There is within us, us Christ followers (hopers, dreamers?) a rather troublesome fellow who’s gone under the radar for too long. Jesus? Not Jesus, no. If in fact Jesus is within us he’s certainly not the problem, I think you must agree. No, not Jesus. Instead, it is the Probation Officer (Robert F. Capon’s idea; thanks Rob). You haven’t heard of him? Well, let me tell you that you probably hear from him all the time. We hear things all the time, just like everybody else. One of the greatest sources of confusion for followers of The Way is to assume that all their internal dialogue is unitary, single in origin. Oh, did I mention that the Probation Officer lives in everyone else, regardless of creed or culture?
Whatever ethic you live by, whatever morality grounds you in the midst of making decisions, you know there is someone or something you’re going to have to check in with. You can’t really be free to roam about as you please. And, good God, you certainly can’t leave the state you’re in. You must have regular house calls and your pockets poked about in. That little bit of candy your friend gave you? “Ah ah, no no, give me that” says the Probation Officer. Don’t be distracted by the candy. The candy is just a stand in for whatever you’ve set up, in your deep moralistic well, as the thing you shouldn’t have. Anyway, he takes your candy. Or maybe not. You may evade him for a day or two, you might even successfully hide away for a good long time. But you know how those Probation Officers are; they have a way of popping in on you when you least expect it. Then he’ll take your candy. Or, at the very least, if he doesn’t take it from you he’ll give you hell for having eaten some. He’ll make you feel bad.
A twist. He’s not real, this legalized state nanny. He’s an apparition arising out of a fundamental flaw in our view into the way things are. We are enslaved to a filament lit only by the energy we supply to it. We believe the light in our world arises out of this filament. It is lit only by those who adhere to the Law. If this little light goes out only darkness would reign and we would stumble about in that darkness (think here about all of Jordan Peterson’s work on cleaning up your room and how impressive it is that the trains arrive on time. You need good people who embody the spirit of self-sacrifice to make society work. And Jesus is the ultimate example, dying a death voluntarily to create the maximally wide and good community possible. etc. etc.) You can have your smackerel of grace and you can have your second chances, but we all know you’ve got to pay up in the end. Didn’t Jesus pay up to the big guy in the sky? It is the threat of accountability to the probation officer that actually modifies your behavior sufficiently to allow society to work. So the the deep fibers and filaments of moralizing go.
Another little variation on the fibrous filament thing, like this: we are all wound up, with strings attached. The tension these strings exert in us, indeed, the very tension which allows them to vibrate and sing, arise out of the legal conception of self and God. One end of the string is irrevocably lodged in the essence of our being, and the other embedded in the shrouded mystery of God’s glory. You need not believe in God, understand. The only difference between the staunch atheist and the lifelong clergyman is the distance into the fundamental cause of being they perceive that string persisting in. The atheist, while seeing only material around him, yet lives under the tyrannical music the social Probation Officer plays upon the string. The clergyman is worse off, because he not only perceives the connection between his soul to God’s, but believes that God is, himself, the Probation Officer. Who can escape that Probation Officer! The songs of guilt that sweetly serenade us at 3:07 am are played on this very string. Again, the string only arises out of a misconception about ourselves and God.
At the end of the day we believe, really believe, that our value is rooted in our moral performance. We are constantly assessing ourselves against a backdrop of performative expectations, internalizing or externalizing them as the case may be. The hardwired voice within us persists in this tension. These don’t have to be the 7 deadly sins, either. Don’t excuse yourself from the “we” thinking that “Well, I don’t murder people! I never cheated in school. I would never cheat on my spouse! I don’t steal. I pay my taxes, for Christ’s sake!” The gold standard set of moral infractions do not diminish the nature of diminutive moral trespasses . The standard you hold yourself to will condemn you, no matter how trifling it might seem. Secret promises made to yourself in the ever circling hamster wheel keep you striving to match up to an idealized “you”. You might whisper into your heart “I shouldn’t go over the speed limit.” To your consternation you’ll find yourself 2 mph over on a consistent basis, the thought nibbling away at some small crust of your conscience. And for every shinning example you point to to justify your willpower in overcoming such aforementioned weaknesses, a legion of failures, foibles, and fibs crowds out that glimmer with dingy reminders of your inadequacy.
Did you know that it was Adam and Eve who hid from God, not the other way around? (I can feel an eye or two rolling all the way into the heavens, those more enlightened among you, despising the idea that Adam and Eve are real. We can clear that up immediately. YOU are Adam and Eve. You are the one who hides from God, real, imagined, or denied when you violate the dictates of your moral conscience. Every denial, every learned ignorance, every excuse; another fig leaf patched together to hide yourself from the one to whom you fear to give account. Adam and Eve are the synecdoche for everyone of us.) Having violated the relationship of trust with God, any true understanding of self and God was lost, dead. It was not as if God thought that Adam and Eve were naked, but that they thought they were naked. Shame had stepped between humanity and God, whispering lies, irrevocably stringing us up with the death-dealing duo of separation and accusation. A reality had been conjured into existence which was rooted in non-existence. The reality that had sprung up in Adam and Eve’s mind was disconnected from true reality. In short, it was death. What kind of death? A death of the ability to know God. What did that death look like? It looked like a complete and total alienation from God, in their own perspective. They tried to hide from God, which is absurd, because God could never loose sight of them. Rather, it was they who had lost sight of both themselves and God.
This leaves us in an uncomfortable place. We try to hide from the Probation Officer, but know that we must eventually give account of our lives. This existential anxiety can be laughed at, mocked, ignored, embraced, or enshrined. But it cannot be eradicated, no more than our conscience can up and disappear, poof. The more we look at the problem of our own imperfection the more insoluble it seems.
Yet a luminous hope gleams just above the stormy clouds of our delusion. Can you see it? What if it is all a lie? What if our insistence on perfectionism as a path toward reunited relationship with God (the sum total of all good things possible contained in one supremely loving being) was a non-starter from the first nanosecond of it’s introduction? What if the warning of death was about our experience, not God’s?
Let’s gain a view on this from a different vantage point. Jesus declares in John 14 that “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” In the light of this logos, the truth must be that you are free. Now. Already. When you know it, then you see that it is so, that it must have always been so. There is certainly a sense in which we are being set free, implying that we weren’t free, because the experience of being in bondage to a lie is just that: bondage. But when you are set free, you see that the bondage was a lie… if it was a lie, then you were actually free the whole time! The truth could not be that you are not free. If the truth, at bottom, were that you were not free, then knowing the truth would simply reveal that you are still in bondage.
In fact this way of thinking is so counterintuitive to the religious mind that it can’t accept it. They (the scrupulously religious) cannot bear the thought that they, and especially not their numerous enemies, are actually free. They are at great pains to transform this pivotal teaching into another method to become free. See, if you can work for something, then the glory still rests on your own shoulders. They would hate to be deprived of the right to justify themselves before others. Their freedom was won through the hard work of accepting the “truth”, and then working on all the little fiddly bits of badness they needed to become free of. The problem with people is that accepting the truth of their sin is just too hard and they can’t bear to do it. But for those who buckle up and put their heads down to do the Lord’s honest work of dealing with the truth of their sinful selves, for them is reserved the salvation and freedom glimpsed at through the Gospel writings.
That’s a load of pure rubbish. Wishing to justify themselves by their own efforts they eagerly heap heavy burdens on others, longing to tie everyone down by the heavy chains of their religious servitude.
So we find it to be the case that the animus behind the desperate need to be moral (regardless of creed or culture) is sometimes the devil himself. It is the lie of separation from God whispering deep in our hearts, “You’re bad'; but if you could do just a bit better, maybe you’d be acceptable.” It’s like the old AA saying; you’re always a recovering alcoholic. The orientation of the zealously moral person is facing their depravity, framed in relationship to their perceived loss of worthiness, constantly trying to clean themselves up.
I may be coming down harsh on this moral sensibility, and one might wonder if I am trying to justify immorality. By no means! Rather, the truly good person must see, a priori, that they are good. Having turned away from themselves and oriented themselves toward relationship with God, the truly good person sees beyond the transpiring circumstance of their fallibility and into the all consuming declaration of God’s love for them (and everyone, for that matter). They find themselves saying things like: “If God says I am righteous, then so be it.” Or, “If God says I am worthy of love, then I must be so.”
You cannot escape the Probation Officer by trying to be good enough. It is the “Kobayashi maru” situation from Star Trek; you cannot rescue the ship. Any engagement with the lie of separation is to in fact validate the terms of the lie and thus find yourself out of step with reality. True freedom is found in dealing with the truth.