Given the basic OCD underlying big chunks of my personality/life, I've read these first few chapters of Genesis a lot. I like to start things. (I may also enjoy finishing things, but have not had so many opportunities to find out.)
Mostly, I've read Genesis 5 in the most common, I-don't-get-how-this-is-sacred kind of vibe -- I suspect that I may have given up around this chapter more than once. Moreover, my life in the past week has become --at least in part -- an exercise in articulating and defending a faith that is incoherent to the people I'm talking to, and I don't need an apparently fanciful and otherwise irrelevant genealogy effing me up.
Except that I read it. And I guess maybe I wasn't paying attention before. Not that I'm all about replacing the Sermon on the Mount with Genesis 5, now. But there's more going on there than I would have anticipated.
To wit: the first verses. 5:1 opens up by announcing that this is the record of the descendants of Adam -- but then, in the same verse, shifts immediately to God and His act of creation. This agency, I think, is more important than whether the ages that follow are real or symbolic, or whether the account is meant as a record, or a weird acrostic-prophesy, or whatever. I think what a reader should be looking at is this first verse, and the fact that man has no history apart from God.
Now, I don't think it's a relevant argument in favor of God to say that believing in Him is useful and brings you happiness and peace. That has been my experience, and it's tempting to let it go at that -- but it's insubstantial. The fact that I badly, badly want there to be a God does not speak to (or against) His reality. In fact, in my case, it took a long time not to write God off precisely because I want so badly for Him to be real.
However, it is a fact that when I am not focused on God, I tend to bring a lot of uselessness and unhappiness all around me. And I would say that -- even if my belief in God were wrong -- still, the most fundamental error in my life is to think it's all about me. As increasingly sure as I am about the reality of a specific and personal God, I am even more sure that whatever there is beyond me, there is something beyond me, and beyond the world as I see it. And the reality that I am inseparable from God -- that my account of my own life would begin with a finger pointing directly towards Him -- is comforting, not (just!) because I like it, but (more importantly!) because it feels correct. True.
It's like, this genealogy, like any other story, is just a lot of words by itself. If there's no meaning beyond the facts that are laid out, there's no anything: words aren't things. They only indicate things. My life, laid out without my experience of God, of love, would be the same as this -- a crusty account of dates that seem suspicious, but that aren't important enough to care about. I was born, I did this stuff, I got sick, I died. Without that beginning, which is critical -- the intentionality of it, the fact that God made us that that that act precedes any actions we take between the day we are born and the day we die -- then everyone's life, whatever his or her actions or experiences or choices, comes down to a birth, a span of years, a death.
I think there is a meaning in the way this chapter is written, one that isn't said or thought enough, and one that is critically important. It is: we are born, we have kids, we live, and we die. Apart from the Christ story, I think, this is actually maybe the most profound and most transformative reality of the Bible. It permeates the Old Testament: you, and these details that you believe make you unique, are both less and more than you believe you are. Because in essence, the things that you value now, they do not matter. You have been born, you will live, and you will die, and none of the things or accomplishments you accumulate will really mean that much. Regardless of the genre of this chapter, or whether or not you believe that the dates and ages here are literally true, I believe that that reality is the message of this account. Just as the central delusion of the temptation story is "You will not die," the corrective, here, is that you will.
So the fact that I wasn't productive at work yesterday -- not, in and of itself, really a problem. Husband has a grammy nomination and I feel like my job is shoving the air from my lungs? He was born, he'll live, he'll die. Me too.
I do think that the role of producing children in genesis 5 is significant apart from establishing the logistics of who came from whom. I think it is important that the only thing most of these men did that is worth mentioning, here, is to have a child. I think that other accomplishments -- at least, the ones that we come up with when left to our own devices -- are irrelevant in the face of bringing life into the world. At least, I would say that this is the case in the Old Testament, and that the New Testament draws on this when it extends the focus from your family and your people to all families and all people.
And I think it is especially significant to me to recognize this now. Not just because my biological clock is hammering away like a metronome. But also because life itself is the most relevent thing on Earth, and I am often made extremely anxious and depressed because I forget that, over and over and over again. More than writing a book or running a company, life matters, and people matter; their worth is on an entirely different scale than all these other things we run around doing.
Here, in Genesis 5 they create life and people by having children, and I do believe the incredible importance of children in Biblical accounts is more authentically human than is the indifference to children typical of twentysomething New Yorkers. I also think, though, that the specific role of father or mother is not the important part of the dynamic. The important part is life and people, whether you create, sustain, or engage them. Parenting per se is not this separate and higher calling. It can become just another role, or it can be transformative -- an experience of another life, something that matters much more than any accomplishment or title.
There are these people -- again, educated young people whose experiences have maybe not caught up with their ample philosophies -- who are infuriated that "dumb" people can have children, who resent others for celebrating their families when anyone can have one. But the profound democracy in that makes me think of God -- and I say that despite the fact that I don't know for sure that I can have biological children. But babies are not important because "mother" is a better or more meaningful title than any other. They are significant because ultimately, others, and how you experience and assist them, are what matters, more than any level of education or accomplishment.
Ultimately, it comes down to: you are born, you live, you die; you have x children. These are the things that signify, after the fact of your life. While I, personally, would rather raise children than do anything else, that's not what I am reading here. What I am reading here is that it is God's actions, not yours, that will be remembered. That there is no distinction, really, between a perpetual student and a site coordinator and a homeless person and a surgeon. He was born, he lived, he died. Beyond that, the only thing worth noting is the image in which you were made -- and, while you are living, the obligation that springs from that act of creation.
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