The serpent coiled around and writhed at her insinuatingly. “You thought me beautiful once. Let me just see your child. I can tell you all about your child.”
“Go away, snake!” she shrieked. Still holding the baby in one arm, with the other she picked up the largest stone that she could manage, a boulder much greater than she would have attempted to lift with both arms ordinarily, and heaved it at the serpent, who writhed out of its path and slid away through the underbrush while the stone pounded down hill. When Eve was certain he was not coming back again, she sank down against the tree, exhausted. The child had begun to cry, raising its voice in a long, thin wail, and she sat clutching it to her until her heart had ceased its pounding and she could sing to it again without a tremor of terror in her voice.
When Adam returned with the skin, a very small skin, the child was sucking at her breast, while she rocked back and forth ever so slightly, ever so gently, singing. He threw the skin down at her feet; then, as she looked up at him, smiling, with an expression he had never seen on her face before, he flung himself down beside her, pressing his face against her thigh because he knew she would not allow him to disturb the little creature at her breast, and burst into a perfect passion of tears because of this day which had been the most terrible day of his life.
—
Thus far. For surely Cain was to give Adam far greater pain later on than he did on the day of his birth.
When Abel was conceived it must have been easier. Eve would have understood what was going on inside her body. She would have realized that her swollen breasts held milk for the infant.
If it was difficult to bear the first child, it must have been even more difficult to be the first child. And to be the cause of the first death.
Cain killed Abel. And that was the beginning. Brother against brother. Yankees killing Southerners and Southerners killing Yankees. Puritans killing Roundheads and Roundheads killing Puritans. Protestants killing Catholics and Catholics killing Protestants. Moslems. Christians, Jews, Cain killing Abel…will it ever stop?
When I was writing that old story of Adam and Eve, I was both Adam and Eve. And I am also Cain and Abel. Scripture is not only the living Word of God, it is also my story, and your story. In the pages of Genesis, and all through the Bible, we recognize ourselves. It is God showing us who we are, and who el wants us to be. If we are to have the courage to recognize ourselves as God reveals us to ourselves, we must have the courage to face ourselves, not only the parts which we like or of which we approve.
The story of Adam and Eve, of their making, of their expulsion from the Garden of Eden into a world so much less real that it was almost unendurable, of the birth of their children, is in its symbolic way a blueprint of our own personalities. Each of us will recognize something different, but if we are honest, each of us will recognize something of ourselves.
In a book on Jung by Laurens van der Post I read with awe of Jung’s feeling that we have completely misunderstood the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. We have interpreted it literally instead of mythically. For, Jung points out, what this doctrine is really doing is attempting to return the feminine to the Godhead.
And I thought: How stupid I’ve been! Falling for the old trap of literal-mindedness again.
Perhaps this urge to literal-mindedness is why we pay so comparatively little attention to the Holy Spirit as an equal part of the unity of the Trinity, even in the most charismatic settings. Somehow it does not help to affirm the feminine aspect of the Godhead, or the Holy Spirit elself, by saying “She”—because the concept is far deeper than a personal pronoun.
Though the Holy Spirit calls forth from us all that is nurturing and intuitive, there is also a wildness of which we are afraid, and so we tend to suppress it. The wind of the Spirit can be balmy and tender, but it can also be fierce, can lash waves to mountainous heights, can become a tornado which creates destruction in its path. We rightly equate the Holy Spirit with wind—the word for spirit is the same as the word for wind in Hebrew: ruach.
This wildness is the maternal aspect of the Trinity!
Some people (and I have encountered this feeling in both the male and female of the species, but more often in the male) see the maternal being as totally devouring. The mother wants to eat the child, they say, and so the mother must be killed.
What must be killed, I think, is the false image of the mother we have created. Needing something to blame, we invent an image of the parent which often has no resemblance to reality. And we do need to kill this image in order to be able to love whomever is the real mother.
Let us not blame this image-making and mother-killing entirely on the male. One young woman told me that her relations with her mother were not good, yet her mother always knew when something was wrong, and would call her. She would try to pretend that everything was all right, because she didn’t want her mother to be worried; she felt that she had to protect her mother. I told her that perhaps she needed to “kill” her mother, in order to be able to share with the real person, whose intuitive love did not need to be protected from whatever was troubling her daughter.
As both a daughter and a mother, I know how dangerous our images of our mothers can be. But we are hardier than we realize.
I am grateful for Jung’s insight. It caused me to remember that Meister Eckhart, and many other mystics, have the same disregard for the limitations of sex. Eckhart writes: “The soul will bring forth Person if God laughs into her and she laughs back to him.”
We need a little more merriment and considerably less brittleness as we come face to face with the problems of human and divine sexuality.
Since we are sexual human beings, we cannot avoid thinking about the Adam or the Eve in us. I doubt that it is possible for us to think about God without at least a touch of anthropomorphism (at least as long as our humanity limits as well as releases us). Throughout the centuries all people have wanted to know what God looks like. I am frequently amazed at how many people visualize God as looking like Moses—and Moses in a bad temper, at that. But the God of the Old Testament, the God to whom Jesus remained true, was, and is, slow to anger, quick to forgive, caring about recalcitrant human beings, longing for us to turn to our Maker, to love our Creator, to receive el’s compassionate love. All through the Old Testament el participates in creation, and in the destiny of each of el’s creatures. So the ultimate participation, God’s becoming one of us in Jesus, is no surprise.
We’re in it together, and God is in it, with us.
When our children were little, we had long bedtimes, stories, songs, prayers. And when things happened which were hard for us to comprehend, like a sudden and unexpected death, I would pile the children into the station wagon and drive up to the top of Mohawk Mountain, to the fire-lookout tower, and we would lie on the great, flat glacial rocks and watch the stars come out, and talk about whatever it was that had shocked or hurt us. I’m not sure where the idea came from that all of creation is God’s body, but if we must have an analogy, it is not a bad one.
When I look at the galaxies on a clear night—when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then, instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged—I rejoice that I am part of it, I, you, all of us—part of this glory. And so, when we go to the altar to receive the bread and wine, we are taking into our own bodies all of creation, all of the galaxies. And our total interdependence is an astounding glory.
We are whatever we eat—junk foods, well-balanced meals, the books we ingest, the people we listen to—but most marvellously we are the eternally loving power of creativity. Does it sound incredible to say that when we receive Communion we are eating the entire universe? Of course it does, but it is also incredibly possible, and I rejoice in it.
As for size—as the old southern phrase has it, size makes no never mind. Those two sources of radio emission, sending their messages across millions of light years, are
as close together as the eyes in a beloved face. A grain of sand commands as much respect as a galaxy. A flower is as bright as the sun. But all, all are part of creation. So, as there is nothing we can do that does not affect someone else (we can never truthfully say “it’s my own business”), there is nothing we can do that does not affect God. This is an awesome responsibility, and one which we offer and accept whenever we receive Communion, asking that we may dwell in God and he in us.
This is not, as some people have wrongly assumed, magic. It is faith that God made everything, and that el saw that it was good. Nothing can be separated from God’s love, or from the Word without which nothing was made that was made.
—
When I look at the stars to help me find perspective, I am seeking an alternate reality, one which is deeper and more real than the world of immediate consciousness.
Different people have different perceptions of reality, and our own perceptions change as we move from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood. As Americans, as people whose background is from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the terms of our reality are very different from that of a fundamentalist Muslim whose presuppositions involve bloodbaths and the ritual killing of anyone who disagrees. But to someone within the framework of this reality, his is right, and ours is wrong. Can we be sure we are right? What about the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of anyone accused of being a witch, even if the accusation was false?
We have strayed far from the reality of those peoples of the world who live close to the land, who listen to the language of the birds, the singing of the trees, the message of the clouds in the sky. Our loss.
We are far from the reality of many of the people we encounter every day. I am light years away from the perception of reality of people who find that story is a lie, who believe that to act in a play is a sin, because it is to “make believe,” and who have fallen for one of the devil’s cleverest deceptions, that myth is not a vehicle of truth, but a falsehood.
Like it or not, we each live within our own perception of reality which makes each one of us the center of our particular universe. Some of the thoughts I have just been expressing have come from the overlapping of my own reality with that of the authors of two books I have been reading, Alternate Realities, by Lawrence le Shan, and A Story Like the Wind, by Laurens van der Post. The idea that we are each one the center of the universe has been haunting me for a long time, not because it seems a selfish idea of reality; it need not be; but because it can sometimes narrow our understanding of interdependence, and the necessity for the circles of our realities to overlap. I had even written this down, thinking it was a wholly original idea of mine, and then, as so often happens, the next morning I came to a question in le Shan’s book by Thomas Mann: (I have used language somewhat more contemporary than the translator.)
The world has many centers, one for each created being, and about each one lies his own circle. You stand but half an ell from me, and yet about you lies a universe whose center I am not, but you are….And I, on the other hand, stand in the center of mine. For our universes are not far from each other so that they do not touch; rather, God has pushed them and interwoven them deep within each other.
One of the greatest problems besetting the world today is that across the continents the circles are moving further apart, just at the time when it is imperative that we move closer together so that our realities may once more overlap. Within Christendom I see signs that our circles are coming closer together. But until the circles once more truly merge we belong to a failed church, a still failing church. It was surely not part of Jesus’ plan that the church, the body of Christ, should be broken into opposing and inimical factions. And I find it difficult to believe that condemning others as being incapable of reflecting the message of the Gospels because they belong to the wrong denomination is in any way Christian. What about the story of the Lord Jesus who asked water of the Samaritan woman at the well, or who ate with tax collectors, or who drove seven demons from Mary of Magdala?
One of the sorry results of this brokenness is a loss of understanding that the Trinitarian God we profess is indeed the God who is One, the God who is all. I am shocked at the number of people who seem to think that the second person of the Trinity didn’t appear until Jesus was born in Bethlehem, or that the Holy Spirit never existed before Pentecost. Surely those who accuse us of polytheism are right unless we believe that the Trinity has always been whole, the Spirit moving over the waters in the beginning, as the Word shouted out the galaxies and the ancient harmonies. This fragmenting of the Trinity is reflected in the fragmenting of our own personalities, our fear of our subconscious minds, our intuitive selves. We are crying out with fear against healing with our extolling of youth and our limiting of love to the merely physical. Physical love is a great joy when expressed in a healthy way, but it is far from being the only kind of love.
Despite all the visible signs of brokenness, all the sharp edges, healing is going on today with something of the same radiance as when Jesus brought Jairus’s daughter to life, or gave sight to the blind man on the road to Jericho, or drove demons from a pain-wracked body. It is my hilarious joy to be so clumsy that not only do I fall over furniture, but stumble into and knock down denominational barriers, shoved into them by gracious gusts of the Holy Spirit; and it is a mistake to think that the Holy Spirit is without humour!
I spent a gloriously happy week at the Baptist Bethel Seminary in Minnesota; I have a second home at Mundelein College, where I stay with the Roman Catholic sisters and go to Mass with them (something which was not possible when I first knew them), and an equally happy second home at Wheaton College, which is known as “the Harvard of the Evangelicals.” I have spent happy weekends with the Presbyterians…oh, and so on. But nowhere have I attempted to alter my own voice, to accommodate, to try to speak in a foreign language. Our circles overlap closely; we discover to our mutual pleasure that we are far closer than we realized, and that many of the harsh arguments going on around us are about peripheral things. And so, through the gift of grace, we are given glimpses of that which is really real.
Reality is not something we observe; something out there, as some people used to think that God was something out there. Reality is something we participate in making, as co-creators with God. Making reality is part of our vocation, and one of the chief concerns of prayer. And it is an affirmation of interdependence.
When I turn to the piano and a Bach fugue, I compose it along with Bach as I hear it and attempt to play it. A writer, alone and with great struggle, writes a book. That book becomes real only as someone reads it and creates it along with the author. Each one of us, reading Genesis, will begin to create a new reality. The important thing is that our realities intersect and overlap.
One way of overlapping is to identify with someone else, for instance, in intercessory prayer. To have compassion (com = with, passion = suffering) means to share with another whatever it is that circumstances are bringing to bear on that other. It does not mean to coerce or to manipulate or to dictate (“Of course you must sell your house first thing. After that there is nothing for you to do but leave him. What you really need is a new wardrobe.”); when we coerce or manipulate or dictate we don’t have to be involved with the one we are hoping to help. Compassion means to be with, to share, to overlap, no matter how difficult or painful it may be.
And compassion is indeed painful, for it means to share in the suffering of those we pray for; to love is to be vulnerable, and to be vulnerable is to be hurt, inevitably, yet without vulnerability we are not alive, and God showed us this when he came to live with us, in utter vulnerability, as Jesus of Nazareth.
Preparation for this kind of sharing comes with story. When I identify with Adam or Eve, with Cain or Abel, with Abraham or Sarah, this is practice in identifying with all the people around me, in helping our circles overlap. And it is sometimes practice in recognizing the dark side of myself, the side I would rather not acknowl
edge. Until I can bring myself to acknowledge it, I cannot offer it to God to be redeemed.
If I am both Adam and Eve, so also am I Cain and Abel. Parables and fairy tales make much of older and younger sons. Joseph, for instance, is a younger brother whose ill-advised bragging deserved the animosity of his elder siblings. And Gideon is a younger brother, who by his humble obedience, succeeded in rescuing the exiled Hebrews from their powerful enemies.
We’re a mixed lot, but what a rich mix we are, and what material we provide for story—story which gives us glimpses of truth which otherwise might remain hidden!
About a decade ago I tried to work out my identification with Cain by writing another story:
THE WAGES OF INNOCENCE
If one has had an unhappy childhood, then all of the naughty acts one commits during adolescence and young adulthood, or even later, are explained, understood, and condoned: forgiveness doesn’t really come into it, at least not for me, because I have no idea what it means, or even if I am forgivable.
My childhood was, in any event, odd. I’m not sure whether it was happy or unhappy, because those were new concepts in our world. My brother and I played from dawn to dark. Sometimes we helped our parents, he more than I. He was the younger of the two of us boys, and I think it made him feel big and important to be told he was a help. If our mother was annoyed with our father, she would praise my brother all the more for any little thing he did for her, so he began to get the idea he was better than anybody.
Our parents, I am sure, are largely responsible for what I did. Ought not parents to shoulder the blame for their children’s acts? Our mother and father quarrelled constantly, each one blaming the other for our present low estate. Since my brother and I might very well not have been born in their other estate (though nobody is quite sure about this), they frequently shouted at or hit us because we reminded them that they had known better days. In cold weather my brother’s nose ran constantly, and our mother would wipe it distastefully and tell us that in the old days it had never been cold and had rained only at night. There had been enough to eat and to spare, and they didn’t have to worry about clothes and nobody knew the difference between work and play and the giants didn’t come lumbering around to steal dinner just as it was ready.
And It Was Good Page 7