KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 September
Dust from the Ground and War in Heaven
You are dirt! And so am I. It is not meant to be an insult! Instead it complements the idea of the dignity of our humanity through the necessary corrective of humility. We are “of dust from the ground,” the dust into which God has breathed the breath of life and “so ‘adam’ became a living being.” From the dignity of our humanity to the dust of the ground, such is the shift in perspective in what are clearly two distinct creation stories set side by side in Genesis.
The challenge is to appreciate and evaluate each of them, first, in their own integrity and, only secondly, to consider in what ways they might complement and correct each other. Genesis 2 offers a very different and much more mythological account which focuses primarily on the nature and place of our humanity as distinct from the cosmic perspective of creation as an orderly and intellectual affair in Genesis 1. Genesis 2 is undeniably anthropomorphic in its descriptions of the Lord God forming adam out of the dust from the ground much like a potter shapes his clay. Yet the passage complements the idea of our being made in the image of God at the same time as it offers a kind of corrective.
There is always the danger of over-emphasizing and misconstruing exactly what our dignity really means, the problem of getting too ‘puffed-up’ about ourselves and losing sight of the real nature of our connection to everything else in the created order. We are formed of dust from the ground. The very word for man here, meaning humankind is adam which is not yet a proper name. It is etymologically connected to the word for ground, adamah.
Just as Genesis 1 counters the idea of the divinization of our humanity emphasizing that our dignity is God-given rather than man-made, so too, Genesis 2 connects us intimately both to the dust and the ground and to God. There is, we might say, ‘the dignified dust of our humanity’. It provides a kind of corrective to Genesis 1, we might say, by emphasizing our connection to the dust and the ground. It counters our tendency to think more highly of ourselves and our relation to others than we should. It humbles us and thus suggests that the true dignity and worth of our humanity is found through humility. Humility incidentally come from the Latin and has as its root, humus,which also refers to the ground. In a way these lessons ground our humanity in relation to God and the created order wonderfully.