An Open Letter to My Sweet-Sixteen Granddaughter (Part 2)

[this continues a reposted "birds and the bees" post from my old blog; here we pick up the story just after God rested from those first six days of creation.]

So everything is wonderful. The time-space continuum is unfolding, the earth and all its fullness, the sun, moon, and stars are out there, and Adam is like a self-portrait in the midst of this work of art. Ah, but this is a work of performance art. This is just the initial motif, the set-up. In the second chapter of Genesis, we take a closer look at some of the events described in chapter one. Here we see how God specifically and personally created Adam, in verse 7:

"And the Lord God formed the Adam of the dust of the ground [heb. 'adamah', see where his name came from?], and breathed into his nostrils the breath [alternatively, 'spirit'] of life, and the Adam became a living soul."

Okay, so we have some more detail here about Adam's creation. The dirt guy. Maybe we should translate 'Adam' in English to 'Dusty'. Anyway, there he is, and God plants a garden in a place called Eden, somewhere to the east of where He had created Dusty, and He takes old Dusty there and puts him in charge of taking care of it. It's all very good, right? Dusty has all the food he/she/they need with fruit trees and other stuff all around in the garden. Oh, yeah, there are these two trees, right in the middle of the garden, one called the Tree of Life, and one called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Dusty is not supposed to eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God tells him that.

"Just one thing, Dusty, don't eat the fruit from that one tree. In the day you do, you will certainly die."

Again, I pursue this train of thought with different emphasis elsewhere. Then in the very next verse, God says,

"It is not good that the Adam should be alone. I will make an appropriate companion for him."

What? Everything was fine, it was "very good". What happened? Well, I had a friend in the Seventies who was a Jewish Christian. He used to say, "They don't call him God for nothin'." And this prompted a corollary on my part, "What God says, Goes." In other words, when God says something, it is true, even if it radically changes reality in heaven or in the physical world. With a word, He called into being the time-space continuum, a brilliant invention for someone who lives in Eternity, a place where time does not pass. Then He filled it with all kinds of cool stuff as an expression of His Glorious nature, and finally He filled the earth with life and made old Dusty, specifically as a self-portrait in the midst of a colossal work of art. And it's all good. So when He says it isn't good for Adam to be alone, from then on it Isn't Good. Now we have some dramatic tension, because Adam IS alone. See why I call it performance art?

I was telling this story to a young woman on the train that took me south on my way to see my mother, and she interrupted at that point and said, "But God is alone." I just about fainted, because she is right. And suddenly, I was thrilled to think I had an answer to a long-standing question I have been asking Him: why the heck did you do all this? Maybe it's a hint that God decided that it wasn't good for Him to be alone either, and we know that some day He will not be alone any more, because we will be with him in the intimacy of the Godhead, collectively an appropriate companion for Him.

But let's get back to Adam. God goes into this artistic counter-move and spends God-only-knows how much time creating a copy of each animal and bringing it to Adam, "to see what he would name it." Again there is a richness of theme in this mythos, but let me stay focused and say no fit companion for Dusty was found among the animals, even the dogs ;-)

So, having made a certain point, God puts Adam into a deep sleep, and does a little surgery. He takes out a rib and uses it to make a woman. Then He brings the woman to Adam (I guess He waited until Adam regained consciousness) and it's love at first sight. Adam, or what's left of him, says, "This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called 'Ishsha', for she was taken out of Ish." Thus he renamed himself and the woman, in light of the new increase in entropy that God had caused. And the Spirit of God, who is narrating this story, breaks away and says, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and bond with his wife, and they two shall become one organism." Organism is a much better translation these days than 'flesh'. A human couple is like a Portugese Man'O'War, or the Star Trek world's "symbiant" beings, consisting of more than one physically different individual, each with a role to play in the whole for it to function properly, each with a deep vital link to the others. A loving human couple, male and female, recreates the original Adamic image of God, and especially when in sexual union. That is my heart-felt opinion. I admit that the Bible does not explicitly state such a thing; but nothing else makes any sense to me. As we, the descendants of Adam and Eve, reach physical maturity, as you are doing, we become aware of a desire deep within us to find a companion; and engaging in sexual union with another person causes a deep emotional bond to form.

With the introduction of the organism consisting of two whole persons, one male, one female, in loving intimacy, a whole world of metaphor about the nature of God and Man opens up. Christ and the Church is like a bridegroom and a bride. And it all feeds back in every direction. Husbands are commanded to love their wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her. This is not an image of possessing a woman like you can possess a dog or a car. The two become vitally involved with each other as members of a greater organism, a super-person. It is about belonging rather than possessing. This is a chance to be more like God, to fulfill the intention of the design: a way to really fulfill that potential and be a living metaphor of God in the World. That is the hope and potential of finding a lifetime companion with whom to live in loving sexual intimacy.

You may ask why not have sex with lots of other people and spread the love around? Well, all I can say is that there is only one God and one mediator between man and god, the man Jesus Christ. He originally made only one Adam and one Eve. There are lots of other ways to be loving to your neighbor. Honestly, I too suffer from the knowledge of good and evil, and so I too have trouble understanding why adultery is so grievous to Him, but it is, Jesus made that very clear. There is a spiritual and emotional benefit to taking your time and forming a loving lifetime companion relationship just once.

There's one last remark at the end of chapter two: "They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed." Now again, don't take that possessive form the way it is usually meant in English. A more accurate modern translation might be 'Adam, together with the woman'. But who said anything about being ashamed of nakedness? The writer of the story did, looking back to the time before sin came into the world. Before that, there was nothing to be ashamed of because their nakedness existed in a state of God-like loving intimacy. Now, however, the state of men and women has changed, spoiled by the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Gaining that knowledge completely changed our perspective on life, separating us from God and each other in a way we were not designed to experience. The stress of this error is what causes ageing and death, to say nothing of all the bad decisions we make all the time about what is good or evil.

Now here is a mystery. I call it that because I don't think the Bible gives a definite answer to this question and so we cannot know this with certainty: something about the way God made our genitalia seems to be inappropriate to look at. I think something about the most private part of the fellowship of the Godhead is exposed in the metaphor of our genitals and looking at the genitals of other people when you are not in the sexual delirium of love is somehow bad (see? there I go with the good/bad thing). I am not a very modest person, physically, but considering my own feelings about being exposed, I think it has to do with what we call human dignity. Perhaps the metaphor exposes God's dignity, which again is not a problem when the other person is in a loving intimate relationship, but becomes humiliating in the cold light of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God took a certain personal risk in creating Adam, and an even bigger risk in separating him into male and female, bringing this thing more into the open. Considering this, it is not we humans who are humiliated by our nakedness so much as God himself. So for His sake, I try to respect this dignity issue regarding my own nakedness and that of others.