How much do I love the story of Abram/Abraham? So much that it's my love for this story, as much as, or more than, my mild-to-moderate OCD, that brings me back to Genesis 12 after about 6 weeks.
The thing that I love most about 12:1-12:3 is the how specific -- and, simultaneously, how unspecified -- it is. It's not that the plan is not there; it's just that Abram is on a need-to-know basis. Only the first, less amazing, part of the promise is open to him: I will make of you a great nation, yes, but also: I will bless you. Here is the real heart of what God promises, I think, and Abram isn't yet able to understand that and gets sidelined by the much-smaller, more attainable Part A. Because what matters more is what God doesn't entirely go into here -- or what He says, understanding that we won't really get it just yet. I will make you larger than your own life, your own expectations. I will show you where to go.
I'm only beginning to get how the human-blessing of Being a Great Nation really serves as an appetizer for the main course of being part of God's work. You'll be a great nation, but you, Abram, will also be part of My team, of what I do. The amazing transformation of Abram and Sarai is this leap from having such a clear sense of what you think God wants, to allowing that God will transform you into what He wants -- that He will determine what it means to be blessed. It's the process of loving God and wanting to be great, to wanting to be what God wants you to be, because that is what being great has come to mean.
I think, all the time -- although still! less often than the all the time I thought this, before -- I think: This is what God wants for me. God wants ME to leave everyone and go be a missionary; He wants ME to be an MD/PhD, He wants me to [insert personal ambition here]... and I have to remember, each day, that what I believe God wants, is for me to grow close enough to Him that I will just do what He asks of me, today, and listen for what He wants next. That my desire is not to invite God into my life plan, but to offer up my life to God so that I can have the privilege of being part of His plan.
The seduction of the alter-call narrative of faith, of the self-help, Gospel-of-prosperity, Prayer-of-Jabez kind of story, is this: a lot of the time, I want to make this commitment that will absolve me of having to stay close to God, to keep listening. I want a transformation that will Take Care of It for me. But when I am brought closer to God, I kind of get that what that kind of transformation does, is keep me wanting to listen for God, always, every day, because I don't want to miss what He wants from me. And I have come to think that He asks us to do His work in the first place as a means to this particular end -- because through learning to really attend to Him so we don't miss anything, we become close to Him. I believe that God gives us work to do because through striving to determine and then carry out this work, we can learn each day how totally we depend on Him. That closeness -- not what we accomplish through Him -- is the purpose of our involvement in His plan.
It's hard, and I don't always get it. But the beautiful thing about Abram/Abraham is: neither did he. And the next several chapters really speak to how this call is just one moment in this 100-plus-year journey called Abram-thinks-he's-figured-it-out-oh-wait. Which is not unlike my own experience of God and His will; which is why this may yet become "A Brooklyn Lady Blogs... Genesis."
Friday, February 26, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
Genesis 11, Or, Babel, Tennessee, and more philosophy
So I closed out 2009 with a pissy little row with my husband, plans to stay in education if the NYCTF accepts me, and the tower of Babel. Which is another story that served me well as a budding young agnostic and serves me less well as a Christian.
Strauss is actually pretty instructive, here. Not because I have actually waded my way through The Beginning of Wisdom to its section on Genesis 11 - though that would be great, right? -- but because his read on the Fall, and his answer to its critics, is similar to mine on Babel. If my powers of interpretation were worth the tens of thousands of dollars of debt I incurred while honing them, Strauss is saying that it's a lousy critique of God that He "can't, or won't" find a way around the problem of sin for us. Students inevitably ask Strauss why God put Adam and Eve near the tree if He knew they would eat from it. To which Strauss its like, maybe this is just how humanity is. Maybe God was warning, not ordering; maybe -- and this might be my own extraction, so don't quote me as saying Strauss said it -- but, you know, maybe God doesn't make the rules so much as He is the rules.
At which point my conception of God shifts, and I think: maybe God is not essentially like us, at all, and the problem is that we all claim to worship Him but really are just trying to appropriate Him. Maybe Christ as the human Jesus was something more of a stretch than we want to acknowledge and God is something a lot less humanoid than we can handle. Maybe He can't just go in and override the system because He is the system, and it/He has to take the long way around for reasons I don't understand.
So it's not like, This is God's will (which, fuck you, people who say that about other people's loss!) It's more like, That super-sucks. But I know that it ultimately will be okay, although I, as yet, have no way to rationalize that. Because I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I am coming to believe that those are the three words most essential to growth, and to progress. And in that light, the Fall and Babel can both be read as attempts to evade that claim -- attempts that don't piss God off, per se, but that He (unlike us) is in a position to recognize as essentially futile and ill-advised.
Strauss is actually pretty instructive, here. Not because I have actually waded my way through The Beginning of Wisdom to its section on Genesis 11 - though that would be great, right? -- but because his read on the Fall, and his answer to its critics, is similar to mine on Babel. If my powers of interpretation were worth the tens of thousands of dollars of debt I incurred while honing them, Strauss is saying that it's a lousy critique of God that He "can't, or won't" find a way around the problem of sin for us. Students inevitably ask Strauss why God put Adam and Eve near the tree if He knew they would eat from it. To which Strauss its like, maybe this is just how humanity is. Maybe God was warning, not ordering; maybe -- and this might be my own extraction, so don't quote me as saying Strauss said it -- but, you know, maybe God doesn't make the rules so much as He is the rules.
At which point my conception of God shifts, and I think: maybe God is not essentially like us, at all, and the problem is that we all claim to worship Him but really are just trying to appropriate Him. Maybe Christ as the human Jesus was something more of a stretch than we want to acknowledge and God is something a lot less humanoid than we can handle. Maybe He can't just go in and override the system because He is the system, and it/He has to take the long way around for reasons I don't understand.
So it's not like, This is God's will (which, fuck you, people who say that about other people's loss!) It's more like, That super-sucks. But I know that it ultimately will be okay, although I, as yet, have no way to rationalize that. Because I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I am coming to believe that those are the three words most essential to growth, and to progress. And in that light, the Fall and Babel can both be read as attempts to evade that claim -- attempts that don't piss God off, per se, but that He (unlike us) is in a position to recognize as essentially futile and ill-advised.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Genesis 8-10, or, There is no free lunch
I started Leon Kass's The Beginning of Wisdom this week, so, to a degree, that will probably be informing some of the next posts. His reading of Genesis -- which, at maybe page 12, I already kind of love -- places it in a philosophical rather than mythological or historical tradition. Hopefully, then, some of my upcoming posts won't have to dwell so much on apologetics -- the downside of reading through the lens of "This email fight I'm having with my atheist ex-boyfriend."
I especially appreciate the license to get away from arguments over carbon dating and the age of the earth and acknowledge the book itself. There is an inherent order and logic in these first chapters of Genesis that is wholly rejected by non-believers and tends to be overlooked by literal readers bent on establishing the physical reality of the non-human events in Genesis. This order is less present, maybe, in the cosmology of the creation story, but it's certainly there in the human stories: If you do right, are you not accepted?
The error, I think, in thinking of God as a control freak who lets us die because we deserve it, is that it personifies Him too much, too literally. God created the universe; I don't think He is wholly distinct from it. It is not a thing He made; in addition to its creation, He continues to be the source of life and nature. And -- as all but the most utopian sci-fi geeks will tell you, if you violate nature, either you, or it, has to go.
But if you depend on nature, if you can't exist without air to breathe and food to eat, there's no real choice, correct? If it comes down between your immediate well being and the order of the universe, one can survive without the other, and not vice versa.
I read this story of the Flood, here, as God torn because He wants to violate that order, because His love is such that He would forgive us anything, if it came down to that. Being omniscient, of course, He can't: you can't look the other way when you see everything. There's no sleight of hand to get away from the fact that man must die, or the perfect order on which he depends will be violated. God, who made the system in the first place, is a God who orders the world in a rational way. He can't make a system that isn't just, one in which actions have no consequences.
But then, look at His love, here, after the Flood. Like a parent for a child, on that parent's very best day, He is ready to let it go. His first conversation with Noah when they're off the boat is not about a moral or lesson; it's a gift and a promise.
God doesn't say, here, to stop sinning. He doesn't remind us of whose fault this was, or tell humanity to never do this again. He says, "Be fruitful and increase in number, and fill the Earth." There is no reservation about welcoming back onto His earth the creation that He had to wipe out because of its ugliness. He has an idea in his mind of the earth He created. And He knows that after a great deal of pain, things will be okay again. And He looks to that, rather than the imperfection and pain that is still to come. He sees what is good. The depth of this love is the best picture of what humanity can be. That we have any of this capacity for grace within us is the justification, I think, for our existence in the first place. It makes clear why God would work so hard to save us -- because as long as that spirit is possible, we carry in ourselves the possibility for this kind of beauty.
I think, too, that the sacrifice in this chapter is important. God understands here that it is not a moral good to be free from obligation -- that, without the reminder of dependence and reverence that ritual and sacrifice instill, humanity will fall away from Him even faster. It can't be taken for granted that humanity will stay close to its Creator, that His inarguable right to our worship will ensure it. He knows we need some understanding of the alternatives to His infinite goodness, or it won't mean anything to us. He knows that, by establishing a covenant, He gives us a role that will hopefully afford us the pride to stop abandoning Him, the sense of self to tolerate and appreciate our dependence on Him.
I especially appreciate the license to get away from arguments over carbon dating and the age of the earth and acknowledge the book itself. There is an inherent order and logic in these first chapters of Genesis that is wholly rejected by non-believers and tends to be overlooked by literal readers bent on establishing the physical reality of the non-human events in Genesis. This order is less present, maybe, in the cosmology of the creation story, but it's certainly there in the human stories: If you do right, are you not accepted?
The error, I think, in thinking of God as a control freak who lets us die because we deserve it, is that it personifies Him too much, too literally. God created the universe; I don't think He is wholly distinct from it. It is not a thing He made; in addition to its creation, He continues to be the source of life and nature. And -- as all but the most utopian sci-fi geeks will tell you, if you violate nature, either you, or it, has to go.
But if you depend on nature, if you can't exist without air to breathe and food to eat, there's no real choice, correct? If it comes down between your immediate well being and the order of the universe, one can survive without the other, and not vice versa.
I read this story of the Flood, here, as God torn because He wants to violate that order, because His love is such that He would forgive us anything, if it came down to that. Being omniscient, of course, He can't: you can't look the other way when you see everything. There's no sleight of hand to get away from the fact that man must die, or the perfect order on which he depends will be violated. God, who made the system in the first place, is a God who orders the world in a rational way. He can't make a system that isn't just, one in which actions have no consequences.
But then, look at His love, here, after the Flood. Like a parent for a child, on that parent's very best day, He is ready to let it go. His first conversation with Noah when they're off the boat is not about a moral or lesson; it's a gift and a promise.
God doesn't say, here, to stop sinning. He doesn't remind us of whose fault this was, or tell humanity to never do this again. He says, "Be fruitful and increase in number, and fill the Earth." There is no reservation about welcoming back onto His earth the creation that He had to wipe out because of its ugliness. He has an idea in his mind of the earth He created. And He knows that after a great deal of pain, things will be okay again. And He looks to that, rather than the imperfection and pain that is still to come. He sees what is good. The depth of this love is the best picture of what humanity can be. That we have any of this capacity for grace within us is the justification, I think, for our existence in the first place. It makes clear why God would work so hard to save us -- because as long as that spirit is possible, we carry in ourselves the possibility for this kind of beauty.
I think, too, that the sacrifice in this chapter is important. God understands here that it is not a moral good to be free from obligation -- that, without the reminder of dependence and reverence that ritual and sacrifice instill, humanity will fall away from Him even faster. It can't be taken for granted that humanity will stay close to its Creator, that His inarguable right to our worship will ensure it. He knows we need some understanding of the alternatives to His infinite goodness, or it won't mean anything to us. He knows that, by establishing a covenant, He gives us a role that will hopefully afford us the pride to stop abandoning Him, the sense of self to tolerate and appreciate our dependence on Him.
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