effing with the Jesus

(Apologies to the Cohen brothers.)

This is like the third attempt to write this post about my other New Year's Project (not resolution!), which is to read the Bible.

I can't tell whether to attribute all my false starts to how I don't have anything useful to say about the Bible/God or to the fact that most people don't want to hear what anyone has to say about either -- and, should they ever (want to), the ratio of them to people who want to share about both is seriously unbalanced. Ride the subway, or walk down Fulton Avenue past the Jesus Christ is Universal Church, and you'll be set until about 2017 (or the Seond Coming -- which, the the kids on the street have it right, should get here well before then).

Anyway, one might not be able to tell it from my potty mouth and general malaise, but God is important to me. And I originally had started this blog in an effort to get myself to actualy engage all the Bible stuff I was reading because honestly, I always start with Genesis, and I always get to that part of Genesis where Jacob steals his brother's birthright, or maybe not even there -- I remember the chapter about scoping out Rebekah and buying her (because she is so eager to water this guy's cattle, and also a virgin: nine out of ten patriarchs love that in a lady!) being super long.

So, this month, I actually got to the end of Genesis, though not to the end of Leon Kass's probably brilliant philosophical treatment of Genesis, which I fully expect to take me roughly until 2014, especially now that I am back in nursing school and supposedly reading about twelve chapters on pediatrics this week. As it turns out, Genesis actually is a  cathartic read for those of us who were raised on mental-health-precluding verses like "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect", but who are imperfect enough to be comforted by the fact that, at least, we are not pimping out our hired help to our husbands or  our daughters to gang-rapists.

Anyway, while I'm not yet ready to say that my husband is right about about religiously instructing our kids -- though those of you who are betting women should probably put their money on it that I will; my penchant for being totally unreasonable and arbitrary when provoked ensures that, given time, I almost always concede exactly that -- it does seem like the goals of said instruction and the realities of child development are at odds with one another.

Given that a young child's immediate interest is most often (always?) how a given situation applies to him or her, it is naturally that kids would understand each Bible story as an imperative. (Regarding the tendency of adult Christians to do basically the same thing: you got me. Email if you figure that one out). From Adam and Eve to the parables, pretty much every Bible story I recall from my childhood concluded with some variation on the same theme: Don't be like [X] and do [Y]. Or, do be like [A] and do [B].

There is the fun-to-remark-upon reality that pretty much everyone is more inclined to do [Y] than [B]; but I've always been more troubled by the fact that a lot of times, the moral imperatives to Do B seem a little contrived. Do be like Abraham and attempt to kill your child? Do be like Lot and ensure that any rapes that go down are heterosexual? Do be like Noah, get drunk, and condemn your kid to perpetual slavery for walking in on your naked, drunk behind?

To me, though, the theme of Genesis, and of each of these stories, that works best is this: God seems kind of arbitrary. Not a particularly astute observation -- this other occasionally blind, often cranky convert got there first.

I don't think that Genesis works as moral instruction -- one reason I've historically been loathe to mine its pages as a guide when I'm in the mood to write discrimination into law . I do think that, taken as a whole, it's a useful primer on the difference between Be and Seem. Wallace Stevens readers might recall that Seem is what concerns us most of the time; those familiar with "being a person" will probably note that our tendency usually to conflate the two. God seem arbitrary; God is arbitrary.

For me, today, my understanding of faith and grace both rely on being open to the idea that Being and Seeing are not the same: that God seems arbitrary only because I'm able to see only a small part of God -- or, you know, of anything else.

For this, Genesis is useful, and because of this, as a mature reader of 30 (!), I am more interested in what it says about God than about what it says about me, or about how I should handle angel-rapists. (I'm still unconvinced that the problem there is gayness, but whatever; as it turns out, I'm not in charge of other people and their interpretive foibles. Talk about grace, amiright?)