Dear God!
I am heavy with pain and frustration. Is there to be no end to this punishment?
First, you cast us out of your garden, cursing me and all the generations of women to come, with afflictions to the end of time. I have already experienced the might of your wrath. My flesh was torn in the birth of my sons. They were only expelled from my agonized body after hours - no - days, of violent contractions which split me apart. I was raw from pain, and you granted me no relief, nor did you stem the infections that invaded me in my weakened state, setting me on fire so that I could not even tend to my boys – a miraculous event - after all, they were the first children to be born on this planet.
For weeks, it was touch and go with them. I could not suckle them and Adam had to feed them with milk from one of the goats. It is a miracle we survived. And for what am I punished? For what cast us out of your garden and heaped with these terrible recriminations? Only for being true to the nature that you have given me. My crime – only that I dared eat the forbidden fruit! I tell you, I don’t understand any of it. Why would you plant a tree in our garden and then forbid us to eat its fruit? Why would you make this fruit so delicious looking, so bulging with goodness, so red and shiny it must drive us crazy with desire to touch… to experience … to eat. Why put it there unless it was to tempt … to test our resolve to resist?
And why expect us to be able to do so? We are but imperfect creatures - with all the frailties of human beings! Why expect us to behave like Gods? Forgive me for thinking that in some way you set us up to fail you. It’s almost as if you contrived to make this happen and thus provide you with an excuse to expel us from the garden. Without engineering our ‘fall’ you might even have grown bored with your creation.
Another question. You called the forbidden tree a ‘tree of knowledge’. And I ask you with tears in my eyes, what we are to understand from the fact that you would punish us so grossly, for eating the fruit that would awaken us from our intuitive, reflexive existence and make us truly human? You placed us in a catch-22 situation: creating a natural curiosity and thirst to know with the brainpower to develop and learn and yet - and yet, you would appear to want to keep us innocent… naïve. There is surely something wrong with this.
And why direct your special anger at me – at womankind, if you please? I am harangued for tempting Adam (forgetting that I myself was tempted by your agent – Satan. And if he isn’t your agent, then who created him and how come you cannot control him?) I am punished with the pains and dangers of childbirth – not Adam. You seem to hold me responsible for his fall, thus providing him and the generations who come after him with the grossest of cop-outs. I can almost foresee the future … generations of men blaming their weaknesses and excesses on us women. It’s not their fault they rape and plunder and bring unwanted children into the world. It is so easy to attribute responsibility and blame to us women!
So be it. I understand nothing of your ways… why you should first create imperfect beings and then be disappointed with your work. Why you should gift us with curiosity and desire and longing and ingenuity and then expect us to be passive and unquestioning. Why you should curse us with choice and yet make no investment in teaching the skills we need to choose. Why are we punished for your mistakes?
Still, I would not be writing this were it not for what you have wrought on my two firstborn sons: my precious boys, Cain and Abel. I could bear everything you have done to me and Adam (we won’t even mention the strain this has caused to our relationship). But I am a mother and the terrible fate you have wrought on my children cannot be ignored.Yes, I hold you responsible for the tragedy that has befallen them. It all stems from your demand for burnt offerings and reassurances of our devotion. Why, for goodness sake? How are you propitiated by our puny gestures of burned grains and animals? And having made it clear to us that you prize equally offerings of grains and of animals, then on what basis do you disdain Cain’s offering to you?
Every parent knows that it is unwise to set brother against brother by feeding into their competitiveness for their parents’ affections. It can be taken as a sine qua non of parenting that for children to grow up mentally healthy, their parents must accept them unconditionally and treat them equally.Yet you – the omnipotent father of us all - deliberately set up a situation of favoring one son and discrediting the other. And why?
Because Abel sacrificed his best animal? Poor Cain is a tiller of the soil, a worker in the fields. Was the quality of his sacrifice inferior to Abel’s? And if so, could you not have shown him how to do better. Wouldn’t that have been an excellent learning opportunity? Surely, there must have been better ways to reveal lessons in morality than by stirring enmity between brothers? It cannot be sound educational practice to generate evil in order to teach moral principles. Imagine how different it might have been had you spoken gently to my son, Cain… counseled him about what was required. What if you’d told him gently that whatever is worth doing must be done with TLC? He was a good boy. He worked long hours in the fields. He had golden hands – whatever he planted grew and was bountiful. He was an honest boy. Perhaps he was a little naïve.
I am sure he didn’t mean to kill his brother. He was upset… angry … rejected. Believe me, much as I am wounded at what happened to Abel, we both know he was no angel. He knew you favored him and he was arrogant. After all – you chose him above his brother Let’s be honest, he knew how to twist the knife. So they fought. It probably started as a rough and tumble for who could foresee the tragedy? Then, between Abel’s taunting and Cain’s anger, it must have escalated, leading to that fatal blow on the head.
My son, my poor Abel – his lifeblood dripping into the earth. How ironic - the very earth from which you created man. And imagine Cain – imagine his bewilderment at seeing his brother’s lifeless body before him? I see him shouting his angst, banging his head with his hands, calling on his brother to get up, to stop pretending to be hurt. I see his panic as he slaps his brother’s face, trying to bring him back to consciousness. I hear him crying: “What have I done?” Not quite comprehending, for what did he know of death? What did any of us know of death? The only deaths we’d seen were the deaths of the animals around us. Did we know that people died? Was that in your plan or was Cain simply another opportunity for you to teach lessons in morality? I hear the souls of my sons crying for justice. Abel, his young life so unnecessarily wasted. Cain, driven into the wilderness, carrying the psychological scar of his brother’s life. Forever branded as the first murderer in history. And I hear the cries of my beloved husband Adam, bereft, I tell you - as I am bereft - with the loss of our two firstborn children. This pain is more than we can bear.
You asked Cain – where is your brother, and he, ashamed and afraid retorted: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He was wrong, of course he was wrong! I have always tried to teach my children a sense of social accountability. I have told them that they have to look after one another, that indeed they are each other’s keepers. But, where were you in all this? If my inability to resist the apple you dangled before my eyes makes me a fallen woman, and if Cain’s inability to control his anger and make peace with his brother makes him evil, then what is your accountability as the creator of this very scenario?
And if we are merely the products of your imagination, then surely all these conflicting impulses for good and bad, for self discipline and weakness, for caring and taking responsibility yet being torn by envy and jealousy and rage and guilt and shame are themselves products of your great genius and therefore exactly as they should be: an expression of our very humanity. So I share with you the confusion that tears me apart, though I expect no answer. I know you care how you are regarded by us. You command us to love you… to honor you … to respect you as we expect our children to love and honor us.
And this brings me to my next issue: is respect and honor to be demanded, or is it a quality that must be earned…?
I am heavy with pain and frustration. Is there to be no end to this punishment?
First, you cast us out of your garden, cursing me and all the generations of women to come, with afflictions to the end of time. I have already experienced the might of your wrath. My flesh was torn in the birth of my sons. They were only expelled from my agonized body after hours - no - days, of violent contractions which split me apart. I was raw from pain, and you granted me no relief, nor did you stem the infections that invaded me in my weakened state, setting me on fire so that I could not even tend to my boys – a miraculous event - after all, they were the first children to be born on this planet.
For weeks, it was touch and go with them. I could not suckle them and Adam had to feed them with milk from one of the goats. It is a miracle we survived. And for what am I punished? For what cast us out of your garden and heaped with these terrible recriminations? Only for being true to the nature that you have given me. My crime – only that I dared eat the forbidden fruit! I tell you, I don’t understand any of it. Why would you plant a tree in our garden and then forbid us to eat its fruit? Why would you make this fruit so delicious looking, so bulging with goodness, so red and shiny it must drive us crazy with desire to touch… to experience … to eat. Why put it there unless it was to tempt … to test our resolve to resist?
And why expect us to be able to do so? We are but imperfect creatures - with all the frailties of human beings! Why expect us to behave like Gods? Forgive me for thinking that in some way you set us up to fail you. It’s almost as if you contrived to make this happen and thus provide you with an excuse to expel us from the garden. Without engineering our ‘fall’ you might even have grown bored with your creation.
Another question. You called the forbidden tree a ‘tree of knowledge’. And I ask you with tears in my eyes, what we are to understand from the fact that you would punish us so grossly, for eating the fruit that would awaken us from our intuitive, reflexive existence and make us truly human? You placed us in a catch-22 situation: creating a natural curiosity and thirst to know with the brainpower to develop and learn and yet - and yet, you would appear to want to keep us innocent… naïve. There is surely something wrong with this.
And why direct your special anger at me – at womankind, if you please? I am harangued for tempting Adam (forgetting that I myself was tempted by your agent – Satan. And if he isn’t your agent, then who created him and how come you cannot control him?) I am punished with the pains and dangers of childbirth – not Adam. You seem to hold me responsible for his fall, thus providing him and the generations who come after him with the grossest of cop-outs. I can almost foresee the future … generations of men blaming their weaknesses and excesses on us women. It’s not their fault they rape and plunder and bring unwanted children into the world. It is so easy to attribute responsibility and blame to us women!
So be it. I understand nothing of your ways… why you should first create imperfect beings and then be disappointed with your work. Why you should gift us with curiosity and desire and longing and ingenuity and then expect us to be passive and unquestioning. Why you should curse us with choice and yet make no investment in teaching the skills we need to choose. Why are we punished for your mistakes?
Still, I would not be writing this were it not for what you have wrought on my two firstborn sons: my precious boys, Cain and Abel. I could bear everything you have done to me and Adam (we won’t even mention the strain this has caused to our relationship). But I am a mother and the terrible fate you have wrought on my children cannot be ignored.Yes, I hold you responsible for the tragedy that has befallen them. It all stems from your demand for burnt offerings and reassurances of our devotion. Why, for goodness sake? How are you propitiated by our puny gestures of burned grains and animals? And having made it clear to us that you prize equally offerings of grains and of animals, then on what basis do you disdain Cain’s offering to you?
Every parent knows that it is unwise to set brother against brother by feeding into their competitiveness for their parents’ affections. It can be taken as a sine qua non of parenting that for children to grow up mentally healthy, their parents must accept them unconditionally and treat them equally.Yet you – the omnipotent father of us all - deliberately set up a situation of favoring one son and discrediting the other. And why?
Because Abel sacrificed his best animal? Poor Cain is a tiller of the soil, a worker in the fields. Was the quality of his sacrifice inferior to Abel’s? And if so, could you not have shown him how to do better. Wouldn’t that have been an excellent learning opportunity? Surely, there must have been better ways to reveal lessons in morality than by stirring enmity between brothers? It cannot be sound educational practice to generate evil in order to teach moral principles. Imagine how different it might have been had you spoken gently to my son, Cain… counseled him about what was required. What if you’d told him gently that whatever is worth doing must be done with TLC? He was a good boy. He worked long hours in the fields. He had golden hands – whatever he planted grew and was bountiful. He was an honest boy. Perhaps he was a little naïve.
I am sure he didn’t mean to kill his brother. He was upset… angry … rejected. Believe me, much as I am wounded at what happened to Abel, we both know he was no angel. He knew you favored him and he was arrogant. After all – you chose him above his brother Let’s be honest, he knew how to twist the knife. So they fought. It probably started as a rough and tumble for who could foresee the tragedy? Then, between Abel’s taunting and Cain’s anger, it must have escalated, leading to that fatal blow on the head.
My son, my poor Abel – his lifeblood dripping into the earth. How ironic - the very earth from which you created man. And imagine Cain – imagine his bewilderment at seeing his brother’s lifeless body before him? I see him shouting his angst, banging his head with his hands, calling on his brother to get up, to stop pretending to be hurt. I see his panic as he slaps his brother’s face, trying to bring him back to consciousness. I hear him crying: “What have I done?” Not quite comprehending, for what did he know of death? What did any of us know of death? The only deaths we’d seen were the deaths of the animals around us. Did we know that people died? Was that in your plan or was Cain simply another opportunity for you to teach lessons in morality? I hear the souls of my sons crying for justice. Abel, his young life so unnecessarily wasted. Cain, driven into the wilderness, carrying the psychological scar of his brother’s life. Forever branded as the first murderer in history. And I hear the cries of my beloved husband Adam, bereft, I tell you - as I am bereft - with the loss of our two firstborn children. This pain is more than we can bear.
You asked Cain – where is your brother, and he, ashamed and afraid retorted: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He was wrong, of course he was wrong! I have always tried to teach my children a sense of social accountability. I have told them that they have to look after one another, that indeed they are each other’s keepers. But, where were you in all this? If my inability to resist the apple you dangled before my eyes makes me a fallen woman, and if Cain’s inability to control his anger and make peace with his brother makes him evil, then what is your accountability as the creator of this very scenario?
And if we are merely the products of your imagination, then surely all these conflicting impulses for good and bad, for self discipline and weakness, for caring and taking responsibility yet being torn by envy and jealousy and rage and guilt and shame are themselves products of your great genius and therefore exactly as they should be: an expression of our very humanity. So I share with you the confusion that tears me apart, though I expect no answer. I know you care how you are regarded by us. You command us to love you… to honor you … to respect you as we expect our children to love and honor us.
And this brings me to my next issue: is respect and honor to be demanded, or is it a quality that must be earned…?
1 comment:
Bold & thoughtful, with charming chuckles.
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