Before I even get into the intensity of my identification with Hagar in this passage, I hve to deal with Sarah, again. It's such an old story, cathartic whenever you see it, in PT Anderson movies and in bio-movies-of-the-week and in Disney and in chick lit. You start out from this place of insufficiency, and that lack makes you human, and likable; anyone could identify.
And then the good things everyone wants for you, happen. And you turn ugly, turn entitled. Look at your servant -- a single mom whose baby dady comes home to you and your kid every night, whose adolescent son is cut out in favor of an infant, and you don't see the ways in which your life is made better, and easier, at her expense, or that while you were the one who brought her into this, she never asked to be part of any of it. And you say: get her out. Fuck her.
And what you're not doing, is giving other people the hope you were intended to give -- or, at least, are capable of giving. I don't think the point of praise is to let God know how awesome He is, though I guess I do have a sense that when you praise God, things are as they should be, they way they are when a theorem is employed in reaching an elegant conclusion, or when justice is served, or when I am caring for a human being who needs what I can provide. Besides that rightness, though, I think praise is essential for us, so that we can see the world as it is -- a good place, a place with possibility, a place to respect and appreciate and revere. I think that praise, that bearing witness to what you have been and what you are, now, is essential because it allows people who have lost things to see that their loss is a loss -- not an indictment, not a failing. It lets them see that their pain is part of something universal and temporary.
Once, I was fifteen, and smart, and loved, and so unhappy that I thought swallowing all the pills my family had was the next right action for me. Once, I could not get through a day without sleeping with a stranger, cutting myself, or throwing up a hundred dollars' worth of food. Once, I hated myself enough that I could not find a single word to say to stop a random friend from ejaculating into my eyes while I passed out. Whether because of my own weakness or stupidity or failings, or because life is what it is, and not what I would have special-ordered, my life was painful and asinine and unproductive and lonely.
Now, it doesn't hurt like that. It doesn't always feel awesome, but I have been restored in a way that I should, by rights, be worshipping God over every day. Because it felt so shitty before that the only kind of comfort I could imagine was to be violent to myself -- and now I can see, even when I am hurt, that I don't need to starve or be hurt or die to correct what hurts me.
And the proper response to that, I believe, should be this conclusion: that life is essentially good, and that I know it is, because I have experienced it. God is good, all the time, because look: I wake up and I want to live. I can work, and love my husband and family, and be useful, and give to others, and I did not think I could do anything besides eat and throw up and hate myself. And to the extent that this is only my life that is this way -- could there be a greater opportunity, privilege or obligation than to find a way to help along this transformation in others?
But I forget that. I forget that moment where I realized that I didn't have to live that way, when I realized that I was comfortable in my skin, that my life was something I wanted. We forget that we would have done anything for a child, and then we have one and now we just want everyone to do things our way, because who are they, compared to us? What is what they have, compared to what we have? So what can they be worth, when we have everything and they have... nothing as good?
And God, here, is like, listen to Sarah. She's right about this; Isaac's the son I intended for you. But it doesn't change this: that Sarah, here, is small in the same way I, Amanda, am small. That she is missing the entire point of Isaac, which is: All nations will praise Me because of you. And so this chapter ends, not with Sarah -- the miracle God promised -- but with a miracle that basically eclipses hers, even though hers is the point.
I mean, who do you remember, here? Who makes you remember what God is? Not Sarah, who has already forgotten how she begged and planned and threatened to get her child, who already thinks this is just one more thing she deserves. The chapter moves on: she didn't get it, really, even after her son was born. Fail.
It's Hagar who's the mom, here, and it's Hagar who God delivers and with whom the story ends. She ends up with nothing except her son, alive, surprise watar, and this: that, Sarah having missed the boat entirely, God turns his grace on her, and she gets it.
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