Reading with the family
The woman conceived and gave birth to a son at the same time the following year, as Elisha had promised her.
The child grew and one day went out to his father and the harvesters. Suddenly he complained to his father, “My head! My head!” His father told his servant, “Carry him to his mother.” So he picked him up and took him to his mother. The child sat on her lap until noon and then died. (2Kings 4:17–21 HCSB)
The devastatingly short biography of a promise.
Look at how the ancient story-teller constructs the tale. The first phrase is a repetition of the words of Elisha. The prophet’s words in the narrator’s voice.
This is how we know the prophet speaks for God: the ‘what will be’ of a man describing what is not, becomes the ‘And it came to pass that…’ of the narrator who always says what is.
But what a desperately short life.
The boy who grew so fast in verse 18, so fast that it takes him merely one sentence to spring from conception to joining his father at the reaping, declines just as steeply. He withers and passes, like the summer grasses. Two sentences and he is dead.
The speed at which this happens shocks us: suddenly he grabs his head. He is rushed to his mother, already unable to walk.
Wait though, it is the next phrase that breaks your heart. The ancient story-teller, not given to spending unnecessary words, burns us with an image of the mother. Voyeuristic, embarrassed, helpless, I sit there all morning, mourning, as the child dies in her lap.
That little detail is the genius of this mini story. Disciplined to be concise by the nature of the available resources, the story-teller can’t give us unlimited description. He chooses his words carefully. This discipline creates a spare, taunt, tightly sprung imaginative world. And all that force recoils through the elected detail.
The story is itself a detail within the the tightly sprung narrative of Yahweh’s redemption of his people. The death of this promise child echoes with generations of questions asked: about Yahweh’s faithfulness, about the security of the future, about the holy discontentment which loving Yahweh provokes and alone can satisfy.
These are my questions because the Shunammite mother is one of my people. Any reader who doesn’t read like this, doesn’t really read. This is a story about how I got to be here, why I hope for the things I hope, about other people’s decisions which have charted my course. So, when I meet the detail within this detail of this (our) story, it unloads upon me with not just narrative, but affective force.
Does this story need to be made relevant to me? She is one of my people! My Auntie. What kind of pathologically insensitive person would need to be taught how to feel about this, this death in the family? Even if I know more about the reasons and the answers, how can I not feel the darkness opening beneath her, the precariousness of her faith, and want to hold on to her and tell her its going to be ok?
But then I discover that she’s comforting me, my auntie in the faith. She steps out from among the great crowd of witnesses, the family tree, sits with her child on her lap, invites me to put my head down there for a while too, and tells me her story.
image by yazeed
The Purpose Driven Space
The spatiality of created beings is not an accident. Much of the attention given to the explaining spatiality in our philosophical tradition has focussed on the necessity of space. Space is ‘necessary’ in the sense I was talking about last post: we find it impossible to think of objects in the world without thinking or relying upon a concept of spatiality at the same time.
Philosophical reasoning first entered on this path by trying to tease out the relationship between being, and non-being, and multiple ‘beings’. This might appear to be a hopelessly abstract question, but for the ancient Greeks it was intimately bound up with the fundamentals of life. I’d like to come back and tell the story in more detail sometime. Let me just give you the conclusion: for the Greek philosophical tradition (which is still deeply influential) spatiality was necessary as a logical feature of what it means for the cosmos to be rather than not be. For a very important reason, however, this answer was completely unacceptable to Christians.
If spatiality is a logical deduction from the concept of being, then it is a property shared equally by all beings, whether God or the cosmos. Greeks had no problem with this, their concept of God as ‘Perfect Being’, meant that the being of God was both the foundation and totality of all other beings: in a sense, God was co-extensive with the cosmos, and embraced the cosmos as part of his own being. For the Greeks, God was perfectly spatial.
The Christian God would have no truck with this. We approach our God, not from the understanding that he is Supreme Being, but as the Author of Being – The Creator. God is not the foundation or pinnacle of a chain of being that leads from greatest to least. God is not part of the chain. Of course, we believe that God is, and therefore is a Being, but his Being and our being cannot be related by forms of logical deduction or degrees of quality/quantity. This leads Christians claim two things about God that Greek philosophy has a real problem with: he is transcendent, and he is infinite. At their root, these are claims that features of created being do not apply unproblematically to God, we speak of him analogically.
This means that, in an intellectual world shaped by knowledge of the Christian God, we cannot rest the necessity of space on a necessity of being qua being. The non-negotiable nature of spatiality for our explanations of experience must rest upon features of created being, the created order. Space is necessary in that it is a fixed property of the created order spoken into existence by God. But Christians do not believe that this universal order is itself a fixed, logical, eternal property of being. Rather, in its fundamental aspect as created, it is radically contingent (i.e., it could have been otherwise or not at all). God created spatiality in freedom, just as he freely called all the other aspects of created being into existence.
Contingency opens up the question of meaning. Necessary Beings are fundamentally uninteresting from the perspective of meaning because they are impervious to the question ‘why?’ When you ask a necessary Being, ‘why?’, it just stares back at you, ’til you either blink and go away or your head explodes. But if spatiality is a created necessity, resting upon an act of freedom, then we can legitimately investigate the possibility that God created spatiality with a purpose: that in its fundamental enactment as a law of created being, space carries an intention. So here’s a thesis: Space is meaningful all the way down, it shares in the basic rationality of all creation as a work of the Spirit. Space communicates just by being the being it is. It endlessly echoes with the words that called it out of nothing. Because:
all things have been created through Him and for Him. (Colossians 1:16 HCSB)
This is a tangent, but isn’t it interesting that it is precisely this excess of signal, the sheer overwhelming amount of communication that occurs in, through, by space that makes it necessary for our brains to have sophisticated filters which constantly screen away irrelevant communication and allow us to focus on matters of interest. It’s one of my favourite non-conscious features of my brain (It’s nice to just sit back and enjoy your brain occasionally). I’m enjoying it right now while I write this in the busy atmosphere of a cafe. However, in a world whose order is distorted by the wrenching entropy of sin, our feverish minds not only filter out the particular communications occurring in space around us, we harden ourselves against the meaning of space itself.
He demonstrated |this power| in the Messiah by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavens— far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put everything under His feet and appointed Him as head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of the One who fills all things in every way. (Ephesians 1:20–23 HCSB)