Genesis 1 Reflection

When the world you know is crumbling all around you, what story do you tell?

When the place you’ve called home your whole life has been reduced to rubble

and when the community that nurtured you and your neighbors, your caregiver and

your neighbors’ caregivers, and your caregivers’ caregivers for generations from birth

has been ripped apart by forced migration, flights to foreign towns and

wildernesses to seek refuge, and violent deaths inflicted by war, what do you say

to your fellow survivors?

What do you say to your child born years after these events?

What do you say to your God?

Some of us do not even know how to put what we feel in such moments into

words. The pain and sense of loss can cut so deep that all language fails to

express the truth of our experience. Our story has no chance to come to life, to be

heard.

Others of us may devise stories of blame. We comb through our memories to

search for the starting point of the chain of events that led to the horrifying

destruction. Our story may focus on ourselves, on someone else in our

community, on an enemy, or even on God as the one at fault for the incalculable

suffering that our people endured.

Some of us weave stories with dreams. Whisking aside the bad, we magnify the

good that shaped our past and the hope that fills our future. Our stories imagine

new worlds in which the struggles of our present reality cannot touch us or our

loved ones.

And others of us go back and forth between all three of these perspectives. We

wend a circuitous path through grief, judgment, hope, and back again. We may

augment, contradict, rewrite, and occasionally leave unfinished the stories that we

create over and over again along the way.

How many people, though, would tell a story like Genesis 1?

Modern debates over the historical and scientific accuracy of the Genesis creation

stories have sucked so much air out of church classrooms that Christians rarely

catch enough breath to consider how these stories even came to be in ancient

Israel. While a lot remains unknown about when and where the contents of

Genesis developed, the book appears only to have reached its final form after the

exilic period in ancient Israel’s history, according to biblical scholars. This means

that the community that decided that these creation tales were fundamental to its

story was a fragmented, disempowered, displaced, suffering, essentially

traumatized group of people.

That astounds me. How on earth does such a community in such a time and place

tell a story about their God making all things good? What would it take to utter

words like that when virtually nothing seems good, right, or holy any more? I

would completely understand if Jerusalem’s destruction had prompted ancient

Israel to give the first two chapters of Genesis the cut in the final round of edits

before publishing the book. The surprising truth is that the creation stories stayed.

The creation stories stayed.

As fascinating as Genesis 1 is, I am amazed by the ancient poets who envisioned

the steady, tender handiwork of the divine forming an entire world brimming with

life out of nothing, piece by piece, creature by creature, one day at a time. I'm in

awe of the creative community that composed these lines and held onto them

after all the loss, suffering, and struggle to survive that the people had gone

through. I hear profound courage behind these verses. They are more than a

nostalgic portrait of a perfect beginning designed to set up the calamity of human

failing. They sing of a people standing in the ruins, picking up the fragments, and

taking time to be human there. To feel it all. To name it all. And yet to bear witness

to one another, It’s not all; there has to be a beginning around here somewhere.

Jodi Belcher