february-2018

CultureWatch
BOOKS ART MUSIC FILM
weariness,
war,
exile...
One day at the foot of the tree, there was a snake,
sleek and naked, and he liked teasing them.
Eat this, and you’ll be completely different.
You won’t die, but it will open your eyes.
You’ll see it all otherwise. The garden.
And everything that lives here. The sky...
Eat this and you’ll be surprised, he said.
The temptation was too strong. Eve took one
of the fruits. Adam wanted some too.
She gave him half.
Suddenly, they were afraid of the lion.
Suddenly, they were afraid of the spider,
and the trees, and the clouds...
They ran and hid in the garden.
They wanted cover and dared
not look at each other.
And the snake turned mean.
He was clearly not their friend.
Then they heard a voice in the garden.
God called out to Adam: Where are you?
I heard you in the garden, and I got scared;
I’m naked, and I went to hide.
there to be something rather than nothing.”
But these ancient stories are, like the
daily news, often filled with the worst of
humanity—rape, murder, massacres, betrayals.
God sometimes forgives and restores,
but also punishes or seems capricious. How
does this engender hope?
I turn to the other key element Boyer
points to, in the midst of these texts of terror
and the terrible: forgiveness. That is, God’s
repeated desire, despite God’s own latent
anger-management issues and homicidal
God places us in history,
but also invites us to
co-create the future.
tendencies, to grant pardon to humanity
(who needs it again and again). And from
that, the forgiveness that is possible between
people. Tender thematic sprouts appear
here and there, often after some narrative
conflagration, as when God asks a sad and
angry Jonah, “Why allow endless darkness
to defeat forgiveness?” The title page of the
final chapter, which is drawn from the book
of Daniel, hints that forgiveness is bound
up with our ultimate destination, noting
that it is a tale “in which the end of time is
announced along with the end of idols and
errors, a time given over to pardon.”
Memory is on our side—the stories
of the past help us know who we are. But
In the Beginning also testifies that people
of faith are heirs to the dynamic, ongoing
story of creation, the inherent hope
in being a living, forgivable, and—if we
choose—forgiving part of “something
rather than nothing.”
Lies and ideologies-made-idols are the
misappropriation and misrepresentation of
reality. They make us want to cry out in frustration:
“Is nothing sacred?” But the quiet
thrum beneath the all that is all is that everything
was meant to be sacred. We were made
for better than this. As we open to that possibility,
to God’s holy syntax (The “sound of
silence,” Boyer writes in reference to Elijah.
“A sound as soft as dust.”), we might know
and live more of what is true. n
Julie Polter is a senior associate editor of
Sojourners magazine.
40 sojourners FEBRUARY 2018 sojo.net