Religion/Theology Bookshelf:
And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings
This is the first in L’Engle’s “Genesis Trilogy
Beautiful books, all three of them. I love them.
And It Was Good is the first of the trilogy.
EXCERPT FROM And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings
The story of God’s terrible demand of Abraham is unique and has unique things to tell us. How could a loving Lord, a Lord who cares about el’s creatures, for whom the tiniest atom is of the utmost importance, the hair on a head, the fate of a sparrow, how could the Master of the Universe ask such an unnatural, impossible thing of Abraham?
How indeed? The question has haunted us for several thousand years. In the Middle Ages, God’s demand of Abraham was often the subject of miracle and morality plays. In the beginning of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and Isaac three different ways and still he reaches no conclusion; even today we cannot understand it unless God reveals its meaning to us. Our only proper response is silence, a silence that is echoed following the words from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
In Jerusalem, inside the old city, i went to the great gold mosque which the devout Jew cannot enter because the mosque is built over the place where the temple stood and no one knows exactly where the Holy of Holies was placed. The Holy of Holies is so sacred that the place where it stood so long ago may not be stepped on, even inadvertently. I went in, with my shoes off, feeling deep awe (Moses took his shoes off before the burning bush, and so must we when we approach God’s holy places), and I stood in front of a great spreading rock, the rock where Abraham laid Isaac and raised his knife to kill his son, and my skin prickled. In my bare feet I stood there, lost in wonder at the magnificent incomprehensibility of the Creator, who loves us so much that he came to live with us and be part of us and die for us and rise again for us and send the Holy Spirit to comfort us. And I was, somehow, comforted by the very incomprehensibility of all that makes life creative and worth living.
The story continues:
Early the next morning Abraham cut some wood for the sacrifice, loaded his donkey, and took Isaac and two servants with him.
How must Sarah have felt? What kind of laughter was there in this? Did Abraham tell her what God had asked of him, tell her perhaps at the last moment in order to avoid her tears and protestations? Or did he just take the boy and go? Scripture says nothing, but Sarah was a mother. She had known Abraham for a long time, and there was no way he could have hidden from her the heaviness of his heart.
So perhaps she got it out of him. “Abraham, soemthing’s wrong. What is it? Tell me.” And then perhaps he unburdened himself. It is not good for the human creature to be alone. And what a burden that was for Abraham to carry, much heavier than for the boy. He must have told Sarah, his helpmeet.
In my ears across the centuries I can hear the echo of Sarah’s cry. “God! You know nothing about being a mother!”
Our perception of God has grown and changed through the centuries, but we still have learned little about the mother in the godhead, we have focused so consistently on the father. I understand Sarah’s cry, and the medieval mystics’ radiant affirmation of Christ as sister, lover, All in all. We need that intuitive and casual knowing that as God is in all things, el is also in both sexes; the brittle insistence on God’s femaleness is as limited as the old paternalism…
Did Isaac realize what was happening? Did he scream with terror? Did he beg to be released? Did he try to resist, to escape, to run away? Abraham
took the knife to kill his son; but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
He answered, “Here I am.”
The angel of the Lord said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy. Do not touch him. Now I know that you have obedient reverence for God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.
You have not withheld from me. The angel is speaking in the voice of the Lord, elself.
Abraham looked up, and there he saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it as a sacrifice instead of his son. Abraham named the place Jehovah-jireh; and to this day the saying is: “In the moutain of the Lord it was provided.”
Then the angel of the Lord called from heaven a second time to Abraham, “This is the word of the Lord: by my own self I swear: because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the sea shore.
Perhaps this story tells us more about the nature of man’s understanding of God than it does about God itself. The story is staggering in its simplicity. It never falters. Its very straightforwardness, its lack of explanation is one of the most difficult things about it.
But the Bible is for me — I repeat — the living Word of God, although I do not need to believe that it was divinely dictated by God in a long beard and white gown (a picture of Moses, again) and written down in a moment of time by an angel scribe. It is a great story book written over a great many centures by many people. And when I call it a great story I am emphasizing that it is a great book of Truth. It is the truth by which I live. I do not understand it all, but that does not make it any less the truth.
