Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past

The expression “turtles all the way down” refers to the problem of infinite regress. In English, we are used to thinking of such problems when we refer to chicken and egg problems, where the legitimacy of an unmoved mover outside of the continual and endless question of causation come to mind. Once, memorably, my mother and a blind gentleman in the congregation where I spent most of my childhood performed a skit for a talent show that was sung to the folksy tone “There’s A Whole In The Bucket,” which depends on a recognition of a hopeless tangle of problems that circle in on themselves as the source of humor. Yet not all of the time is the infinite regress a matter of philosophical exploration nor a matter of comedic enjoyment. At times, the problem of infinite regress is an immensely serious problem, and one that requires a great deal of judgment, in the knowledge that one is not only judging other people, but also setting aside the standard by which one will be judged.

It is worthwhile to reflect a little bit on the seriousness of judgment that one is involved in before one gets to the actual process of judging other people and their own lives. The subject of judgment is far too lengthy and complicated to deal with extensively, but where one writes about the evils done to one by another, questions of justice and mercy inevitably follow. Matthew 7:1-5 reminds us: “Judge not, that you not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

While it would seem at first that this passage is against any sort of judgment, what is instead being spoken of is the need for us to see clearly before we can engage in matters of judgment and discernment. First, we make sure our own state with God and with others is above board, and then we have the credibility to make proper judgments. Something of this nature is what Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 6:1-5 when lamenting the lack of judgment among the brethren in that troubled congregation: “Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unrighteousness, and not before the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world will be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Do you not know that we shall judge angels? How much more, things that pertain to this life? If then you have judgments concerning things pertaining to this life, do you appoint those who are least esteemed by the church to judge?” All too often believers lack the competence or competence to fairly judge others with mercy and justice, and people who profess to believe in God’s ways are unwilling to submit to the judgment of anyone who may judge against them and their interests, and so the problems of dysfunctional families and relationships become a matter of public shame.

This is, after all, what occurred in my own situation. During the contentious and lengthy arguments over whether my mother and father were bound, and what sort of wrongdoing was done in the course of their marriage, my father was briefly disfellowshipped upon the accusation of abuse, only to be let back in when friends of his argued that such a man like my father would never have done such a thing. I do not remember anyone examining the facts, but rather it became an ugly political duel. Nor do I remember any sort of questions being asked of me; it seemed that the whole struggle was simply a battle between two adults who could not, at that time, get along with each other, and had nothing to do with any larger questions of truth. Perhaps part of this was due to my own perspective, but I have been a third party witness to many such problems between other people, and the same sort of adversarial relationship between estranged parents has trumped questions of what is best for the children and what the children want or need. At times our own attempts at dealing with conflict adopt too much of the adversarial nature of conflict resolution in the world, forgetting that everyone involved in such a dispute has been set apart for holiness, and adversarial struggle seldom brings out holiness in any of us. I know it has seldom brought out any reflection of godly nature in myself or those who have been my own adversaries in various difficulties [1], and few people look any more flattering under the glare of such difficulties.

Being an investigator or a critic or a judge of a situation like that of my own early childhood, if it is to be done well, requires that one become skilled as a historian. Perhaps that is where a great deal of my own interest in history came from, that forensic desire to make sense of the mess of the world by digging into the past to see what happened, and what went wrong, from the best evidence available. Our lives, and much that is in them, are crime scenes, and it is no wonder that so many of us should be avid fans of various historical controversies, in which we engage in deeply partisan argumentation, or that we should enjoy watching shows that engage in crime scene investigation that serves as a metaphor for the way that so many of us treat our lives and the situations in them. And so it is that most of the scenes of our lives reward investigation, so long as it is done in a fair-minded process. And here too we run into the infinite regress problem in full force.

My father spent the first six years of his life sharing a bed with his maternal grandmother. No one ever told me if anything was thought strange of this by either of my paternal grandparents; it certainly never came up in any of my discussions with my widowed and elderly grandmother late in her life. As it happens, my father had been molested repeatedly over that time, and placed in deliberate harm’s way by his parents. From what I have been able to piece together, my great-grandmother had been greatly embittered by the death of her husband from the effects of being gassed on the battlefields of World War I [2], and appears to have taken it out on men in general, or even very small boys. The specific power relationship in my family, where she was the owner of the farm and her son-in-law considered as merely hired help, who ran the farm in jure uxoris, through his wife’s inheritance, played a role both in the difficulties of questioning the elderly woman about what she was doing as well as my father’s own lifelong longing for a strong patriarchal order. One need not excuse him of all blame to recognize this longing as legitimate in light of his own experience.

In coming to terms with such matters, there are several concerns that spring readily to mind. For one, there is the question of apportioning blame. My father is no more responsible for this abuse inflicted upon him by his bitter grandmother any more than I was responsible for the abuse inflicted upon me. Yet we are responsible for what we do to others, and being mistreated does not excuse us mistreating others. We are not responsible for the dysfunctional conditions we have been given in this broken world full of sin and corruption, but we are responsible before God to make the best of it, and to the greatest strength we possess and all the divine assistance and encouragement we can obtain, and all of the help we can find from others, make no more worse a mess than we have been given. This task is not fair, but nothing about life is fair. Nor would we want it so—what is fair is that we should all be condemned to death for our own sins, but nobody wants that. Yet we cannot be forgiven for our own blunders if we are without mercy to others. We can wish that the misery of others did not spill over into our own lives, but most of us are not that lucky. I know I am not.

What was it that led my great-grandmother to abuse my father? What led her to think of that as an appropriate response to her own bitterness and loss, her own loneliness and isolation? I do not know, but I suppose she would blame someone. Would she blame her late husband for being too weak to overcome the horrors of warfare on the Western Front of World War I? That hardly seems just. Would she blame the wickedness of the Germans who gassed him? Would she blame some sort of troublesome family background of her own? Who knows where that could lead. The question, very quickly, becomes a matter of whether there are turtles all the way down, or if at some point we can point to someone to blame. In reality, we retain responsibility over ourselves and what we do with what we have—as far as making the mess in the first place, there is usually plenty of that to go around, and in life as in so much else: success has a hundred fathers, but failure is an orphan. No one wants to be left holding the bag as to the blame of failure and dysfunction, although there is plenty of that to be passed out.

Thinking about the blame game in my own life reminds of the first recorded instance of when this game was played, in Genesis 3:8-13: “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.” And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”” Not much about the blame game has changed since it started [3]. It is a game that everyone can play—all you need is a problem and someone to blame for it. There is little of worth that I or anyone else can add to the lengthy history of this game being played, even if it can be a difficult task to avoid playing it.

The most important aspect of the story, though, is how God deals with the blame game: he apportions judgment to all, in reverse order to the questions that He asks. First he pronounces a judgment on the serpent, promising hostility between the people of God and those who follow the serpent’s way, and promises ultimate victory to humanity through Jesus Christ. To the woman he provides a notice that childhood will be painful and that there will be the struggle for dominance between husbands and wives. That is a curse we have all been witness to. And to the man he promises the curse of death for sin, and the curse of fruitless and immense toil while we live, and that curse we all recognize in our own lives and the lives of others also. All are given blame based on their own part of the problem, and no one is given more blame than they actually deserve. The sins of people result in the suffering of others, and the fact that we are simultaneously sinners and sinned against does not remove either the justice of our claims or the justice of the claims against us. We plead for mitigating circumstances, we tell a sob story and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, and yet we seek for our just claims to be heard. What makes mercy so hard is that we cannot accurately judge the damages that we have caused against the damages we have suffered, and so that we feel loss in abandoning claims against others that we cannot enforce and do not fully understand the immensity of the boon we have been given by having our own debts forgiven. And it is to that problem that we must turn next, fairly understanding the extent of damages suffered and damages caused.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/the-cogwa-cattle-rustlers-of-zambia/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/facing-the-grim-arithmetic-the-paid-ministry-of-cogwa/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/why-i-am-not-a-conspiracy-theorist/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/see-i-told-you-so/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/when-they-ask-us-why/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/zechariah-11-the-prophecy-of-the-wicked-shepherds/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/too-delicate-a-sense-of-honor/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/some-ironic-comments-on-a-lawsuit/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/death-is-a-hungry-hunter/

[3] See, for example: