In The Cool Of The Evening Breeze
Lilias Trotter, “A Little Humble Path,” c. 1900
In the midst of our ever-frightening world, I am drawn this morning to that marvelous passage from Genesis where God pauses from his work of creation to walk about in the garden. This may be one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture.
8 The man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from him among the trees. Genesis 3:8
We have already learned of the power of this majestic creator bringing forth out of nothing light and darkness, water and land, plants and seeds and trees, the skies, the sun, the moon, the stars, wild animals, cattle, and creeping things, evening and morning.
We learn too that male and female he created each one of us, made in his own image. And all was good indeed. In all the confusion of our world, we need to linger on this picture.
The great Walter Brueggemann talks about what comes next:
Delightful creation is finished. Sabbath is celebrated as a sign of the new life. Now human destiny in that world must be faced. The destiny of the human creatures is to live in God’s world, not a world of his/her own making.
Ah, there’s our tension. We hide in the trees because we want to remake the world in our own image. This is “the crisis of humankind.” The result is alienation. Perhaps the biggest question of our day is how we can once again listen for God walking in the garden, how we can take his hand and walk together and talk about his marvelous creation.
In his monumental work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor maps out the massive cultural forces that moved, over the centuries, from this vivid picture of our creator God walking in the garden to no garden at all, no creator, no male and female made in God’s image. We are left with a stunted, shriveled imagination. We can no longer see, says Taylor, a life that “is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be.”
I often find many of our poets catching a glimpse into that other world that is richer, fuller, deeper, closer to joy and contentment. I think of Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Oliver knows how to fall down on her knees in adoration and gratitude. This is one of those hints and guesses T. S. Eliot talks about that will lead us to the incarnate, embodied God who surrounds us. I find Oliver, with so many other poets, listening, intently, for the sound of God walking in the garden.
How can we be rescued from the mess of a world we have created? A small suggestion, I suppose, it will begin as we discover again how to watch and listen for God walking in the garden in the cool of the evening breeze. Pretty basic, I know, but that just may be our only hope right now. ———————————————————————————————————————--
P. S. I’m sorry I’ve been away from my blog writing for a bit. I have just finished teaching two different courses, sort of draining my creative energies. I’m glad to be back now, and so happy you continue to join me. We’ve got a lot to talk about, don’t we?