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

I wanted this to be open because there are so many other sixteen-year-old girls out there who I think need to hear this, and it wouldn't hurt the boys to hear it either. I know you're busy, so I apologize for running on as long as I did and I'm going to break this letter into sections.

I want to talk to you about sex, about what it means to have a sexual relationship with someone. Sexual activity is one of the most exciting pleasures, the most deeply satisfying, the most emotionally powerful things we can experience. In the wrong circumstances, however, it can be the most violent, ugly assault we can experience. Most of us experience it somewhere between those two extremes, and the key is the relationship we have with the person we are experiencing it with. I think that the power of this experience and the capacity for it to be so good or so bad comes from our origin.

If humans are just a part of the evolution of species on this planet, then the meaning of two people having sex is minimal at best. The mythos of evolution would encourage us to try to choose the best genes to mate with and so advance the species; but it is virtually impossible to do that with any confidence: You never know what will be a useful gene in the future. But sexual activity is about far more than mere propagation of the species. By the way, I use the term 'mythos' to describe a story that explains something about us or the world around us, why we are the way we are, where we came from. Even if you don't accept the story as something that literally happened, as with the Greek or Navaho myths, it often contains profound wisdom and truth.

Consider with me an alternative mythos to Evolution: in the Judeo-Christian mythos, God specifically and personally created Adam, from whom humanity has propagated like a ring of smoke, to be a metaphor of Himself in this physical world. I do accept the Judeo-Christian myth of our origin as something that literally happened, insofar as it is meaningful to say that; but the Biblical account is admittedly poetic. Let's look at some of the details.

Let me first summarize the story of Adam's creation, something I have written about with other emphases here. Prior to Adam, God who is called "Elohim", ie "the mighty ones", created the physical universe and the earth in particular, then He created plant life and animals. He did this by saying things like, "Let there be light," and "Let the earth bring forth plants, with seeds, and fruit trees yielding fruit according to their kind." By using that expression, the Bible leaves plenty of room for evolutionary processes to take place. He created the gene machine and has let it run. But when it comes to Adam, the Bible says, "God said, 'Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness...'". And then it says, "So God created Adam in his own image; in the image of Elohim created he him; male and female created he them." I want to point out two things here: one is that Elohim is a plural noun, but used repeatedly to refer to the God of Israel, who is One God. The idea that God is one is repeated throughout the Bible, and is a foundational concept for Judaism. Christianity asserts that there are multiple persons making up this unified being, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In modern terms, what we have here is a problem with entropy. This multiple-person spirit-being is unified in loving intimacy. Jesus uses lots of poetic language to try to describe his unity with the Father and the Spirit.

But lets get back to Adam. That's the second thing: Adam was also a multi-person being, just like God. Sometimes that passage uses the singular, him, and sometimes it uses the plural, them. Again we have a similar entropy problem, and the analogy, the image God uses to describe the unified but distinct aspects of Adam is that they were male and female. Adam is a single unified physical multi-person being that is a metaphor for God himself. Themself. Whatever.

Now, Adam was the last thing God created in his initial six days of creation. As the first chapter of Genesis ends, it says that He saw everything He had made, and behold (ie 'look at that!'), it was very good. He liked it all so much that he took the next day off, demarcating all that He had done so far from everything He was going to do afterward.