And It Was Good

by Madeleine L'engle

  We reached the field and the sheep and my brother lying where I had left him, his blood drying on the grass.

  My mother flung herself upon my brother, covering his body with hers, crying to him to get up, to move. “O my son, my son,” she cried, “my son, my son.”

  “I didn’t know about death. I didn’t know,” I said loudly. “I am not guilty. Therefore I am innocent.”

  My father stood very still. All about him there was a kind of terrifying quietness. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, but my father did not move.

  “I am innocent,” I said again.

  At last my father spoke, slowly, heavily. “Innocence is not enough. When your mother and I chose to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, innocence was lost. You were ignorant, perhaps, but not innocent.”

  “Then it was your fault. It wasn’t mine.”

  “We are responsible for our actions,” my father said. “This is what it means to be human. In this we are different from the dragons and the dinosaurs.”

  My mother still covered my brother with her body, crying out to him. My father left me and went to my mother. He knelt beside her and beside my brother. He did not look at me again, or speak to me. It was as though I was not there.

  He held my mother, at first gently, then, as she began to scream, roughly.

  My father knew my mother. He took my mother away and knew her.

  After a time I had a baby brother. They called his name, Seth.

  How sweet he was, how tiny, tender, and soft. I did not remember my other brother that way. But I was not allowed to touch this little one. Every once in a while as we squatted around the fire at dinner, my mother would reach out her hand almost as though she were going to touch me. But then instead she would reach into the bowl of food, or put the baby to her breast. My father was no longer angry; he was, instead, sad, except when the baby laughed. But he said that I was no longer to be trusted. After a while I left them and went off to live my own life away from them. The Lord God set a mark upon me so that no one would kill me for bringing death to the world. And NoName laughed at me and said that now all my questions were answered.

  O Lord, my God. I think I could have loved my baby brother.

  As chapter 5 of the Book of Genesis begins, Adam and Eve have left the Garden; Cain has killed Abel; and Adam and Eve have a third son, Seth. Seth has had a son named Enos, though there is no mention of who Seth’s wife is. But there must have been people around, for the last verse of chapter 5 reads:

  And to Seth, to him also was born a son, and he called his name Enos; then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.

  Not until then? Was it because the memory of Eden was becoming dim, and the easy communication with the Lord who walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening was no longer possible? Was it a longing cry of homesickness? As the Lord had called out when Adam and Eve had eaten of the fruit of the forbidden tree, “Where are you?” in wounded love, so were el’s people now beginning to ache from their wounds and to call out to their begetter? Was that the beginning of conscious, verbalized prayer? In the Garden, prayer had been all of life; eating, knowing each other, sleeping, all were part of prayer. So wasn’t the Fall the breaking of life into fragments which needed to be put together again by prayer?

  Chapter 5 begins:

  This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him, male and female.

  The ancient Hebrew lived in a completely patriarchal society, so this reiterated insistence on male and female as the image of God is all the more extraordinary, and all the more wonderful.

  Seth was probably the child who gave Adam and Eve the most pleasure and the least grief, though we do not know a great deal about him, beyond his genealogy. He had a son, Enos, who was important not only because it was after he was born that men (male and female) began to call upon the name of the Lord, but because he was an ancestor of Enoch. Enoch walked with God; that is far more important than that he begat sons and daughters, including Methuselah.

  Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

  God took him. He didn’t die, like other people. He walked with God, and God took him, as el later took Elijah the prophet.

  In terminology which barely overlaps my own circle, Enoch was raptured.

  I sometimes see a bumper sticker which I find disturbing. It reads: IN THE CASE OF THE RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED. That strikes me as being highly irresponsible. I have a vision of a VW bug careening along while the occupants are wafted out through the roof, paying no attention to the other cars on the highway being smashed by their abandoned vehicle.

  (When my Anglican priest son-in-law, Alan, first visited my husband’s family in Tulsa, my mother-in-law asked him barely before he had time to get in the door, “Alan, do you believe in the Second Coming?” “Yes.”

  That was only the beginning. Later on that day he and Josephine were taken on a drive around Tulsa. Josephine had visited there a good many times, so the focus of showing off the beautiful city was on Alan. A friend of my sister-in-law was driving, and suddenly she asked, “Alan do you believe that at the Second Coming our feet will have left the ground before Jesus’ feet touch down?”

  My sister-in-law interjected quickly, “Alan, that’s the courthouse over there. I do want you to have a good look at it. Dad spent a lot of time there.”

  To worry about whose feet are where at the Second Coming strikes me as trivializing the Parousia, and yet the questioner was utterly serious. Another case of circles not overlapping. What appears irrelevant to me was important to her.)

  However it happened, Enoch walked with God, and God took him. Already, in chapter 5 of Genesis, God is trampling on death, telling us that death is not going to have the last word.

  And, by the end of chapter 5, Noah has been born, and so have Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

  —

  Five short chapters, and already this Book of Books has outdone the bestsellers: sex, the supernatural, violence, murder, and the strange, almost science-fiction story of Enoch, simply vanishing from the face of the earth, after a full life, of knowing his wife and begetting children, Enoch was taken by God. Perhaps, if we walk with God our sense of wonder is untouched, we retain our joy at being simply who we are, faulted and flawed, but God’s. Perhaps if we walk with God, our lives are truly nothing but prayer.

  For outrageous imagination, chapter 6 outdoes chapter 5. And yet—is it imagination? (Can we imagine anything which is not real?) In the beginning of chapter 6 we read:

  And it came to pass that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives…

  Who were these sons of God? One theory is that they were fallen angels, which is why things went from bad to worse with poor, fallen human nature. Another theory is that they were an advanced race from a distant galaxy whose space ship was crippled perhaps, forcing them to land on this backwards planet. In any event, they married with us natives, and that is why we have our Leonardo da Vincis and Shakespeares and Beethovens…

  And perhaps…but who knows what really happened? The Bible does not tell us, and thus far we do not know.

  And then we read,

  There were giants in the earth in those days.

  Giants? All folklore includes stories of giants. In almost every culture there is some version of the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk—Jack, the naughty boy, who ends up outwitting the even naughtier giant.

  But is it only folklore? What about the outline of the great chalk horse in England, a long, running horse which can only be seen from a distance? Or, even stranger, in Peru there are extraordinary markings which are visible as patterns only from the air. From the ground they appear random, but from the air it is apparent that they are not random at all, nor are they accidental patterns of nature; they are deliberate design. What they mean, and who made them, we do not know, just as we do not know more than a fragm
ent of the complex and sophisticated culture of ancient Peru, a strange country, a frightening country, a country of ghosts and unknowns.

  There were giants in the earth in those days,

  says verse 4 of chapter 6, and it continues:

  When the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

  And then, immediately following in verse 5, we read,

  And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil.

  What happened? What turned the people’s hearts to wickedness?

  We don’t know. Very likely it was the same things which turn people’s hearts to wickedness today, discontent with who they were and what they had, so that they were easy prey for the temptations of hubris; selfish pride and greed and envy; boredom, lust, violence—all of which result in other people being treated as things, rather than the wonderful creatures, the children of the Creator which we really are.

  So verse 6 goes on to say,

  And it repented the Lord that el had made man (male and female) on the earth, and it grieved el in the depths of the heart.

  Repent is a word used frequently in connection with the Lord of the Old Testament.

  The Greek word for repent is metanoia, meaning to turn completely around, to reverse directions. The thing which may seem strange to us today is that the word repent, as used by the ancient Hebrew, referred not only to us creatures, but to the Lord: We have done evil in the sight of the Lord, perhaps if we amend our sinful ways el will repent and take away the harshness of the divine judgment. God, in other words, was as free as we are to have a change of mind.

  After David had lusted after and taken Bathsheba, after she had conceived a baby by him, and he had planned that her husband be deliberately killed in battle in order that he might marry her, the baby of this illicit union became ill. While the baby had sickened and lay dying, David put on sackcloth and ashes and fasted, praying that the child might be spared. But when the baby died, he took off the sackcloth and ashes and asked for food. And he was asked why he wasn’t wearing sackcloth and ashes and fasting now, now that the child was dead. And he replied: What for? As long as the baby was alive there was a chance that God might repent, change el’s mind. But el did not, and the baby was dead, so there was nothing to do but get on with life.

  There is considerable contemporary argument about the possibility of God’s changing. I was sent a sermon recently in which the preacher (whose name was not included) talked about the inadvisability of believing in a “God who is always changing, and therefore, inevitably, becoming what we want him to be.” What’s inevitable about that? The God to whom David prayed for the life of his son did not change as David would have wanted. The writer of the sermon said, “I am not sure I can worship a God who gives me what I ask for and who is always changing according to the way in which the world changes.” But who is to say that if God chooses to change, he chooses to change in the way in which the world changes? It may be completely the reverse, I do not know whether or not, or how, God changes, only that el will be what el will be, and that is what el wills, not what I will. Perhaps there are people who see God changing according to their own manipulation of him (the masculine pronoun again; it gives me an idea of how I feel about this). Manipulation is idolatry, not faith. My faith tells me that God is utterly trustworthy, and that el’s love of us is infinite and unfathomable. As long as the Lord will be what el will be, a living Lord still involved in creating, it is always possible that el will repent, either to forgive us when we are truly sorry for our sins, or to punish us when we are discontented, and often don’t even know we are sinning, unless there is a prophet to point it out.

  And prophets frequently aren’t listened to. The great prophets did not concern themselves overmuch with foretelling the future. Instead, they pointed out to the people that they had turned away from the living Lord and were worshiping false gods (mammon, sex, self-righteousness, holier-than-thou-ness, greed, lust, avarice, destructive criticism, judgmentalism…). So, when

  God saw that the wickedness of people was great on the earth….it repented the Lord that he had made these creatures, and el said, I will destroy man (male and female) whom I have created from the face of the earth.

  But—and why on earth?

  Noah (of all people)

  found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

  Noah: the first of the great Old Testament heroes. An ordinary man, with wife and children, enjoying the legitimate pleasures of the flesh, and enjoying wine rather too much.

  Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

  The Lord gave Noah specific directions as to how to build the ark, and as I read these directions, I’m not sure how seaworthy the ark sounds, but that doesn’t matter, because the Lord is the Director of the heavens and the earth and the seas. Noah listened to the directions, and he did what the Lord told him to do. That’s the first thing the Old Testament heroes have in common: When God spoke to them, they recognized the Lord’s voice, and they listened, and they obeyed. They might argue; they might obey reluctantly, but they obeyed.

  And here we come to a mighty question: How did Noah, and those to come after him, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, how did they know that it was the voice of the Lord they were hearing, and not the voice of the tempter? We human beings have often, with the best will in the world, confused the two.

  When the crusaders, believing in the holiness of their cause, slaughtered orthodox Christians in Greece, whose voice did they hear? I have a beautiful Jerusalem cross, but I would never wear it in Greece, because it is a symbol of the massacre of Christians by Christians.

  In our own daily lives, in smaller but nevertheless significant ways, how can we tell whose voice it is we are hearing?

  Sometimes we can’t, for the tempter is extremely clever, and is a superb mimic. But he always slips. If there is even a touch of any of the temptations offered Jesus after the baptism, then it is not the voice of the Holy Spirit we are hearing. If we are gently patted on the back and told that we have a particularly devout and effective prayer group, if we are complimented, ever so gently, on the depth of our spirituality, if we are set apart, even a little, from the rest of creation, then we can make a reasonable guess as to whose voice we are hearing.

  When I ride the subway; when I think of the angry man who swung his plastic bag full of bottles at my old dog and me; when I read about drug pushers and rapists, it is not always easy to see these people as my brothers and sisters; but they are, and if I draw my skirts aside then I am drawing away from part of all that God has created. The hem of Jesus’ garment must often have been dirty.

  If anyone says, loftily, that so-and-so is not saved because so-and-so is a Roman Catholic—or an Episcopalian or a Seventh-Day Adventist—we are equally setting ourselves apart, and this setting apart is always a sign of the presence of the tempter. If we look down from the heights of our theological sophistication on the enthusiasm of the hymn-singers and alleluia-and-praise-the-Lord shouters, we are setting ourselves apart or, even worse, above—another sign that the tempter is breathing sweetly upon us.

  John Wesley was a brilliant preacher, and one day after he had preached a great sermon, he was approached by someone who told him what a magnificent sermon it was.

  “Yes, I know,” he replied. “The devil has already told me.”

  It is very disturbing to some people to accept that Satan and the fallen angels speak in tongues. Of course they do. After all, an angel is still an angel, even if fallen. We’ve all heard of churches which have been visited by the Holy Spirit, where the people have praised the Lord in tongues, where joy has abounded in the loveliest possible way. But, as so often happens, if these gifted people begin to think that they are even slightly more gifted and slightly more saved than the rest of the congregation, then it is no longer the Holy Spir
it who is speaking through them, though they may not have noticed the takeover.

  Of course Noah was special. I am special. Each one of us is special. It is when we begin to feel more special than that the trouble begins.

  Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. God didn’t dwell on that, but told Noah how to build the ark, and then told him to bring all the beasts of the earth and fowls of the air into the ark, by sevens, not by twos, as the old song has it. Building the ark cannot have been easy for Noah. Not only did it call for great physical labour, but it must have evoked the laughter and scorn of his friends and neighbours, who probably thought of him as no more than a doom monger.

  But as the Lord told Noah it would happen, so did it happen, and water covered the face of the earth, and all life that was not in the ark perished.

  When finally, after forty days, the torrents of rain stopped and the sun came out, God set a rainbow in the sky as a covenant between the Creator and el’s fragile creatures.

  And how fragile we are! The end of chapter 9, from verse 21 on, demonstrates this. Here Noah and his family have been chosen from among all the people of the earth to survive the flood and repopulate the planet. Noah planted a garden and a vineyard, and grew grapes, and made wine, and got drunk, and one of his sons “saw” his father’s nakedness, as we euphemistically translate it.

  Human, frail, faulted, flawed—out of this sorry clay God produces the people, male and female, who are to do el’s will, to be el’s image. How strange and wonderful that the image of God is not made from an accumulation of perfection and virtue, but from blundering creatures who nevertheless struggle to listen, and to love.

  So the earth was repopulated, and life went on much as usual. People were perhaps no worse, but there’s no evidence that they were much better. Shouldn’t they have been better, after all that had happened? But they weren’t.