My mistress sent me to the master to have sons for her. The custom was strange to me. But she explained how the master’s grandfather, one Abraham, had had his first son by his wife’s maid, and that it was the way of their people. The master took me moderately kindly, for if my fair beauty is strange to these rough people my body can still awaken desire. He was gentle, but quick. And when my body filled with his child I was given milk of goat and camel to drink, allowed to stay away from the cook tent with its rank smells of oil and garlic, given whatever I asked for to eat, the fruits of home, pomegranate and wild pear.
The birthing times, especially the first, were beyond my comprehension. The midwives were there, the most skilled my mistress’s old nurse. I longed simply to squat, with one woman of my tribe experienced in deliveries to urge me along. But no, my mistress was there, trying to make her body part of mine, and when, after the hours of anguish, the child burst forth she claimed it as her own.
Strange people. Strange customs. However, it was my breasts that had the milk, and I was allowed the child at feeding times, allowed, too, to keep him clean, then hand his tiny perfection back to waiting Rachel.
Twice I did this for her, twice bore sons in her place, willing because she was kind and full of sorrow and shame, because Jacob was a fair lover, and because I enjoyed the freedom from the heavier burdens, freedom to take time to think what it means to be a woman.
If I had the choice, would I be a man in this strange tribe whose god is a man, rough and wild, leaping on my master in the dark and striking him on the thigh so that he limps, and will forever move that one leg with difficulty and pain?
My goddess does not come so close, though she, too, is wild, as are the deities of all the tribes. The goddess orders the courses of the moon as well as women, and the turning of the seasons and the tides tells us when to sow and when to harvest, when to plant and when to lie fallow. Tells the women to rejoice in our slender wrists which, no matter how much we labour in the fields, will never be as strong as a man’s, but are more deft and delicate.
When we are children we play together, boy and girl, not paying attention to our differences which are merely genital. Our bodies for the first years are otherwise indistinguishable. Then what hardens in the boys softens in the girls. Our breasts bloom like small flowers and our hips curve into roundness. We can no longer run as far or jump as high, or wrestle friend or brother to the ground, though we may try, unwilling to give up our wild freedom, even after we have become women.
But we and the boys are no longer the same. The difference used to be no more than a matter of standing or squatting to let out our water. Now our women’s bodies are warm and full like new wineskins. And when they empty of a child, our breasts in turn are full, bursting with milk. When the child can toddle, our hips are small shelves on which we carry them, sitting astride us in comfort. Let a man try to hold a child this way and it slides down his thigh.
There are tribes where women proclaim themselves to be the same as men, sit astride wild horses, throw spears, gnaw meat off bones. Their hair is full of lice. They stink, and yet the stink is not a man’s. It is folly, I think, for a woman to try to be a man.
And why? When I was a child it was the women who were wise. The oldest ones could listen to the goddess in the moon, the angels in the stars, listen well enough to warn us of earthquake or of drought. It was the old wise women who were heeded, honoured by the men. When a child was born, male or female, it was not merely a source of pride for the man or prestige for the woman but of joy for us all, and the goddess laughed her pleasure with us.
Here my sons were hardly mine once they were weaned, but possessions of Jacob’s pride. Even after Rachel had a child of her own my sons were still more hers than mine.
Sons. How greedy Jacob was for sons! Leah with her strange eyes, gave him four. Then her maid, Zilpah, gave her two more to add to Jacob’s quiver, and then Leah filled it further, with two more sons and a daughter.
I still remember how good it is to be a woman, to give an offering of love, as I gave to Reuben, Jacob’s first son—to give, instead of being taken.
It is the calling of women to give. Men believe that it is their prerogative to take. I would rather be a giver than a taker.
If it is thought less to be a woman than a man, how can a woman give? It is in the nature of a woman to give love. Ish! Will I ever give again?
What vision did Levi have of the universe? Was he awed by the magnificence of the stars at night? Or was he so tired by the day’s work that he retreated to his tent? Certainly, if he thought about it at all, his understanding of the universe and his place in it was simpler than ours.
Simpler than ours. The planet was still sparsely populated. When flocks had eaten the pastureland bare, the nomadic Hebrews moved on to fresher fields, even if it meant pushing out people who were already there. But that was all right, because God wanted them, his people, to have the land, so the heathen didn’t matter.
He hath shewed his people the power of his works, that he may give them the heritage of the heathen.
Alas, these words of the psalmist have been behind our treatment of the native Americans, and England’s Empire. Is this what God really wants?
But God, El, the God of Joseph and the patriarchs, seems to be almost two separate gods, the tribal god whom Bilhah found so offensive, and who still offends many people today, and the God who was the Maker of the Universe, Creator of the Stars, the All in All, the God of Love who still lights our hearts.
The tribal god can be described and defined. The God of love, the God of beginnings, cannot. And we have the desire to define, to encompass, to understand with our minds, rather than our hearts, the God we proclaim.
For Joseph and his brothers, this little planet was, of course, the center of all things, with the stars glistening in the sky for their pleasure, the sun and the moon for their sole benefit. When the Creator had created the universe in a brilliant burst of love, had seen what had been made, he called it good, very good, but it had been assumed that nothing was really very important until God had achieved the pinnacle of Creation in the persons of two human beings, Adam and Eve.
This anthropic point of view continued, basically unchanged, until well into the Middle Ages. Even after the birth of Jesus most people saw the universe very much as Joseph and his brothers saw it, despite the fact that God had come to us as Jesus of Nazareth in the most extraordinary outpouring of love that can be imagined—though, alas, it cannot be imagined. How can we understand that God cared so much about this sorry planet that the Creator Elself came to visit? To be with us as the Lord Jesus who lived and died and rose for us? And then, after the Ascension we were sent the Holy Spirit to give us strength.
But as far as the physical understanding of the universe went, this planet was still the center of all things. Joseph in Egypt was able and willing to change his way of looking at the world. He may have been spoiled, but he was also bright and flexible. Throughout the centuries many individuals have been willing to be flexible, while their institutions have not. All institutions resist change, and whenever anything happens to alter what the institution has decided is the right picture of God and the universe—not only the right picture but the only picture—they resist. It is frightening to be told that the “truth” that the institution has been teaching is not the “truth” after all. But it isn’t the truth that changes, only our knowledge. Truth is eternal, but our knowledge is always flawed and partial.
The way we look at the making of the universe is inevitably an image, an icon. Joseph, standing out in the desert at night and looking at the sun sliding down behind the western horizon, turning to see the moon coming up in the east, understandably saw the sun and the moon as heavenly bodies that revolved around the earth. That, indeed, is how it looks to all of us. We may know that it is not the sun that is setting, but rather our planet that is turning, nevertheless the evidence of our eyes is that the sun sets.
As our kno
wledge changes, our images, our icons, must change, too, or they become idols. Our understanding of the universe today is very different from Joseph’s understanding, but we, too, must be willing to allow our understanding to change and grow as we learn more about God’s glorious work. We still tend to cling to our own ideas, or what we have been taught, or told, and to feel threatened if anything new is revealed. What we know now is probably as far from the way God really created as the patriarch’s limited vision and version. How do we stay open to revelation?
It must have been a cozy feeling to believe that the earth was Creation’s center, with everything else revolving around it for our pleasure. The self-satisfied human ego got a terrible blow in the sixteenth century with the Copernican Revolution which displaced earth as the center of the universe. But finally it had to be acknowledged that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, and that instead of the sun revolving around us, we revolve around the sun.
Human pride and self-satisfaction got yet another blow when it was seen that our sun is only one of many in our great galaxy the Milky Way—so gorgeous to look at when I am at Crosswicks, our house in the Litchfield hills, and I walk the dogs at night and see it flowing across the sky. I look up and try to understand that our solar system is a tiny pinprick in that great river of stars, and a relatively unimportant one in the exurbs of our spiral galaxy. It is the way we now understand God’s Creation, but it is still only partial understanding. The truth I hold to is that it is all God’s, joyfully created, and that it is good.
After it had been accepted that our planet was part of a solar system in the Milky Way, then came the even more humbling realization that the Milky Way itself is not unique, but is an ordinary spiral galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies all rushing away from each other to the distant reaches of space.
It was no doubt a good thing for the human ego to learn about the immensity of the universe. And in this century we have discovered not only the vastness of the macrocosm, but the equal vastness of the microcosm, the almost unimaginably small world of subatomic particles. It gives some idea of the smallness when we realize that subatomic particles are as much smaller than we are as the galaxies are larger than we are.
But this knowledge also had the effect of making the thinking, questioning human creature seem pretty unimportant. Who are we that God should be mindful of us? Worse than that, to some people it seemed that we are God’s biggest mistake, with our unending wars, our terrorism, our greed which has caused us to be poor stewards of the land given us to nurture. How do we account for man’s inhumanity to men? What has happened to God’s image in us?
Even when we list our great saints and artists, Teresa, Julian of Norwich, Bach, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, nothing we do seems very important, set against the enormity of Creation.
The God I believe in is greater than anything I or anybody else can conceive. But part of my faith is that the Creator who made human beings with at least an iota of free will does not diminish that marvellous and terrible gift by manipulating us. God is not a Great Dictator. Every once in a while when life seems nearly unbearable I might long, fleetingly, for such a God who has already, as it were, written the story, but I do not want to be part of a tale that has already been told. God calls us to work with our Maker on the fulfilling of Creation. What we do either moves us toward the Second Coming, the reconciliation of all things, or holds us back.
Yes, each of us is that important, and this can be very frightening. With our abuse of free will we have increased the ravages of disease; our polluted planet is causing more people to die of cancer than when the skies and seas and earth were clean. But this does not mean that we have to throw out the idea of a God who loves and cares.
What kind of a God of love can we believe in at this point in the human endeavor? How do we reconcile God’s love and the strange gift of free will?
As a human parent I have had to learn to allow my children to make their own mistakes, to become free adults and so, truly human. I cannot rush in and correct every error in judgment, or fix everything that goes wrong. The children of parents who attempt to do that usually end up as emotional cripples. The message of the Incarnation underlines the message that is all through Scripture: God cares about Creation. God is in it with us. If we hurt, God hurts.
If we abuse our free will, we hurt God. If we really cared about God and Creation, how could we continue to cut down the rain forests? To tear apart the ozone layer? To forget that our grandchildren will suffer from the results of our greed? What is happening to us human beings? Have all our icons become idols?
An icon is the opposite of an idol. An icon is an open window to the love of God. An idol is a closed door in the face of God’s love. We must be sure that our symbols remain icons, rather than walls, like the Berlin Wall, or the Maginot line, or the Iron Curtain—all of which have shown their fallibility.
Whenever we get too sure of ourselves we get a comeuppance. The Church Establishment stubbornly resisted giving up the Aristotelian idea that the earth is flat, with heaven above, hell below, a sort of cosmic sandwich. It was a blow to human pride to discover that the earth was not in fact a sandwich, but a slightly pear-shaped sphere. What did that do to the ideas of heaven and hell? It staggered some people for a while. Where, indeed, are heaven and hell? Have we been able to move beyond the literalism of the Middle Ages?
When Copernicus died in 1543 he had started what came to be known as the Copernican Revolution. This Polish doctor and church administrator displaced the earth as the center of the universe. Instead, from his observations he deduced that the earth is a planet, and this denigration of our place in the scheme of things was a bitter blow to human self-satisfaction. When Joseph dreamed of the sun and the moon and the eleven stars bowing down before him his cosmology was the old one of the earth as the center. But finally, in the sixteenth century, we had to acknowledge the falsity of the old image and adopt a new one.
What a terrible shock to the establishment that had taught its people that we are the center of everything and the reason for everything else! No wonder the Church went through the furious and futile process of denial. The closed, comfortable system had been burst asunder, and this produced anger and panic, rather than joy and wonder.
Giordano Bruno, one of Copernicus’s disciples, shocked the establishment further when he conceived of the universe as infinite, and filled with countless stars which were suns. And then Johannes Kepler came up with the distressing realization that the orbits of the planets were not circles, but ellipses. The circle was considered perfect. How could planets travel a course that was less than perfect? What did this do to God, and Creation?
Nothing, of course, but we creatures have often confused protecting God with protecting our own ideas. We get frightened, and so we focus on peripheral ideas instead of on the glory of God and all that has been made. We cling to our untenable position and are afraid of changing it, unable to laugh at our grand statements and move on.
Throughout the centuries many grandiose statements have been made, both by scientists and theologians, yet most of these statements have had to be revised and expanded, if not discarded. How difficult it was for the Church to let go the image of planet earth as the center of the universe! Now it no longer upsets most people that our planet is in an ordinary solar system in the Milky Way. The important thing is that we still belong to the One who created it all.
When Darwin’s discoveries indicated that perhaps the world had taken more than seven earth days to make and that it was considerably older than anybody had expected, this shook many people so badly that they felt that they had to choose between God and evolution, with a terrible misunderstanding of the beautiful interdependence of religion and science. A while ago when I was at Berea College in Kentucky I was asked the usual earnest questions about creationism vs. evolution.
I laughed and said that I really couldn’t get very excited about it. The only question worth asking is whether o
r not the universe is God’s. If the answer is YES! then why get so excited about how? The important thing is that we are God’s, created in love. And what about those seven days? In whose time are they? Eastern Standard Time? My daughter in San Francisco lives in a time zone three hours earlier than mine. In Australia, what time is it? Did God create in human time? Solar time? Galactic time? What about God’s time? What matter if the first day took a few billennia in our time, and the second day a few billennia more?
I told the student at Berea that some form of evolution seems consistent with our present knowledge, and that I didn’t think that God put the fossil skeletons of fish in the mountains of Nepal to test our faith, as some creationists teach. But if I should find out tomorrow that God’s method of creation was something quite different from either creationism or evolution, that would in no way shake my faith, because that is not where my faith is centered.
Thank God. If my faith were based on anything so fragile, how would I have lived through my husband’s dying and death? How would I continue to live a full and loving life? My faith is based on the wonder that everything is contained in the mind of God, all that we can see, all that we cannot see, all that is visible and all that—like subatomic particles—is invisible. All the laughter, all the pain, all the birthing and living and dying and glory, all our stories, without exception, are given dignity by God’s awareness and concern.
But we get frightened, and we begin to wonder if all this explosion of knowledge doesn’t make us so tiny and insignificant that we don’t even count in the vastness of Creation. In the enormity of existence, we ask, Is there really a point to it all?
That there is, indeed, a point is something that all who believe in Christ affirm. We may not always know what the point is, but we base our lives on God’s knowing. When we say that Christ is Lord we are affirming that God cares so much that we get the point, that the Second Person of the Trinity came to live with us, to be one of us, just to show us the point.
Sold into Egypt Page 5
