Results tagged “Genesis” from Kristin Swenson

Biologists in FL are working to preserve native species threatened by the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, and they've dubbed it "Operation Noah's Ark." Echoing that story in the biblical book of Genesis, Jack and Anne Rudlow are collecting what critters they can house in their Gulf Specimen Marine Lab to preserve and then release when the danger is past. The whole matter is so heartbreaking.

So many good people who have worked so hard over so many years to conserve, preserve, do the right thing. And then this. In a virtual instant, irresponsibility wrecks havoc on a colossal level. So many innocent creatures- -- dolphins, fish, birds, and turtles -- suffering torturous deaths because of our insatiable thirst for profit and cheap energy.

And I think of the little girl I met in Richmond some weeks ago. A beautiful child with long blond hair that fell in loose curls to her waist. In all her eight years, she had never cut it. Yet she determined that the next day she'd join whoever else showed up (at the Children's Museum, I think it was), to cut it all off -- "to help with the oil." The program is called "Matter of Trust." Her mother, wistfully running her hands through the girl's hair, explained that they'd been told that human hair has a unique capacity to sop up oil. In my mind, "obscene" was the word that pierced the sorrow. Compare her sacrifice, her concern and commitment to BP's profit, politicians' popularity, and our obstinate demand for oil.

Sorry for the downer, but there it is. Meanwhile, the sun shines its summertime heat on the green Virginia hills, storm clouds thunder through at night, and Beaver Beverly's guy Vernon has ambled up from the pond where she's busy working to have himself an afternoon snack of the maple shoots sprouting in the shade. He's within the dogs' scope and territory... if they'd just raise their big sleepy heads to look. They're all safe for now.  

The storied "sea" (actually a freshwater lake) where Jesus performed miracles among its fisher-folk and from which Jesus called his disciples to become "fishers of men" is now off limits. Galilean fish stocks are so depleted that Israel has instituted a ban on fishing there, in effect for two years, in the hopes that that piscis population will rebound. For those of us who know Galilee from the gospel stories, it's easy to get sentimental, wishing for a 21st century reality just like we read about Jesus' first century one.

But as Louis Jenkins' poem that Garrison Keillor read on today's Writers Almanac reminds us, "Everything changes." He observes, "Dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers and then the bread makers all went to rummage sales along with the exercise bikes."

I've been thinking with church groups lately about what the Bible says about environmental issues, and how different the message can be when we consider that everything changes. That we today can radically transform our conditions, that we can take for granted safety from wild animals and the weather and have no worries about access to food makes Genesis 1's command to subdue and have dominion mean differently than it did in its ancient context.

In the case of Galilee, it means a fishing ban -- active care and wise restraint -- in what would seem on the surface to be directly opposed to Jesus' encouraging such industry. The biblical notion of controlling and ruling over the non-human natural world is transformed into intelligent stewardship. Paradoxically, that would seem to be exactly what the biblical texts promote.

Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court got me thinking about Jewish traditions of justice, at least as the Bible suggests and reflects. Near as I can tell, it bodes well for the work she'd be doing. I don't think it's a stretch to say that justice is a major preoccupation of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) -- the Jewish Bible. 

One thing that makes me optimistic, if Kagan is informed by these roots, is how the Bible clearly champions justice while accepting that the just thing is not always immediately clear. Rather, doing justice requires wrestling with the particularities of certain circumstances (think of all those specific "laws" in Exodus and Leviticus, for example), balancing absolute "thou shalt nots" with the fact that sometimes we do anyway, and determining where and when is the most just thing actually mercy.

Then there's the central role of debate, argument, and conversation in determining how best to execute justice. Sometimes, the Bible supports different sides of the same issue, as I briefly note in one of Bible Babel's chapters, inviting us to bring our own experiences and judgments to the table. Shoot, even God's judgments are subject to review and debate!... by human beings, no less (think Abraham in Genesis 18). In the Bible, priority and emphasis lie with doing the right thing, yes, but figuring out what exactly that is requires diligent wrestling, argument, and the confidence to be humble. Here's hoping that Kagan brings that spirit to the bench.

Atheist students at a Texas university are offering porn in exchange for Bibles arguing, "same diff." Inflammatory, to be sure, but are they right? The Bible is indeed full of racy material, from its very first book on. Robert Crumb's Genesis in graphic novel form warns on the cover that adult supervision is recommended. The Song of Solomon's highly suggestive erotic poetry is inspiration for a line of Christian sex toys that you can buy at Book22.com (in one Christian ordering of the books, it is the 22nd). In the New Testament, Paul explicitly lists some of the ways that people "got off" in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Revelation, the final book of Christian canon, describes in gory (albeit symbolic) detail the whoring of Babylon. And that's just a wee sampling of the sex. But pornography isn't just about sex, is it? There's something more that makes it what it is... and so difficult to define. There's something of the forbidden and shameful about it. There's the debasing and humiliating, the using and abusing of others for a temporary pleasure that drives porn. Violence and the horrors that lay a person out raw, which we watch hungrily, disaffected and complicit. Isn't that combination -- the repulsive and our inability to tear our eyes away from it -- porn, too? 

Wouldn't it be nice to say that the Bible includes no such narratives, images, and invitations? But it does. Saul is castigated for showing mercy to a vanquished king, so we watch smugly as he carries out the righteous act of butchering Agag. We watch as a nameless woman, gang-raped and left for dead, is cut into eleven pieces to rally the Israelite tribes against their own. The prophet Ezekiel likens the capital cities of Samaria and Jerusalem to two young women and proceeds to subject them to graphic humiliations and abuse. We watch comfortably even titillated, knowing that "they deserved it." Doesn't Jesus's crucifixion -- an innocent submitting to a twisted power of the state, of hatred and fear, brutally humiliated and strung up in bloody torture... and accepted as somehow right and good -- meet the criteria for porn? Paul's stern rebukes (whether they came from him or became attributed to him) of women thinking, acting, and speaking with equal humanity as men, and the ways in which those texts have denied women their fullest expressions of humanity... is that porn? Or when biblical texts serve the purposes of the powerful to circumscribe individual growth and even to dehumanize the other... well, a case could be made.

Finally, though, the Bible is isn't the same as the porn those university students are handing out. It is far more rich and nuanced. It is also full of the very things that lead us to push back against the arrogance of brutality and to cringe and to cry out in sympathy and compassion for the oppressed and abused. Even while it throws into our faces the ugliness of hatred and fear, violence and humiliation, it invites us to challenge (demands that we do!) whatever is life-denying to the least of these, the poorest, and most vulnerable. For that's finally what each of us is, what we all are. Hannah's song becomes Mary's Magnificat. Power is overturned and the weak become the strong. Expectations and assumptions are derailed and reborn in compassion and joy. 

If we loose our grip on what the Bible can and cannot do, on what we allow that the Bible says and doesn't say, then maybe we'll witness the Bible embrace what seems pornographic only to assimilate and transform it into a mandate for the fully realized life for all beings in a family at home on this breathing earth.

Doing some research on images of angels in biblical texts, I came across the captivating icon painted by Russian Andrei Rublev around 1410. Men, angels, or God? The peculiar story of Abraham and Sarah's visitors in Gen 18 uses a constellation of Hebrew vocabulary that has intriguing theological implications. For Rublev, it afforded an opportunity to meditate on the Christian mystery of the Trinity. In this icon depicting Gen 18, Rublev gives the messengers halos and wings. Not only that, but although the story appears in the Hebrew Bible (and predates Jesus by centuries), its interpretation in Rublev's hands is an exquisite representation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

This makes me think about the business of taking texts out of context. We are right to be anxious about such practice, but can there be a place for it, too? Maybe it's a little like grammar -- once you know the rules, you can break them. So long as you know about the Bible well enough to know that Gen 18 is not "about the Trinity," you can go ahead and meditate on how it could be about the Trinity.

Although scholars debate whether the figure on the left or center is Jesus or God the Father, it would seem that the central figure is Jesus -- the color and style of his clothes are typically used in this form of art for Jesus. The meal they share is at once the meal prepared by Sarah, who hurries to bring the best (and hears from the visitors that finally she's to have a son), and the Eucharist, commemorating Jesus' sacrificial death and resurrection. Rublev's Three-in-One God is both host and guest -- a gracious image of profound hospitality, simulataneously communicating paradoxical ideas, as art so richly enables us to do.

One of the most iconic images of western art is Michelangelo's "creation of man" in the Sistine chapel. You know the one -- a stirring painting depicting an impressive old man God reaching from the clouds to touch the outstretched hand of a young Adam. But just what, exactly, is that image based on? Genesis tells the creation of human beings in two places -- the first chapter, in which an invisible God creates humankind, male and female, in God's image; and the second chapter, in which an anthropomorphic God fashions a human out of humus and breathes life into this creature. It is endlesslessly fascinating to me how biblical texts are interpreted and reinterpreted, sometimes uncovering hints or suggestions embedded in the rich layers of biblical texts and sometimes adding layers to the layers that are already there. This is the Bible as living text. And interpretation at the hand of creative masters in their medium of choice is intriguing delight. The Vatican Museum in collaboration with the Italian Il Sole 24Ore is publishing a series of four volumes called "The Painted Word" that discusses the ways that artists interpreted the Bible in the visual feast that is the Sistine Chapel. Mom, Dad: great gift idea, but in English, please.

I've just begun (re)reading Milton's "Paradise Lost." Truth is, I don't remember ever reading the whole thing through before. Snippets here and there for lit classes over the years but never from the beginning to the end. What a ride it is! And to think that Milton wrote it blind. Contemplate that, for a minute.

This, too, impresses: Where most English translations read Gen 1:2 as "the spirit of God hovered over the face of the deeps," Milton follows the Hebrew verb describing the spirit like a bird "brooding" over the waters. That's the way that verb appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible -- the protective hovering of a bird over its nest... though Milton imagines the spirit in a masculine form impregnating "the Abyss" below despite the Hebrew's feminine Spirit subject in this verse.

But that's small stuff -- a tiny example of the thousands of ways that Milton appeals to and shifts the biblical text. Fascinating. I'm still a little puzzled by the bad guys that open the story. I mean, Satan appears to be a different character than Beelzebub, and there are cherubim and seraphim in hell. Well, back to it, as the dark powers prepare for war.

Countless visual representations of the Garden of Eden creation story narrated in Genesis chaps 2-3 depict a crisp apple as the downfall of Adam and Eve. Yet the original Hebrew reads simply "fruit." Without knowing that, we English speakers (and readers) can be excused for assuming that it was specifically an apple such as a Gala or juicy Granny Smith, since that's the way that the Hebrew is often translated -- Eve ate from the apple, shared it with Adam, and bye bye Paradise. Translating like that makes a certain kind of sense, since "apple" used to function in English to describe all sorts of fruit. But even before that, when the text began to be translated into Latin, the translators introduced an evocative wordplay: they translated the Hebrew "fruit" with "apple," which in Latin is malum -- not incidentally related to malus, meaning "bad." Poor guys clearly never had my mom's apple pie...

Anyone's who's read through the book of Genesis, from The Beginning to its portentous end in Egypt, knows that it's pretty darn graphic -- horny gods mate with human women, men try to rape angels, there's fratricide and the near murder of a boy by his father (commanded by God, no less), a daughter-in-law rights wrongs by seducing her errant father-in-law, and brothers massacre an entire town of freshly circumcised adults. And that's just some of what goes on. Well, now R. Crumb has rendered the story as a bona fide graphic novel. Here's a sample. I'd love to hear what you think!

On the NBC sitcom, "30 Rock," the optimistic, smile-y, and just plain aw-so-cute character Kenneth the Page declared, "science was my most favorite subject, especially the Old Testament." It's a hilarious poke in fun at a serious debate raging today -- Should the Bible's narratives about creation inform ideas about the earth's origins? Or: If a person takes the Bible seriously, must he or she necessarily reject the scientific theory of evolution?