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.
The Jewish account which informs Christian and Islamic understandings is very different. Creation is an orderly affair, a process of distinguishing one thing from another, and a declaration of the essential goodness of the created order as a whole and in its parts. Like modern science, too, it emphasizes that nothing in creation is divine. None of this means taking the world for granted. It does mean a respect for the order of creation which is very different from being in a state of fearful uncertainty. The difference lies, I suggest, in the concept of metanoia, about our thinking after the things of the Creator. St. Paul will argue that since creation the invisible things of God have been made known in the visible things of creation. God is not any one of the things of creation; he is their cause and principle. Storms, too, are part of nature and certainly demand our respect for the power of nature. God can use them to teach us things about ourselves. Job, for instance, suffers a whole raft of disasters, all of biblical proportions, yet God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind to recall him to the created order upon which all forms of law ultimately depend. The litany of creation underlies the whole of the Jewish Scriptures like the deep undertone of a pipe organ.
Presented to us poetically and philosophically, the litany of creation here reminds us of the goodness of the created order. “Good” means both the fittingness of things in their being and relation as well as suggesting an ethical sensibility that belongs to all the forms of our thinking and doing. A corrective and a counter to our own fears and uncertainties, perhaps we can begin to see the world in God. This is a bit different from seeing God in the world which runs the risk of reducing God to the world, to a thing, and or simply as something imagined and invented by us.
Already in the Genesis account of things up to ‘the fifth day,’ it seems to me, we are ‘there’ in thinking afterthe things of God. The reading on Thursday and Friday shows us the work of the sixth and the seventh day. Here our humanity comes explicitly and directly into the story. We are the work of the sixth day, not as an after-thought, not as some sort of left-over, but as “made in the image and likeness of God.” It is a powerful statement about the dignity of our humanity. It argues for our connection to everything else in the created order but also about our special relationship to God. We are made in God’s image. What does that mean? At this point, all we can say is that we are made in the image of the one who speaks creation into being in an orderly and intelligible manner and who declares that what is created is good, and, indeed, the whole of it, “very good.” Somehow that must include us. This requires us to think about evil in another way. But in thinking about the goodness of creation and ourselves within that order, we are impelled to think respectfully of the things of creation and so, too, of one another. It means to discover a sense of the dignity of our humanity.
God’s sabbath rest on the seventh day is also about a kind of metanoiaon our part. Through contemplation we enter into God’s delight in the very goodness of what he has made. Every chapel service is a little sabbath, a time to reflect, a time to “be still and know that I am God,” as the Psalmist puts it. Such is our metanoia, our thinking after the things of God which teaches respect for the world and for one another. It makes us strong.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy