Little is much when God is in it

I’m going to comment on some recent statements by Vallicella:

Parents are essential: without them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions...Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions. 

Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from being an object of those attitudes of propinquity -- to give them a name -- such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly. 

The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off.  Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2012/02/the-childless-as-anthropological-danglers.html

Second, religion is about transcendence and transcending, about reaching beyond the human-all-too-human, and beyond all the images of the picture-loving imagination.  Religion is not about the positing of a hinterworld that duplicates this world with the negative removed.  It is not about crude, materialistic, wish-fulfillment.  This is why we find the Islamic 72 virgins conception of paradise so paltry and ridiculous:  it is a blatant pandering to the basest elements in our nature, a pandering at once both superstitious and idolatrous.  Religion aims at a spiritualization of the human being which cannot be imagined and is just barely conceivable.  It is about theosis (deification) as is maintained in Orthodox Christianity.  And because the ultimate goal for humans is not imaginable and barely conceivable, it is repeatedly pictured in crude and absurd materialistic ways -- which only fuels the fires of atheism.  Actually, one ought to be an atheist in respect of the anthropomorphic God-conceptions.

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2012/02/mormonism-and-anthropomorphism.html

Before proceeding, I’d like to consider some possible influences on Vallicella’s conception of religion. One possible influence is Buddhism, which fosters detachment.

In addition, Vallicella was raised in Italian Catholicism. Compare his statements with the Catholic dogma of the Beatific Vision:

In heaven the just will see God by direct intuition, clearly and distinctly. Here on earth we have no immediate perception of God; we see Him but indirectly in the mirror of creation. We get our first and direct knowledge from creatures, and then, by reasoning from these, we ascend to a knowledge of God according to the imperfect likeness which creatures bear to their Creator. But in doing so we proceed to a large extent by way of negation, i.e., by removing from the Divine Being the imperfections proper to creatures. In heaven, however, no creature will stand between God and the soul. He himself will be the immediate object of its vision. Scripture and theology tell us that the blessed see God face to face. And because this vision is immediate and direct, it is also exceedingly clear and distinct...The blessed see God, not merely according to the measure of His likeness imperfectly reflected in creation, but they see Him as He is, after the manner of His own Being. That the blessed see God is a dogma of faith, expressly defined by Benedict XII (1336):

We define that the souls of all the saints in heaven have seen and do see the Divine Essence by direct intuition and face to face [visione intuitivâ et etiam faciali], in such wise that nothing created intervenes as an object of vision, but the Divine Essence presents itself to their immediate gaze, unveiled, clearly and openly; moreover, that in this vision they enjoy the Divine Essence, and that, in virtue of this vision and this enjoyment, they are truly blessed and possess eternal life and eternal rest" (Denzinger, Enchiridion, ed. 10, n. 530--old edition, n, 456; cf. nn. 693, 1084, 1458 old, nn. 588, 868).

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07170a.htm#III

This is part of a religiously and philosophically diverse tradition according to which salvation involves an escape from the mundane, the ordinary, the earthly, the physical, the sensory. According to this tradition, our embodied experience is a wall rather than a window. Our finitude, physicality, creatureliness, is a prison.

From a biblical standpoint, this conception of religion is misguided and ultimately impious.

For instance, the Bible contains visions of heaven, visions of the afterlife. Yet the imagery is drawn from concrete human experience. It may combine natural objects in fantastic ways, but the raw materials are down-to-earth. 

My ordinary life-experience is a way I experience God. For everything I experience ultimately comes from God. God planned every experience I have. I experience God in and through the life he gave me. God is the storyteller, and I am the story. One of many stories. Stories within stories. Each life is a story that God has wrought. Each story is a journey.

That’s how God is present in our lives. That’s how God comes to us. Not in some discrete vision or apparition. But in the very fabric of life. In the journey. God isn’t just a part of our lives. Rather, everything that happens to us is from the hand of God. Every bend in the river.

That doesn’t mean an individual consciously experiences God in his mundane experience. And raw experience isn’t self-interpreting.

However, Christians also experience the Bible. God has made the Bible a part of our personal experience. The Bible comes to us within human experience, yet it tells us what lies behind human experience. You discover a book within the world that tells you about the world from a viewpoint beyond the world.

A story about the story. The backstory. The story of how the story began, and how it comes out. A roadmap for the journey ahead.

Among other things, the Bible is a lens through which we can discern God’s ordinary providence in our lives. The minutiae of our tiny lives acquires hidden significance as we realize that it’s all meaningful, all purposeful.

Something doesn’t have to be spectacular to be good. The extraordinary isn’t inherently better than the ordinary. What was the vocation of Adam and Eve? To be husband and wife. To be parents. To be gardeners.

You can garden to the glory of God. You don’t need to be a mystic to experience God. God comes to us in little things. Simple things. We need to learn the art of finding more in less. I’m reminded of the line from a hymn: “Little is much when God is in it.”

In a fallen world, sin often robs us of the ability to simply enjoy life. To calmly take pleasure in all that God has given us. Anxiety, resentment, regret, frustration, disappointment, sickness, and mortality haunt us or harass us. But in the new Eden, in the new Jerusalem, that will all melt away.

At the same time, the experience of traveling through a fallen world to arrive at the new Eden, the new Jerusalem, enriches our appreciation. Take a soldier whose land is invaded by the enemy. He moves his family out of the war zone. He hides them in a place of safekeeping. But duty calls. He must return to the war zone.

He misses his family. He remembers their faces when he rode away. Yet hope sustains him during the war. He knows they are safe. He knows he has that to come back to. They are waiting for him. And he is waiting for them.

During the war, he may come within an inch of his life. A near miss. The realization that he almost died makes him all the more thankful to be alive. Awestruck by the close call.

After the war he returns home. The reunion is more precious than if they were never separated.

Or take a hiker who is lost in the woods. Maybe he always took life for granted. Now he’s afraid. Hungry. Thirsty. Chilling. Alone. Very alone.

He begins to lose hope. He looks back over his life. All the things he left undone. All the lost opportunities.

If he’s found, he values his life in a way he didn’t before he was lost. In a sense, he goes back to his old life. He’s still the same person. But he lives his old life with new eyes.

Salvation is not about transcending our humanity, but learning to be human. Learning to be what God made us to be. Humanity redeemed. God is in the details. In the story of our little lives. A story we better understand as we see the journey unfold.