Who am I? Alternatively, what is my perspective? I have experienced less than 25 years of conscious existence; a statistically insignificant drop in the vast and deep surging ocean of history. Spatially I could be said to be reasonably acquainted with a small region in Kent, fleetingly with parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and areas around Dulwich and Westminster in London. I have encountered such meagre geographical areas of a tiny island in a small world relative to the vastness of an ever-expanding universe. I am a white male human being, just one species in a vast array of bio-diversity.

So, what is my perspective? With bleak honesty, limited and partial in the extreme. On what experience may I draw to make claims on any subject, particularly meta-narrative religions? Virtually none, good education or no, ‘Christian’ up-bringing or not.

Supposing that I wish to reach beyond my self, to explore my environs and attempt to interact with any ‘other’ that I may stumble across does my perspective thereby broaden to justify claims to be authoritative on any matter? Upon reflection I have forged relationships, defined as loosely as one wishes, with only a tiny number of the peoples of this particular epoch, and none with people born more than 100 earth years ago; hardly a sufficient grounding for confident assertions! I could spend every minute of my life ‘reaching out’ yet breathe my last in a state of un-bridged partiality, not least because of the ‘barrier’ of the means by which I interact and learn; the medium of language.

αγαπη — like a morning mist tracing beautiful patterns yet so delicate and liable to melt away? Yet are some readers a little confused by the apparently bizarre, if not meaningless, typography to which I refer? In ‘roman’ script it is “agape”; one of the terms that captures an aspect of the ubiquitous English word “love”. A pathetic smattering of Greek is the limit to which my linguistic (in)abilities extend towards the language community in which the man Jesus of Nazareth of the Christian ‘narrative’ lived and communicated. Nonetheless, permit me to reflect further on language.

It appears to me that each language has its own distinct and intricate set of rules and grammar, vocabulary, scripts, pronunciations, intonations; indeed an appreciation of even one's ‘mother’ language is partial; regional variations and linguistic development over time being just two of the many limits to complete mastery. Perhaps, as languages arise within organism communities to facilitate communication, the image of language as itself a living and evolving organism dependent on ‘environment’ for the fact and nature of its existence is appropriate?

Additionally, does not the ‘life’ of a language-community extend beyond ‘mechanisms’ for interaction? Gestures, customs, colloquialisms, shared ‘myths’ do these not lie beyond the realm of relatively accessible marks on parchment or aural/vocal techniques? Yet are they not also integral to a language-community, inseparable, inter-weaving and enlivening? The task of acquiring a broader perspective seems yet more challenging.

Further, words seem to define themselves with reference to one another, imprecisely and endlessly at an abstract level. What is a “dog”? As a “mammal” it has body hair and is homoiothermic. So what is “hair”? Keratin — which is what? It is only embedded in the context of the organism-community, that which gives language its life in the first place, that abstract definitions seem to come alive with meaning and my perspective on community life context is? … very limited!

Painful questions? Ambiguities? A diminishing ‘I’? Could this be a (the?) point of crucifixion? Authentic struggling, honesty, maybe begins to admit ‘reality’; partial perspectives confronted, pretensions broken. In breaking the shell of ‘answers’, and of the ‘self’, can learning, begun and conducted continually in all-pervasive humility, falter into focus again? Broken in humility may a process of resurrection, restoring to life, commence?

With considerable limits on the ‘I’ and an infused attitude of humility, in what state other than vulnerable openness of the ‘self’ can this happen? Might it be in the earth of other-ness, from vulnerable shared-ness in relationship, that nourishment is discovered, as seeds depend on the fertiliser of other seeds’ lives broken and shared and the other elements in which they are embedded? Might the diverse beauty and experiences of others, once affirmed, also begin affirming through openness in vulnerable trust? The music and creative art and writings of communities across the globe, the inspiration of the lives of whole-y people of previous times; might these not also begin to minister to a broken ‘self’ traumatised at its lack of ‘life’ in isolation? However, might resurrection only be experienced if simultaneously crucifixion awareness of my ‘I’ distortion, and the possible brokenness characteristic of ‘others’, remains dynamic and painful for the rest of my life?

Resurrection, restoring to life, may be a process as personal and unique to individuals as crucifixion. I share in the space remaining, two aspects of my re-learning to partially indicate one person’s, incomplete, wrestlings.

How may I begin opening myself to the figure whose crucifixion inspires my reflections, and who in that act of inspiring across time and space points to something, to a ‘God’, transcendent? Am I justified in bounding my ‘access’ and glimpses of ‘God’ to a mechanistic means of communication (‘external symbols’ - words spoken or written) that does not fully capture life in its entirety? More specifically, are all pronouncements pertaining to a transcendent ‘God’ to be verified by sole reference to one selected set of texts, chosen by a particular group of people in a specific community-life context, at a particular freeze-frame of time? Is ‘God’ permitted to be no more alive than mechanistic strokes on parchment approved by people (men?) whose life- perspective probably mirrored mine to some degree (i.e. partial)?

I may admit that ‘God’ can communicate in and despite human linguistic fragility, but all this permits is the statement that the particular mechanistic formations of a religious text may have some divine ‘mandate’. Do not earlier musings suggest, however, that symbols on paper do not ‘live’ and do not have meaning except as interpreted, en-cultured and contextualised by individuals who, however ‘expert’, reside in a human perspective of very limited partiality? At this point the words on paper become only part of a wider dance encompassing life experiences of the reader and the culture, the ‘life’, of one particular community, mostly unknowable in itself, and only one of many across time and space. So what perspective on meta-narratives of religion and divinity? Attempting at holistic ‘multi-media’ openness to a transcendent God or a self-imposed partial, text-only or even text-mainly, channel?

Whilst wrestling with the creative and dynamic inter-play between an authentic perspective on one-self, other-ness, and glimpses of ‘God’, life continues. So do I seek to escape crucifixion and its pain by arrogantly constraining and abusing others, and thereby myself; or can I reach into my pain, grasp my authentic ‘nothingness’, and then gently re-engage with life choices and begin living a life of resurrection, of restoring to life those whom life is crucifying? Perhaps the language of conventional ‘morality’ (life choices), ‘Christian’ or not, proves inadequate to the task of a resurrection discourse. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ operate in an abstract world assuming clearly apprehended value ‘criteria’ against which lives and decisions are judged. Considered a little perhaps these criteria, devoid of context, like their sister of language, collapse into sophistry and self-referencing definitions, with little prospect of flawed humans connecting with holistic meaning? Do not the continuous wrangles in ethics and philosophy bear a testimony to this?

To offer ‘God’ as a way out only removes questions to a second-order debate of similar abstraction; if that which is ‘right’ is of ‘God’, what is of ‘God’? ‘Right’ becomes referred to ‘God’, but my perspective of ‘God’ is partial beyond imagination. Tempting as it may be to refer to ‘handbooks’ of morality to escape abstraction, whether Pauline Epistles, Hebrew Scriptures or John Stott, I cannot escape the confines of my ‘self’ in reading and comprehending, nor they in their writing. Claiming that “God blesses X, condemns Y”, is unauthentic in denying the part the limited ‘I’, with its fragments of preferences and prejudices, plays in forming such perspectives. Further, a groundless arrogance of ‘answers’ can creep in that I, or anyone else, has a unique perspective of ‘God’ and Her aspirations for life, and that this works against the breaking of crucifixion.

Rather is not the ‘Passion’ of Christ to be the focus that captures and inspires? Passion raw love, intense vulnerability and painful tenderness. Can this really admit judgements by a partial self on life? Perhaps instead of vainly constructing bleak ice structures of ‘morality’, however well intentioned or Biblically-based/Spirit-inspired (unauthenticity again to a limited ‘I’), I remain in the embrace of crucifixion-resurrection in the warmer lagoon of, for want of inspired language, ‘organic relational’ Passion? Organic as I am, concerned with full-fill- ment, broken potentiality and development; relational as it is in the earth of other-ness that growth begins, brokenness becomes healing; and Passion-infused by crucifixion's vulnerable love.

This, or indeed any, discourse dislocation and paradigm shift from conventional approaches to life choices (‘morality’) may be painful and possibly continuously so. The fear of no longer possessing ‘solutions’, even of asking appropriate questions, may scare one into close-minded, plight-denying arrogance as the pain of authentic, all-infused vulnerability wrenches at a desire for ‘security’. If crucifixion is to break the ‘self’ however, perhaps the process also entails that pretensions at shells of ‘understanding’ and ‘answers’, even means to answers, are themselves crucified and subject to metamorphosis.

Perhaps I push too far, but does the sunshine of the unique diversity of each person crucified then melt illusions of monolithic and uniquely ‘Christian’ perspectives, or more especially judgements, on life? From Victorian-era romanticised notions of ‘family’ and ‘right’ sexual behaviour, to the ‘dangerous’ other-ness of other faith narratives, can judgement and discussion in ‘right-wrong morality’ be supplanted by a crucifixion- resurrection discourse?

Perhaps in confronting authentically the reality of being broken in perspective and tiny in the deep and wide ocean of life, one then creates a vulnerable ‘self’ in crucifixion that precedes tentative restoration to life in resurrection. Is my prayer now that I share in Passion until I breathe no more, and that then in the mystery of ‘other lives’, touched by raw vulnerability, crucifixion and resurrection pulsate beyond? Will crucifixion’s intensity, personal-ism and pain, provoke distortions or unauthentic ‘escapism’? Or might a spirit of gentleness break my delusionary confident discourse, that through crucifixion life begins restoration?

Questions Vulnerability Authenticity : PASSION :
Whole-yness Other — Self
Might here, in mystery, ‘faith’ begin to take root?

Craig Myers