Speaking Reality

--> There are times when someone speaks and what they say seems magical.

It was a -20 F day at the Knox Retreat Center in interior Alaska.  Along the edges of the lake where the trees met the ice a parallel edge  formed, a curtain of ice crystal suspended like fog in the air, restricted only to the edges of the lake.  It was cold outside and the wood stove inside provided both heat for the building and a charming ambiance for the people to gather.

Fourteen people had traveled from across the state to spend time together renewing their connections and revising the purpose and plans for their work.  One of the purposes for the group has to do with building connections and communications between congregations across Alaska.  This is not simple since nearly half of the presbytery’s congregations are in rural Alaska, without connections by road, and often with extremely slow internet connections.  How do we communicate and build relationships that would make a difference to these small faith communities?

Of course we began with a sense of dissatisfaction with what we had been doing so far—if we had been happy with the status quo we wouldn’t have needed much of a conversation!  We really had to big questions: How could we better understand why communicating and connecting was so important at this moment in our work together, and what could we do that would better fill the need?

The human need to describe what we are finding in the role, and our role in relating to what we find, is huge in the Bible.  In Genesis 2:18-24 we have this familiar passage out of the Bible.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the human  should be alone; I will make a helper as partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the human to see what the human would call them; and whatever the human called every living creature, that was its name. The human gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the human there was not found a helper as partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the human, who then slept; then God took one of the human’s ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

this one shall be called Woman,

for out of Man this one was taken.”

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh…

This is the first story in the Bible describing ur-human in action.  The first thing the human does is begin naming everything.  We do this, too, but our naming is not just assigning “names.”  Our naming is about describing the reality we are encountering so we can live in proper relationship with what we find.  To the degree that we describe things well, we live well; and to the degree that we describe things poorly, we live poorly.  For instance, to the degree that we describe cancer well, we can prevent it or treat it well.  To the degree that we don’t understand cancer and can’t describe it well, our approaches are ineffective.

Perhaps one of the best ways for understanding ourselves as God created us is as “naming creatures.”  We seek to live well in the world, which means understanding this world we live in and understanding healthy and proper relationships within this world. 

There is both power and limits in our abilities as naming creatures.  The Genesis passage points out the limits quite clearly.  For Adam (note that the passage only names Adam as male at the end of the passage, after God turns Adam from one human creature [which is what the word Adam means] into one pair—a man and a woman) the search to describe reality in a way that deals with his/her loneliness turns out not to be something she/he can control.  Ada, names absolutely everything he/she can, searches everything and is still alone in the end.  Yet God understands the underlying need and provides for Adam’s need in ways that Adam cannot. 

This passage tells us that all of our searching and seeking does not make us self-sufficient.  In the end, all these important things we encounter and discover on our own are important, but there is a responsiveness within God that Christians call grace, who provides new possibilities where we cannot.

More tomorrow