KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 September
And God saw that it was good
The first Chapel services last week began with the hymn, “I feel the winds of God today,” sung to a lovely English traditional melody called Kingsfold. I don’t know about the “winds of God,” but I think many of us certainly felt the winds of Hurricane Dorian! Wind and rain, falling branches and uprooted trees, one of which glanced off Alexandra Hall, the Headmaster’s House, power lines down, no internet. Catastrophic. Yet, unlike the Bahamas, there has been no loss of life, just lots of damage. We are keeping the people of the Bahamas in our prayers, especially in this difficult time of grief, and for all relief and restoration efforts. The experience of the storm raises the question, how is this good? The question relates to the opening chapter of Genesis and to what we heard in verses 6 – 23.
There is a great deal of contemporary concern about safety, about safe places and about feeling safe. But does the culture of safety-ism imply that the world, then, is a dangerous and threatening place? That evil lies outside in the ‘natural’ world? The culture of safety-ism suggests that we, too, are fearful and anxious. Yet one of the great “untruths” of contemporary culture, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, is the idea that you are fragile. The truth is that you are actually quite resilient. Which is why we need to remind ourselves yet again of the great wisdom of Genesis 1 with its recurring refrain, “and God saw that it was good.” Something profound is being said about the world as created and something profound is being said about us.
We can appreciate the wisdom of Genesis 1 by way of comparison to something like the creation stories of the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia. The Genesis story is told in contra-distinction to such accounts which see creation as a struggle between chaos and order. For the ancient Sumerians, who had achieved a great number of practical technological innovations, not unlike our modern world, there was a fearful uncertainty about reality as if chaos might just be greater than order. Chaos just might rise up and overthrow everything. Despite their technological advances, they lived in a state of fearful uncertainty, one of the images of which is Humbaba, the force of the forest who, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, is said to be “the evil in the land” and who, as “a battering ram,” is viewed as a threat to the city. The fearful uncertainty is not just the fear of the unknown but the greater fear of the unknowable, what is literally unable to be known and grasped intellectually. Evil or danger lies outside the city. The world is a fearful, dangerous and deadly place.