And she became chaos...

I was reading the Hebrew Old Testament this morning, starting at the first, the verse in Genesis that we read as "the earth was with out form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the waters". In the Hebrew a more literal translation could be "and the earth, she became chaos, and the Lord He hovered (fluttered?) over the face of the water".

It is the eternal debate, between the Lord and the chaos.  In the ancient (and some modern) cultures a recurring theme was the "earth mother".  There was a sense and a belief that the earth she nurtures us, she protects us, we nurse at her bosom.  But she also possess us, we cannot break free of her, she demands servitude, and in the end, we return to her, dust to dust.

Standing at the other end was the belief of the sky father.  The sense of the "other", the feeling of being watched.  I was amazed when people took such offense over George W saying he heard from God (all of his other issues aside). We all hear from God, He speaks to us constantly.  He is our companion or our judge.  He's the reason why complete silence is never complete.  He pulls us from the earth, He insists there is more than what we now see.  He lights our soul ablaze with hidden passion to transcend our mortal coil, to cheat death at all turns and find a way back to life.

And so out of the chaos that had become the earth, God planted a garden, and from the earth He made a pair of gardeners.  But He made them out of more than just the earth, He breathed into them, the Hebrew for breath and soul have forever been linked.  And so we are born with two (dare I say, three) parts, the part that comes from the soil, our flesh, and the breath within us, our spirit.

And in between the two, some times watching, some times deciding, is our soul.  It is the authority within us.  When God said He would create us in His image He gave us something that He withheld from all other things created.  He said we could change things, even we ourselves can be changed by nothing more than a decision.  A simple thought carrying authority, a decision to move, or to stay, to cling to or to let go.

Of course one of man's first decisions was spectacularly awful.  The kind that sends ripples throughout the rest of our time here on earth.  And yet God did not stop him from making it.

When I was a child, learning to ride a bike, my dad would ride behind me, holding the bike.  He would let go at roughly the same point, and I would crash a few feet later at roughly the same point.  Was it cruel of him to let me go?  Much of the "angry atheism" I have found in my life has come from those who understood the constant presence of an other, but could not crest the hill between His watching and His changing.  If this God, this other, were all powerful, then why did I loose something so dear to me?  A mother, a son, our faith, all these things taken back into the bowels of the earth, with no great miracle, no last second save.  They just died, and left us here, with our sense of God, but our ultimate spiritual blindness as to His purpose.

There's something an atheist friend had told me last week, that we can't know whether it's real or just in our heads.  Can we know?  Can we deny truth that is so completely pervasive.  There is a voice calling to us from every quiet moment, every time the TV is off and the kids are asleep and there we are, talking to the air, the sky, the sky father.