A More Coherent Coherence?

So I originally meant this as a reply to MWS’s insightful comments but it got long and turned out to express what I’d been trying to express from the beginning, so here’s a kind of part 2 which is hopefully a lot more comprehensible.

Part of my thinking- and if you followed Mrs. Peel’s blog, you’d know this post was planned for awhile- has been due to a desire to address a few issues that sometimes trouble me or seem like serious atheist objections.  Namely, I have trouble envisioning, as I said, a world where we’re free, but not free to go wrong.  You can explain the fall with that line, but then how do you explain salvation/heaven/the New Jerusalem.  Like, ok…why doesn’t he fall again?  What’s gone on in the interim to change the situation?

Along those same lines, I’ve always been slightly piqued by the atheist quip about heaven sounding dull.  Part of the reason the whole “fortunate fall” thing has caught on among atheists, and part of the reason, for instance, so many people see Lucifer as the real hero of Paradise Lost despite Milton’s intentions, is because it’s very, very difficult to imagine a meaningful world without conflict.  Extremely difficult.  I mean, almost impossibly difficult.  I’m reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling now, and he goes on about being “shattered” by the story of Abraham- well I’ve been nearly shattered in the past by the idea of a world without conflict.  It’s not that I can’t imagine it- I can.  I just sort of see the atheist point.   How do we get there…and like it?

And what I came up with, the more I thought about both of these points, was something like coherence.  Really, I thought about a story.  You know, try writing a story with no conflict.  To illustrate this, I actually planned to write one.  I got somewhere, but then couldn’t continue.  Here’s it is.

A man wakes up, alert but with just enough of the pleasant fugue of coming out of a dream.  He kisses his wife, who smells of lavender.  She tussles his hair fondly.  He gets his morning paper, reads about 6 kittens that are saved from a tree by an awshucks boy scout.  Smiles a bit, and sips his coffee which is strong and rich, with an aesthetically pleasing dollop of cream just vanishing beneath the brown liquid, and tumbling tendrils of heat touching his face.  Kisses his wife goodbye, lavender again; maybe he should save that scent- take the bottle- to see him through the day.

His office isn’t far; he’ll walk.  The morning breeze takes the edge off the coffee, and he’s feeling both warm and snug at once by the time he arrives, with a hint of that pleasant stretching strain that sneaks through your muscles after a walk that isn’t necessary.  The boss greets him at the door; he always does, and really he’s not a boss anyway- they’re collaborators.  The man’s been given authority and responsibility, but doesn’t shoulder the ultimate burden.  Like clockwork, when the clock strikes 5, he’ll head home; no overtime or missed holidays and soccer games.  But, now he’s working.  He has to help a young family get a new home, by convincing the bank they’d make good loan prospects.  They’re sitting there in front of him, smiling beatifically- the little girl tries to hand him a picture.  It’s a house, or something like one- an enormous red roof runs through a crooked blue square.  He’s touched.  The phone comes up- “the Melville’s are very deserving.  You would?  Terrific.”

They all three shake his hand- promising to send him a welcome mat as a reminder- and walk out the door.  Just then, the boss- the collaborator- walks in.  He heard about the deal.  “Really fantastic work!…A raise?  Why certainly!  How does 8% sound?”  8% sounded great.  Just enough to get the house fixed up, but not enough that the man would be tempted to buy a bigger place and stretch their finances.

As he leaves for lunch, he hears about a new cafe about a four minutes from his office building.  The co-worker who tells him comes along.  This co-worker is a fine fellow, with an easy laugh, but a fine sense of distance.  They only have lunch together every so often; a friend, but not a smother.  The cafe is just outside a park, where they can see kids- probably on some kind of recess- playing dodgeball with a fierce competitiveness that dissolves into back-slapping at the first sign of real tension.  They get a seat outside, so they can watch that vitality, adding to the nourishment of the food.  And boy is the food good.  The man gets a small order of chicken franchese- they actually have three sizes of everything, to accommodate your level of hunger- a dish his wife never makes.  It’s just buttery enough, and the lemon and wine have mostly dissolved into the rest of the flavors.

Etc.  And so it goes, ad nauseam, everyday, without any conflicts, however small.  But, even that sample doesn’t do it.  Because I have included conflicts- he has a job, and work.  He gets the satisfaction of completing the job, however easy it happened to be.  And there are rewards.  The raise, for one, which actually does something: he fixes up his house.  Which presumably was unfixed before (a conflict).  I’m not even sure I could write a story that included none of that sort of thing.  But, if I could, I don’t think even competent/interesting writing could stop it from being dull.  And so I wondered.  I was trying to reconcile the fact that “the fall” was really a bad thing, with my intuition that not to have fallen seems like a not natural thing and, in some ways, dull, with the idea that when we get to the “big show” we’ll be in a prelapsarian type of situation and it will really be a good thing, and we’ll really stay there this time.  All while keeping freedom intact.   And so, like I said, I thought of coherence, and I thought of a story.  And I thought…huh, isn’t it odd how, really, there are only two times we can accept a lack of conflict in  a story; at the beginning and at the end?  How we actually seem to demand pristiness for bookends?  How stories just don’t seem to work unless we get one or the other, and usually both?

Which also seems to mirror the Christian story in odd ways.  You get the pristiness in the beginning- people are happy, life seems great, but then not so much.  And it seems as if these mini-falls, the beginning of the conflict, are both inevitable and a kind of punishment for some action.  And the only way you can get to pristiness again- your happy ending- is through this whole process.  At which point, you’re able to feel that the happy ending might stick- that they can keep to the path- because there’s this whole context that wasn’t there before.  You see this in life too- children can do things that seem totally tedious to adults.  They can play with the same blocks for hours on end or watch the same movie repeatedly.  They don’t need conflict.  They CAN create it, obviously- they’re impatient, spoiled, monsters at times.  But, they still have a remarkable level of wonder at things that just don’t fit into what we adults would see as interesting.  And when life’s end approaches- there’s a similar level of patience and content with a conflictless life, though a little more refined for the weathering.  All this bundled up with ideas of innocence and redemption was what I was trying to get at, and didn’t have time to, in that first essay.  Maybe I don’t have it exactly right.  Maybe I minimize the fall “as punishment”.  I don’t know.  That’s just sort of how I’ve come to think of it and, to me, it seems awfully coherent, without being especially rational.