We had a “home church” session, my daughter and I.  My son couldn’t keep up, stuck around for the early basics and left off when we started talking about the bigger ideas.

We were discussing Genesis, a hyper-overview of the creation of the universe and mankind.

My daughter made a crack about dinosaurs sometime after Adam and Eve but before Abraham, defining the point at which we had to talk about the nature of the Bible itself.

I reviewed the division of the Bible in two major sections, divided into smaller books and chapters and then verses; she understands this, understands the difference between Old and New Testaments and that the Old Testament was written along a timeline before Christ.  She understands who the Apostles were and that Christians are disciples or followers of Christ’s teachings.  She understands that Christianity’s roots are in Judaism, that Jesus was Jewish.

A piece of cake so far.

But we had to talk about taking the Bible literally.  I explained to her that some people do take the Bible literally; they believe that everything happened exactly as it is written.  Verbatim.  Word-for-word.

I asked her, though, who was it that heard God say, Let there be light.  Was this not hindsight, at the very least?  There were no humans present at the time; God had not yet created Adam.  How could we know?  And it’s not as if humans have had tape recorders they could use to record the voice of God, recounting how the universe was created.

We talked about hindsight – looking back, we are prone to seeing in our mind’s eye only the things we want to see.  Who looked back in hindsight on any of these events and wrote about them from their individual perspective, weeding out deliberately or accidentally details that others might have found important?

No problem with comprehension here; we’ve used the example of a story told and passed from one student to another in a classroom.  The story corrupts over the course of time; two classrooms side-by-side passing the same story within each room from student to student would have entirely different outcomes.  She gets it. Genesis is hindsight, told from unknown perspectives over a great distance of age.  It might contain nuggets of truth, but over time the nuggets are harder to see clearly.

Which is very much as it was explained to me decades ago by a Catholic nun during catechism.  Who’d have thought I’d remember anything from catechism after all these years?

I tried at this point to explain the nature of archetypes, how some stories are told across the globe within different cultures but are very much similar.  Creation stories are one of those kinds of stories; the Great Flood is a story that appears in different, unrelated cultures around the world, although Noah is a character that is specific to Judaism and Christianity.  Sometimes humans told stories to explain the unexplainable; we humans found the same things to be mysterious and magic, no matter what people we came from, hence the similarity between many of the stories and pervasiveness of the magical and mysterious.

She asked about science and early humans and our ancestors; why was it they didn’t understand evolution?  I told her that the earliest humans didn’t have anything remotely like science we know today; early people couldn’t explain things well, seeing the unexplainable as magic, attributing it to a god or gods directly for lack of any other reason.  People who needed to spend all their time on survival didn’t have time to observe, measure, analyze and speculate.

Do you recall when you were very little, say two years old or so, what things seemed like magic?  How did you explain them?  I asked her.

She told me dinner seemed like magic.

I couldn’t resist laughing at that; I’d never heard her say that.  She laughed too.  Now you know that it’s not magic at all, since you can very nearly cook dinner yourself.  There is no magic at work here, I told her.

But she couldn’t articulate what it was that seemed like magic to her two-year-old mind; it simply was.  There was no dinner, and then there was.  Poof.  Magic.

Well, that’s what it may have been like for early man.  It seemed like magic, as if a super entity said, Let there be dinner.  Or let there be light, and poof, there it was.

That’s not to say that God doesn’t actually say that.  Perhaps God did and does.

But we as humans had limits to our understanding thousands of years ago and still do now.  We need to keep an open mind so that we can see the point at which things are no longer a mystery, magical.  We can appreciate the wonder until then, but it’s important to appreciate the mastery and knowledge when it comes to us, too. 

Just like the mystery of the magical dinner.

Learning to cook by helping Mom in the kitchen solved the mystery of dinner.  Without learning about cooking and how it worked, you wouldn’t have learned how to pack your own lunch and would have to eat that icky hot lunch or trust your Mom to pack something you liked.  We tried that and it didn’t work, did it?  But now you know how to cook and you make yourself the lunch you like.  You can cook a little for others, too; isn’t that a great thing?

We don’t know the secrets of the universe.  We may never know them.  We can appreciate the mystery and what seems like magic now, but we should continue to seek.  We may be able to solve a lot of problems here on earth if we continue to study and solve what seems magical to us now.  I believe that’s what God would expect smart creatures that he created to do if they have the skills to do so.

Personally, I think that people who take the Bible literally don’t fully appreciate the magnitude of the Creation.  They make it something as simple and small as dinner appearing before a two-year-old.  I believe it’s something far greater, more magnificent than we puny humans are fully capable of comprehending.  I believe in a God that matches that scale.

I’d rather be a human being that fit in the enormity of that mystery, too.

She seemed to be comfortable with this idea, although I could see her mind spinning around, chewing up all the reading and talking we did, evidenced by her knitted brow.

We had to leave off here for our not-so-mysterious dinner.  We’ll save the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel for next week.

4:56:14 PM    comment []