Pondering the Story

For years I have pondered the garden story in Genesis 2-3. The story is part of a larger conversation in the ancient Middle Eastern culture about what it means to be human, including such stories as Adapa and the Gilgamesh. To be human, so goes the ancient conversation, is to be between: between the animal and divine worlds. We are, first, animal: mortal, time-bound, of the earth. But we also possess divine knowledge. We can and do make things. And destroy things. We are dangerous, almost divine, animals.

Gilgamesh captures our betweenness by contrasting Enkidu, a primeval human, with Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah, sometimes called Atraḥasīs, “Surpassingly-wise,” which could be taken as “Knowing-too-much.” In his original state, Enkidu is at home with the animals, and they with him. But when he awakes to human consciousness, the animals flee him. He has become estranged from nature. In contrast, we meet Utnapishtim and his wife at the end of the story, old as eternity. Survivors of the great flood, they have acquired everlasting life, but it seems a drag. Everlasting life is not all it’s cracked up to be, the epic seems to suggest. 

Human life, its glories and its sadness, is to be found between those alternatives: between the primeval Enkidu, who knows too little, and the jaded Utnapishtim, who knows too much, between the animal immortality of not know and divine immortality. At the end of epic, Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine at the beginning, has become fully human: mortal, sad, yet seeing the promise of human life as if for the first time.

The Genesis garden story engages this same discussion in much the same terms as the Mesopotamian conversation.  Who are we? the story asks.  We are, it tells us, dust of the earth, and therefore mortal. “Dust you are, and to the dust you return,” says the Lord God (Genesis 3:19). We share the dust with all the rest of creation. But we are also the knowers of good and evil, knowledge we share with divinity (3:22). This gives to human life both its possibilities and its perils. It gives to our lives their peculiar flavor.

On a recent trip, we found, as we often do, a small, somewhat eccentric, bookstore—a find. In it, my wife happened on a slender volume from the late Nobel Prize winning poet, Louise Glück, entitled The Wild Iris (1992). The volume was the winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. On our way home, my wife read some of the poems to me. It quickly became apparent that in Wild Iris Glück was working the imaginative landscape of the biblical garden story. She never mentions the Genesis story explicitly, but the poems circle around the biblical themes, opening the Genesis story in fresh ways.

Conventional Theology

Reading Glück serves as an antidote to the conventional theological reading of the Genesis story. We were taught in Sunday School class (and for some of us, in college and seminary) two things about the Genesis garden story: first, that it’s a fall story. Not just a fall story; the fall story. As a fall story, it is supposed to explain what happened to the human race: how humans went from good to bad (and how the rest of the universe fell with us).

Second, conventional theology demands that the story is “historical,” that it happened pretty much as Genesis account says: an original human couple, unblemished by sin, at a given point in time thought a rebellious thought, ate a piece of fruit, and hid from God—however you want to construe it—and in that way brought down the wrath of God on themselves and their descendants, including all of us. 

None of this makes sense of the story nor of human evil nor of natural disasters nor of much of anything else. It’s amazing that this reading of the story has had as long a life as it has had. If the Genesis story is true, and I believe it is, it must be true to life. And if it is true to life, it cannot be threatened by new historical or scientific knowledge. It must open for us what human life is about, convey to us a wisdom would not otherwise know. The problem with the conventional theological reading of the garden story is that it fails to do any of this. 

Report 44

I recently reread a synodical report on “The Nature and Extent of Biblical Authority,” submitted to the synod of Christian Reformed Church in 1972, known in the denomination as “Report 44.” It was regarded by many as a brave attempt by the church fifty years ago to work its way through some of the issues of biblical interpretation, including how to read the garden story in Genesis. The writers of the report were my teachers—good men, all (and all men). But in the end, the report fails in all the predictable ways.

It starts well enough, trying to work out a view of the Bible as a whole, its canonical authority. But when the report reaches the garden story in Genesis, it leaves the Bible behind and falls back on the theology of the day. It claimed that regardless of how one reads the story, it must be “historical”: there must have been a real couple in a real garden who fell from grace and thereby doomed the human race (and everything else). Why must it be so? Not because the story requires this reading, but because the theology of the church in that day required it (and in many places still does). The writers of the report had no other choice. They had to affirm the conventional theological reading of the story, if they wanted to remain in the good graces of the denomination.

The Wild Iris

In contrast to this theological reading of the garden story, in The Wild Iris Louise Glück imagines her way into the story and finds the truths within it. There are three principal voices in the book, the same voices we find in the biblical garden story: the voice of nature (think the serpent, the “cleverest of all the wild animals the Lord God made”), the voice of the creator, and the voice of the poet herself.

In Glück’s poems nature finds voice in flower poems. In these poems, the flowers themselves speak. In the first poem, for example, the wild iris speaks of coming to life after being buried in the soil. To come back to life is to find a voice. 

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice.

The iris’s voice has a color: “deep blue/shadows on azure seawater.” Nature speaks in colors and growth and the way it masses on the rocks. You have to learn how to hear it. Glück is teaching us to hear.

The voice can be beautiful, but it can also be cranky, as when the wild scilla speaks to the poet hovering above it:

You are all the same to us,
solitary, standing above us, planning
your silly lives . . ..

Or as the witchgrass, bringing weedy chaos to the garden, says sarcastically:

If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language . . ..

But mostly the flowers accept the natural cycle of life. They come and go with the seasons. They understand beginnings and ends. The silver lily says, “In spring, when the moon rose, it meant / time was endless.” But, “We have come too far together toward the end now / to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain / I know what the end means.” Time is different for the flowers of the field.

The Voice of the Creator

Along with the flower poems are poems that give voice to the creator. Glück names these poems for times and seasons. The voice of the creator is wind and changing light and spring and winter. The creator often expresses disappointment in us, in our human lack of imagination. In “Clear Morning,” the creator complains, “And all this time / I indulged your limitation, thinking // you would cast it aside yourselves sooner or later, thinking matter could not absorb your gaze forever . . ..” We keep looking down, when we should be looking up.

“Retreating Light” expands this idea into something approaching a (reversed) fall story. The creator realizes that humans are incapable of understanding their own story:

Then I realized you couldn’t think
with any real boldness or passion;
you hadn’t had your own lives yet,
your own tragedies.
So I gave you lives; I gave you tragedies. . ..

In this way, grief becomes a window to what is beyond us, to love, to the creator. Grief, as, for example, in the Gilgamesh story, marks us as human. Speaking of a human couple, the creator says:

. . . grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white 
the wood violet.

We are creatures who grieve.

Prayers: Matins and Vespers

Along with the voices of nature and of the creator are prayer poems. The prayers fall into two groups: matins and vespers, morning prayers and evening prayers. Both kinds of prayer express loneliness, the search for the creator. The poet prays:

I cannot love
what I cannot conceive, and you disclose
virtually nothing . . .

And:

I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way.

But the creator breaks through nevertheless. In one of the vesper poems, Glück acknowledges:

Even as you appeared to Moses, because
I need you, you appear to me, not
often, however.

Her burning bush is not single but “a whole / pasture of fire, and beyond, the red sun neither falling nor rising. . ..”

In such moments Glück’s reading of the garden story touches the biblical story. In the last of the matins prayers, she addresses the creator as a dear friend:

Dear friend,
dear trembling partner, what
surprises you most in what you feel,
earth’s radiance or your own delight?
For me, always
the delight is the surprise.

In the same poem, she apologizes for considering the creator to be unfeeling and distant:

I am ashamed
at what I thought you were,
distant for us; regarding us
as an experiment . . .

And the creator in the same way finds delight in human creativity:

You will never know how deeply
it pleases me to see you sitting there
like independent beings,
to see you dreaming by the open window
holding the pencils I gave you
until the summer morning disappears into writing.

Soul Work

Like the Genesis garden story, Glück’s Wild Iris is a conversation about what it means to be human. There are the voices of nature, expressed in the garden flowers. There is the voice of the creator, found in a pasture glowing with the fire of the sun and in the gentle breeze of a summer evening. And there is the voice of the poet herself in the morning and evening prayers.

The work of these poems is soul work. Soul for Glück is not the Platonic soul of theology. It is, as in the garden story, relationship, the rich relationship with the natural world and, especially, the relationship with the creator. Soul, she says, is reflected fire:

. . . the soul
filled with fire that is moonlight really, taken
from another source, and briefly
shining as the moon shines . . .

In the Genesis garden story soul is not fire but breath. When the creator has shaped the dust into human form, an act of divine intimacy, the creator breathes the human alive. This breath is not something we own. It’s not a bit of divinity in our lungs. Breath is the relationship we have with the creator. When did humans become human? When they breathed God. When they awoke at long last to the presence of the eternal.

For Glück, this is reflected fire. We shine with the divine light. And if the light that shines on us is divine, then it is eternal. The violets say to us:

. . . in all your greatness knowing
nothing of the soul’s nature,
which is never to die, poor sad god,
either you never have one
or you never lose one.

We are sad gods who fail to understand our own nature. To be soul is a calling, a life that’s given to us, a life that cannot be taken away. The tragedy of human life is not grief, not loss, but the failure to turn our face upward to the creator’s fire. It’s what Jesus in the gospel of John calls “eternal life”: 

. . . Jesus . . . looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. (John 17:1-3)

We live in the space between the flowers and the creator, between the blue voice of the wild iris and the reflected fire of eternal light. The garden is here, has always been here. We have only to see it.

Clay