It seems fitting to me that we start a new chapter at the point where we move from the creation of physical nature to the construction of the first purely theological concept (holiness). The God of the previous chapter has a habit of making things that are so pointedly capable of re-making themselves (all those seeds and multiplying, in case we don't get the point) and calling it "good." One likes to think that as humans are made in the image of God, humans are not unique in their ability to re-make themselves (the fowls and fishes and herbs can do that too); they are unique (compared to the rest of creation) in their ability to "see that it is good." Humans, like God, can think, and what they think is that a startlingly rich physical world populated by sexual and nonsexual reproduction all over the place is "good" in comparison to what existed before, which is the incorporeal God in the dark void about which nothing is knowable or effable.

New chapter, God takes a break, and suddenly God is no longer satisfied with things that are "good." Some things must now be "holy." The incorporeal inscrutable that-which-is God existed before the friendly thoughtful human-scale Creator God, and he is going to make a return in chapter 2 to interrupt this regularly scheduled program of an independently propagating self-sustaining ecosystem to issue the first Theological Bulletin: what is good for you is not good enough for God. You will get your day of rest, but you may fail to enjoy it, because the day of rest is the day the genial Creator God is replaced by the tempramental Inscrutable God, and so your long week of tilling the fields and herding the cows will be punctuated by a long day of finding that being "good" is less important than being "holy," and you will of course fail in all efforts at holiness, because holiness is a concept that can only apply to the noncorporeal God-in-the-Void.

Being a person who is facing her own mortality rather earlier than she expected, I find myself more than usually frustrated by those who will not give me my full alotment of six days of seeing that life is good. No, these "helpful Christians" wish me to face the coming of the day of the Void not with a heightened sense of how good it has all been, but with a terrified cringing before the Void which can only be remedied by a fixation on holiness. My response is along the lines of "give it a rest."
Tanta | 12.07.06 - 3:59 am | #