Science changed, irrevocably, with the splitting of the atom, and our perception of reality has not yet caught up with this change. We discovered that for every question we have answered, a hundred new questions have been uncovered. For all our knowledge, all our technical advances, we have learned to our chagrin (and sometimes delight) that we know practically nothing.
We are still in the process of tiptoeing over the sill of this new perception of the universe which is, strangely, far more like the universe in which Abraham and Sarah found themselves when they left home and went into a strange land, than it is like the exalted individualism of Renaissance man, or the technocratic smugness of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Our contemporary mystics are the astrophysicists, the cellular biologists, the physicists who study quantum mechanics, for they are dealing with the nature of being itself. Like Abraham and Sarah they are continually discovering the extraordinary mystery of being, and the charting of the worlds within us as well as the worlds beyond us. And we, too, are being asked to leave our comfortable home and go out into the wilderness, like Abraham and Sarah, into the mysterious world of unknown spaces, where there may be famine, drought, hostile inhabitants.
Only one thing was certain in Abraham’s and Sarah’s uncertain world, only one thing stands sure in ours, and that is that the universe is God’s. Out of nothing el created us, and called us into being that we might go out into the unknown and become co-creators with our Creator, in this new and uncharted land where our concepts of space and time are radically different from what they were half a century ago.
So, as always in the face of the unknown, I turn and return to story. The first of the great stories in the Bible is that of Adam and Eve. The point is not which came first, the chicken or the egg, but that it is not good for the human being to be alone. Each of us needs others. Any single one of us, alone, cannot be the image of God; discovering that image within us is not a do-it-yourself activity. Before I can be an icon of the image of God, I must be with someone else, hand in hand.
As there are two creation stories in Genesis, so there are two stories of the making of Adam and Eve, and both make the same point. Despite the proliferation of do-it-yourself books, we can’t do it ourselves. We need each other. As to who came first, Jesus makes it very clear that this is a matter of unimportance. He emphasizes this by stating that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Adam is not better than Eve because he arrived on the scene first; nor is Eve less than Adam because she came second. (Often the butler and the maid begin the play.) It was the storyteller’s realization that it is not good for the human creature to be alone that is important. God has called us to be co-creators, a corporate activity. Dean Inge of Saint Paul’s says, “God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.”
We are most free when we are most willing to acknowledge our interdependence. Adam and Eve were free until they saw each other as separate and autonomous, and afraid of their Creator.
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We never pray alone. Ever. Even if there is no other human being around us who is willing or able to pray with us, we are in the company of angels and archangels. We are surrounded by a glorious cloud of witnesses. And, even when we feel most isolated, there are other human creatures, somewhere, who are praying with us. It used to be required in my church that we read morning and evening prayer, and although it is no longer required, not even for those who are ordained, I am grateful that many of us still find comfort in this daily structure, so that when I am praying in this manner I know that many thousands of people are praying with me. A quiet listening to the words of the Psalms, to the readings from both Old and New Testaments, to the great prayers of the collects and canticles, is often a prelude to the prayers which go beyond words, go deeper than words, leading us from reading to thinking to prayer. And the practice of morning and evening prayer provides a structure to the day which keeps everything in proportion and perspective.
In the spring of the year I am among those who give the oral examinations to candidates for ordination who have already gone through most of the process. They have finished seminary, taken their General Ordination examinations, and are nearly ready for ordination in the Episcopal Church. Our job, in my diocese, is to examine these young men and women in whatever subject they have shown the greatest weakness.
This spring I was examining with two priests who are friends of mine, and with whom I am easy and comfortable and can speak spontaneously. Among those who came to us for examination was a personable young man who had done well throughout seminary and on his exams, but who showed a slight weakness in pastoral concerns. I asked him something I usually ask: “What are your own personal disciplines of prayer?” He replied that whenever it was possible he liked to read morning prayer, but that often he was so busy that there was no time. “All it takes is ten minutes!” I exclaimed. “Why don’t you read it on the john?”
To my amazement, I had shocked him. He asked, “But isn’t that sacrilegious?”
Almost equally shocked by this response, I said, “That is a very unincarnational question.”
One of my priest friends reminded him that Luther had done some deep theological thinking on what, in his day, was called the jakes, and all three of us tried to get over to him that life cannot be separated into secular and sacred, that if God created everything, and called it good, then all of life is good, and only we can see it as sacrilegious. There is nothing which is, of itself, sacrilegious. Just as the act of making love can be sacramental, so can all aspects of our lives, even the most lowly. If we cannot pray in the bathroom, it is not likely that we will be able to pray anywhere.
My suggestion came not out of thin air but out of my own experience. Sometimes when I am on a lecture tour I am so tightly scheduled that there is certainly no programmed time for my reading of morning and evening prayer. But I need the affirmation and the structure they give me, and often the only time and place is in the bathroom. How can it be sacrilegious? God is the Lord of all of my life, and there is no place where it is not proper to turn to my Maker.
Paul said it so cogently in his first letter to Corinth:
Those parts of the body which seem to us to be less deserving of notice we have to allow the highest honour of function. The parts which do not look beautiful have a deeper beauty in the work they do, while the parts which look beautiful may not be at all essential to life!
In the Garden of Eden there was no separation of sacred and secular; separation is one of the triumphs of the devil. All of creation is God’s, and therefore it is all sacred. And when everything is sacred, then we can understand something about freedom.
Part of the meaning of the incarnation is that Jesus en-Christed everything, giving it again the sacredness it had when the Word first spoke all of creation into being.
God created Adam in a sacred world in which it was truly possible to be free. God made Adam, and saw that it was not good for this creature to be alone, and so God gave Adam a helpmeet. It is a marvellous story, and it tells us a great deal about the nature of ourselves and our relationship to God.
Story, unlike theories of science which are always open to change, is timeless. The story of Adam and Eve may have different things to say to different generations in different places, but it always has something to say. Therefore it touches on the nature of reality.
Once again we come to the old question: What is real? I look at my hand, at the bones and veins and skin, at the fingers which can touch the keys of the typewriter and so put words on paper, or touch the keys of a piano, and bring the sounds of a fugue or a sonata into the room. I rub them together and I can feel them generating a healing electricity. I take a whisk in one hand, hold the pot with the other, and stir eggs and butter and lemon juice to make hollandaise sauce. My hands are very real to me. And yet I know that they are also a whirling dance of electrons, and that there are vast spaces between the parts of the electrons. There is
energy in my hands, and energy and matter are interchangeable. The movement of my hands is not contained within the skin and bone, muscle and nerve, but is triggered by that part of my brain which is focussed on the movement of my hands, my fingers. There is far more that I do not know about my hands than that I know. But they are real. I don’t understand their reality, but neither do I doubt it.
If Pontius Pilate did not know what truth was, neither did he know reality, and most of us aren’t much further along the way than he. God creates from nothing, ex nihilo, but we, el’s creatures, can create only from what el has already created and given us. Therefore our reality must be part of God’s reality if it is to have any validity. Could Shakespeare have created Hamlet if such a character were not possible? Isn’t the perennial fascination with Hamlet partly because we all see something of ourselves in this questioning creature, and partly because Hamlet, like the rest of us, is so complex that he can never be understood? But is Hamlet unreal?
I had a delightful letter from a woman who expressed her hope that after death she would meet some of her favourite fictional characters. I agree with her that this would be a delightful aspect of heaven. There are so many I would like to meet—Emily of New Moon, Ivan Karamazov, Mole and Rat, Viola and Duke Orsino, Mary Lennox, and even, I hope, some of the characters who have come to me in my own books.
So story is real. And music is real, and what is real is an icon of our Creator, even if some of us who have been wounded balk at the use of the word Father. A Bach fugue is for me an icon of this reality, and so with my often inadequate fingers I struggle at the piano, in order to get myself back into reality.
And when I go to a museum I am not going just to look at an exhibition of painting or sculpture in order to be au courant with the latest cultural fashion; I am going in order to look for that reality which will help me to live my own life more fully, more courageously, more freely.
So there is no doubt in my mind that Adam and Eve are real.
And one of the first things their story points out is the importance of Naming.
(Here we go again: Madeleine and Naming. She’s like a dog with a bone. True. But anyone who has had a name taken away, as happened to me in boarding school when, at age twelve, I was numbered, 97, not Madeleine, is likely to be overconcerned on the subject of names. Can we be overconcerned? Granted, naming seems to crop up in everything I write, but that is because it cannot, in this day of uninvolved anonymity, be overemphasized.)
All the animals, all the fish and fowl and land beasts had to be named in order to be. And we cannot name ourselves alone. Before we can love each other, before we can dialogue, each one of us has to be named by the other and we have to name in return.
While Adam and Eve were naming the animals, the story is that Adam asked, “Hey, Eve, why are you calling that creature a hippopotamus?”
And Eve replied, “Because it looks like a hippopotamus.”
Are we going to be able to remain God’s creatures who are known by name? On our little ship we could not become friends with any of our fellow passengers until we had exchanged names. “Hello, we are Hugh and Madeleine.” Until we were Hugh and Madeleine we were not quite real. Can you imagine saying to someone, “Hello, I’m 061–12–5619.” That’s Hugh’s social security number, which he has memorized, so when anyone asks, “What’s your social security number?” he is able to rattle it off. But it’s not his name. I call him Hugh.
I do not know my social security number. I have no intention of ever knowing my social security number. I can look it up if absolutely necessary. But if we don’t take care, if we don’t watch out, society may limit us to numbers. I wonder if I could pray if I lost my name? I am not at all sure that I could.
If we are numbered, not named, we are less than human. One of the most terrible things done to slaves throughout the centuries, from Babylon to Rome to the United States, was to take away their names. Isn’t one of the worst things we can do to any prisoner to take away his name or her name and call them by numbers? If you take away someone’s name, you can treat that person as a thing with a clear conscience. You can horsewhip a thing far more easily than a person with a name, a name known to you. No wonder the people who were put in Nazi concentration camps had numbers branded on their arms.
When Adam named the animals he made them real. My dog is named Timothy and my cat is named Titus. Farmers do not let their children name the animals who are going to be slaughtered or put in the pot. It is not easy to eat a ham you have known as Wilbur or a chicken called Flossy.
When we respond to our names, or call someone else by name, it is already the beginning of a community expressing the image of God. To call someone by name is an act of prayer. We may abuse our names, and our prayer, but without names we are not human. And Adam and Eve, no matter what else they were, were human.
At first there was nothing but joy, joy in being created, and in worshipping the God who had created them. And wonder: wonder at sunrises and starfish and dolphin and even dandelions. My husband, who mows the lawn at Crosswicks, hates dandelions, but they are indeed wondrous things, and not to be taken for granted. In early June the big hay field north of our house is white with dandelion clocks, and the prevailing northwesterly winds blow those incredibly productive dandelions clocks right onto our lawn. My husband takes this insult so personally that I am not allowed to put delicious young dandelion greens into the salad. But he does not take dandelions for granted.
Abraham Joshua Heschel says: “The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of being is the root of sin.”
Were Adam and Eve beginning to take the image of God in themselves and the loveliness of Eden for granted? Is that why they fell for Satan’s temptations?
When we take things for granted, then what we have is not enough, and we are rendered vulnerable to the wiles of the tempter. We tend to take our own democratic freedom for granted, and every time I leave this country, especially if I am going to Asia or to South America, I am jolted to a fresh awareness of just how fortunate we are, despite all of the things which are wrong and getting worse. And I wonder anew at our funny, fumbling system, which nevertheless gives us freedoms unknown to people in countries with restrictions we find it hard to conceive of.
If Adam and Eve had remained satisfied, joyous and grateful for all the wonders of creation, for the creatures they had named, for the beauty of Eden, they would not have listened to the tempter, who came to them with the same temptations he offered Jesus: If you do what I say, you can be as God. You can be God.
When we lose our sense of wonder we become dissatisfied with who we are (just as the tempter became dissatisfied with who he was, the most luminous of all the angels); like the tempter, we are no longer content to be created. To love God and enjoy him forever begins to be dull. We are ripe for temptation.
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It is my great good fortune to have for a close friend a woman who is as tall as I am, who was as gawky an adolescent as I was, who sees herself, as she says, as a mouse, but who is the chief health officer of a great city. We have known each other since we were in our late teens, and we have done a lot of growing up together, falling over many of the same stumbling blocks, and picking ourselves up out of the mud, wiping off the blood, and stumbling on. In the late summer she visits us at Crosswicks, and we go into a massive applesauce factory production. A couple of summers ago we were in the midst of the sauce pot and the Foley food mill when our corner of Connecticut was hit by the fringe of a hurricane. The rain and wind were lashing the house when the power went out and we ran out of apples. Without even consulting each other we ran upstairs, put on our bathing suits, and dashed out into the storm to pick more apples, exhilarated by the deluge of rain against our skin and the apples falling from the trees as the wind whipped the branches. Later on I thought how marvellous it is to have a friend, also in her sixtie
s, with whom I can be so foolish and so gloriously happy, full of wonder at the marvel of being. And this sense of wonder is also prayer.
It is this awareness of the marvellousness of creation which helps to keep dissatisfaction away; rejoicing in and being wholly satisfied with being God’s co-creators is a prayer of protection.
To be dissatisfied with who we are is not the same thing as that divine discontent which Plato talks about. Divine discontent is to accept to our sorrow that we are not what we have been created to be. We have fallen far short of our small part in the image of God; we are less than we are. Once we are aware of this we can open ourselves to our Creator, saying, Help me to be what you want me to be.
Whereas being dissatisfied with who we are involves being dissatisfied with being created. We have been given a marvellous role in the great drama, and suddenly it is not enough. But we become discontented with our roles and want our name up on the marquee in brighter and larger lights than anybody else’s.
Adam and Eve lost their joy, their radical amazement at the wonders of being, simply being, being Adam and Eve, being Namers. They no longer looked at the world around them and said,
“This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.”
And in came the tempter.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You can do anything you want to, you know.”
When you’ve stopped being delighted with who you are, it’s very nice to be told you’re special. Even if there’s nobody else around to be more special than, it’s still a pleasurable feeling.
After that we are ripe for the real temptation. “Do as I tell you: Eat the apple; jump from the highest pinnacle of the temple; worship me, and you shall be as God.”
Hubris. Usurping the prerogatives of God.
“Go on then,” the tempter urged. “You won’t die if you eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. The only reason el doesn’t want you to eat it is that el knows that if you do, you’ll be able to tell right from wrong, and then you’ll be as God.”
And It Was Good Page 5
