative about ourselves, our ability to read the poetry or law or philosophy of ancestors millennia ago and still relate to them on that profound level which we call the “human condition”. It’s not that I believe we’re exactly immutable, so much as it is that our nature is fixed: our progress is incremental, our systems and fashions and attitudes may evolve over time, but no amount of revelation or intervention can change our fundamental state of being.
It’s not us who have really changed, but God. God, who trusted us with obedience only to be surprised with our betrayal; God, who wiped out nearly all life on earth in disgust at our pettiness and vanity, only to regret it a day later and promise to never do it again; God, who relinquished command and descended to earth in the skin and shape of a man to feel what it was like to be us, knowing full well the cruelty and intolerance of the authorities of this earth. Our actions and presence upon this earth have changed the nature of God as far as our narrative as a species is concerned, drawing God very slowly over the centuries into our fold of existence, our precarious understanding of this world and one another and ourselves.
I dunno… maybe it’s presumptuous of me to draw these conclusions the way I am – who knows, the timeline and scale God has existed on is incomprehensible to me, and who can say to know the will and nature of God anyways – but ultimately I think what I’m trying to get at is that, if we are truly God’s creation, we will last with our humanity – whatever that is, whatever that’s worth – uncompromised, regardless of what happens. It’s the rest of the world beyond us that changes in reaction to us; and it’s in their consideration which we should be ever vigilant as shepherds and custodians of this world, to at least try to act in good faith and with good intentions – or at the bare minimum, a modicum of self-awareness and sincerity.
Or so it goes.
