Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible by Peter Manseau, Jeff Sharlet

From the Publisher

Now in paperback—the book that caused a religious and critically acclaimed stir. Publishers Weekly called it "the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road." The Buffalo News hailed it as "one of the most eccentric and fascinating books of the year." O, The Oprah Magazine said "This collection proves that fear and trembling are human, but a sense of humor is divine."

Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet have created a work of calling that is as odd, moving, and inspiring as the people and the scriptures they encountered. Whether it is Manseau and Sharlet telling their "psalms" from outposts as unexpected as a strip club or a cattle-auction barn, Peter Trachtenberg unraveling the Gordian logic of Job via the Borscht Belt, Rick Moody finding a modern-day Jonah in Queens, or Haven Kimmel shocking and thrilling us with her Revelation, what emerges is not an attack on religion, but a quizzical, fascinating look at it from the inside. Killing the Buddha is a positively riveting look at the facets of true belief.

Publishers Weekly

The set-up goes like this: take two religiously flippant intellectuals (in this case, Manseau and Sharlet, the founding editors of the spiritually hip online magazine Killing the Buddha) and send them on a yearlong road trip to discover the underbelly of America's religious culture. Make sure they mingle with the most wild and weird of holy rollers-a philosophical stripper working out of a converted Baptist church in Nashville, a one-eyed rodeo preacher from the "Cowboy Church" of Texas, a clan of bloodthirsty Jesus freaks in Florida and a cross-dressing terrorist from North Carolina badly in need of an exorcism. Take all these "true" stories, turn them into the "Bible's Book of Psalms," and alternate them with 13 freshly imagined "books" of the Bible, written by iconic American writers such as Rick Moody, Peter Trachtenberg and Haven Kimmel-and, voila, a heretic's Bible is born. Each of the 13 contributors was offered "a solo, a single book from the Bible to be remade, revealed, replaced, inverted, perverted, or born again, however the spirit so led them." The writers came up with seven nonfiction books (e.g., in "Exodus" Francine Prose draws upon her childhood to explain why she can no longer stomach seders) and six books of pure fiction. "Like the original, this Bible crosses freely between genres, between history and prophecy, confession and myth," according to Manseau and Sharlet. As disjointed and freakish as this biblical sequel sounds, the editors manage to pull off a most impressive work. This is some of the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road. (Jan. 13) Forecast: Be on the lookout for the authors' Bible-thumping, tent revival book tour in January and February. Stops are planned for 28 cities coast to coast, and will feature the two authors (who are experienced performers) and, in some cities, headlining writers such as Prose, Moody and Kimmel. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0641885075
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641885075
• Format: Hardcover, 304pp
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: December 2003
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 41,215

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

MORTAL EAT THIS SCROLL!

Late morning, just before lunch, one of Lin Chi's monks comes up to him half-crazed, out of his mind with ecstasy, babbling about Buddha. Says he's seen him. Says he was just walking down the road when suddenly: Buddhamind. Enlightenment. Nirvana. The big payoff. The monk can't stop talking about it. Lin Chi strikes a match, lights his pipe, takes a long drag. Leaves the monk hanging, waiting for his reward. Instead, Lin Chi blows a cloud of smoke, reaches out, and smacks him.

"You meet the Buddha on the road," Lin Chi says, "kill him."

Imagine the monk's face. Better yet, imagine your own: You've been to church, you've gone to the zendo, you took your bat mitzvah money and ran. You're an atheist, or you're an agnostic, or you're an orthodox believer without a cause. Maybe you've tried not to think about it. You've opted for sex, drugs, and electronica, you've opted for a career; you're poor and you never had any options. You've run away from your family, you've started a family, you've given up on God, Family, and Nation. And then, when you were minding your own business, getting on with things, you stumbled upon—something. Him, Her, a Higher Power, Buddha, Jesus, the Shekhina, Shiva. The mysterium tremendum, the big white whale. And even though you're no seeker, you weren't looking and you didn't ask to find, you had to admit: God is Great. Allah Akbar! Holy Ghost Power.

To which Lin Chi says: Super. You found it. Now you can kill it. The Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed, he will only stand in your way.

When Lin Chi contributedthe idea of deicide to his godless religion a thousand years ago, he was talking not just about a long-dead teacher who had come to be known as Buddha but about the dominant ideologies of his day: One True Path, One True Story, One True Anything. The preachers and the gurus, the Christian Coalition and the secular masses, the heart that wants what it wants and the mind that always thinks better: These are the Buddhas we meet on the road, the Buddhas we know and love and listen to, the Buddhas we all are. Faced with modern-day atheists or fundamentalists or guys who thump thousand-year-old Zen aphorisms hard as any Bible, Lin Chi would probably say the same thing: Don't be a chump. A single story never explained anything.

What do you say about yourself, for example, to explain the things you do? Forget the hypothetical—let's start here, with this book. We had more reasons for making it than there are words between the covers. One of us is a Jew raised by a Pentecostal Hindu Buddhist, one is a son of a Catholic priest and a former nun. The priest kept the vestments in the front hallway and held mass in the dining room; the Hindu Buddhist asked Charismatic Christians to pray over her as she lay dying. Between us we've lived in monasteries, warehouses, hermit shacks, luxury condos. We've worked as truck drivers, casino hands, carpenters, court-martial reporters. We met when we both worked at a Yiddish library, for which we pulled books out of attics and Dumpsters, dragging artifacts of the old world into the new.

That's more or less what we had in mind when we began talking about killing the Buddha, and about what a Bible filled with heresy might look like, and about what Bibles and Buddhas, killings and heresies, had to do with each other. We had lost faith in the way faith gets talked about in America, the way it's seen as either innocuous spirituality or dangerous fanaticism, perfume or mustard gas. After years of writing about religion, for newspapers and magazines and in letters to each other, we'd come to think that it is almost always both: Show us the truth and we'll show you a lie, prove God is dead and we promise a resurrection.

Right after Lin Chi told the monk to kill Buddha, he said: "And burn all the sutras." He wasn't talking about bonfires and he wasn't the kind of guy to ban anything. He probably would have been thrilled had the monk torched the holy scrolls and then written them all over again, sentence for sentence, every mantra a revelation, the word made strange. All he'd have to do—all we did—was look around.

Like everyone else who knows how to read or count the stars, we've spent our whole lives studying scripture. When we were kids it was the story of Apollo's chariot pulling the sun, and Bilbo Baggins with his ring, and Harriet the Spy writing her own Book of Revelation. Later, there was Marx on money, Darwin on your mother, Virginia Woolf on each minute passing. There were also the Batman comic books we read in the first grade, the Challenger explosion we watched a few years later, the Penthouse magazine we found down by the river in junior high. There was a billboard that read, "Jesus Christ, King of Newark"; a paperback copy of the Koran we stole from our high school library; a letter from Einstein we found pressed between Yiddish pages. Not to mention the texts we share with everyone: strange desert flowers and rain making streams in the gutters, headlines of nuclear threats and the most up-to-date mass murders; the lines that cross our palms, the creaking reports of our bones, everyone's X rays, interchangeable.

So many sutras. We made this book not to replace the Bible but to light it and its successors on fire; when you're done with it, you should burn this book, too. Or you could make like the prophet Ezekiel and eat it.

There's a certain risk in making a book that involves America, a car, and talk of the Buddha. All we can say is that had we owned a Cessna, we'd probably be wincing whenever someone mentioned Saint-Exupéry. The fact is that this book is about America because America has good roads, and we drove on those roads not because they're sacred veins of the land or paths into the mystic heart of the nation (three words to be wary of: mystic, heart, nation) but because they're paved. Such was our methodology: Drive south then west then north and back in search of homegrown heresy, belief in the raw. We had no itinerary, but that didn't matter, because nearly all the people we spoke to told us it was no coincidence we'd showed up in their church, their temple, their compound. America is a nation of experts in predestination. In comparison we're amateurs. Our criteria for forward motion were these: the leading of the Holy Spirit; nice weather; rumors and accusations. We were looking not so much for a sacred show-and-tell as for a holy-rolling striptease, revelation as an end in itself.

But getting naked isn't as simple as it sounds, and it's hard to say when an idea is really in the nude. The very word heresy, after all, hints at the belief it supposedly displaces. Strip off the heresy, and beneath there's orthodoxy, which turns out to be nothing but another heresy got up in drag. Kind of like one of those Russian dolls, the ones where you twist open a babushka only to find another one inside. The heresy of our title doesn't so much refute belief, in fact, as confirm its value, if not its current terms. Heresy is as old as it is new, the naughty secret and the fresh coat of paint. It's the pasties beneath the hair shirt as much as it is the new age robes thrown over it all. Put a tune to it and you get cacophony, not harmony, a song that's part punk, part country, part gospel, part death metal.

We wanted to hear it all played together, multiple turntables spinning at the same time. We knew where to find the sheet music—we'd take the Bible apart, scatter its pages in the wind, and put it back together again. Creation via apocalypse: translation with a dynamite pen. To light the fuse we needed new stories to scratch the flint of the old. We asked thirteen writers to provide them. We offered each one a solo, a single book of the Bible to be remade, revealed, replaced, inverted, perverted, or born again, however the spirit so led them. We gave them directions and waited for their improvisations; the stories we tell in this book are the questions we put to their answers. This book is not an anthology, it's a call-and-response. It's not so much a collage as it is a Frankenstein's monster—which is to say that despite the fact that it doesn't so much have seams as it has scars, it's some kind of scripture.

Why use the Bible as a blueprint for a project that takes its name from the Buddhist tradition? Because in America, the first nation founded on secularism, the Bible is always there, the book waiting for a sweaty-palmed rendezvous in every motel room. There's no refuge from the Bible's reach. It's there in the movies you like and the books you don't. It's on our money and in our courts and in our classrooms, everywhere at once, whether you want it or not. Consider its stories—Adam meets Eve, Jonah meets whale, Jesus meets a bad end—you've heard them all before. The Bible is in your bones before you crack its binding.

For our part—for this Bible's Book of Psalms—we traveled for most of a year. We rode the range, went to jail, called down the moon, ate dirt with a crowd, and generally inserted ourselves into the lives of complete strangers, who in turn treated us as confessors, or confidants, or possible notches in their I-saved-this-many-heathens bedposts.

People always figured one of us for a believer, one a skeptic; or imagined us as members of dueling doctrines, the Catholic and the Jew. We played the roles assigned us, mystic and cynic, good cop and bad cop, Laurel and Hardy; Ishmael and Ahab, Lenny and Squiggy, Tweedledee and Tweedledum and I'm the one in charge. Yeah, but who's the "I," smart guy? We became "we" because it seemed like the only answer both of us could agree on. No matter how long we drove, neither of us by himself was able to get where he wanted to go, and the more we drove the further away we got from wherever that was. There were times when we drove in the wrong lane, times when we dodged drunk drivers, one time when in our rusty Ford we flew above the desert and beneath the moon; that time, we hollered. Two people, one voice, the "we" that is the author.

But One Voice is no more true than One God. Every day we argued over which stories to chase and which holy souls to believe and which of us was more of a charlatan and whether that was good or bad. In Tennessee we called each other liars, in Alabama we kept each other honest, in New Mexico we came to blows, in Colorado we loaned each other shoes. We're not sure, but we think that's how you make a Bible together.

Like the original, this Bible crosses freely between genres, between history and prophecy, confession and myth. Seven of the contributors responded to our call with nonfiction: Genesis, Exodus, and Ruth as personal investigations; Leviticus, Job, and Isaiah as critical riffs; Song of Songs as a love letter. Six responded with fiction: one book of biblical history is revised (Samuel), the rants of three prophets are translated and improved (Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah), and books of the New Testament (the Gospels and Revelation) are entirely made up. Threaded through the chorus of our makeshift choir are our own counterharmonies, thirteen postcards from our trip across this strange, godless, pious land: not so much walking the Bible as stalking its shadow. Every one of these psalms is 110 percent true, pure American revelation.

Which is not to say that we vouch for the visions of the hermaphrodite angels, apocalypse ranchers, storm doctors, corporeal manifestations of the divine, or the electric chair gospel choir we encountered in our travels. They are all real human beings, and the names we call them in this book are the names they gave us. The miracles they describe, perform, and deny are just as real, the signs and wonders of people who want to know why they've been abandoned by God, people who think they've found God, people who swear they're going to wring His neck when they get ahold of Him. What follow, our contributors' chapters and the stories with which we knit them together, are songs sung by and to people reading tea leaves, people kissing crosses, people breaking windows, people wrapped in flags; people ducking for cover or looking to the skies, as if everyone was his or her own personal Moses and the whole world was one great burning bush, jumping with flames but not yet consumed.

Such was the world when we set out to find the source of the fire.

Copyright © 2004 by Margins of Faith, Inc.

GENESIS

By A. L. Kennedy

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked...

Genesis 3:7

In the beginning, it's simple, all very clear—you are and then know that you are and that's enough. But not for long. Eventually, you need an explanation.

My explanation starts with certain facts: that I was conceived in Australia, then born in Scotland at 3:57 a.m. on October 22, 1965 a.d. These are facts that I take on faith—I can't remember anything about them.

Beginnings are particularly hungry for our faith. Our communal starting point—too monumental to imagine and eternally out of reach—can seem the hungriest of all. Without it, we lack definition, but it continually proves itself impossible to define. We can't even fix a date for the opening of time. According to James Ussher, once archbishop of Armagh, God began to create our heavens and our earth and everything herein on the evening before October 23, 4004 B.C. (Which would mean that my birthday perpetually commemorates my ability to just miss key events.) The Eastern Orthodox Church didn't specify a day but set the Year of Creation at 5508 B.C., while ancient Syrian Christians were sure it was 5490 B.C. A variety of the faithful of many religions have made a variety of other calculations, in cyclical and linear time, in order to pinpoint the birth of everything. Modern physicists are less precise—they propose a moment of singular significance, expanding from an infinite temperature and into potential life somewhere between 20 and 10 billion years ago. With ourselves and our surroundings as our only tangible evidence, we assume that we and our world, our universe, have come to be: How this has happened we take on faith—we can't remember anything about it.

We are unsure of our inheritance, the traits we may find emerging in our blood: We need a cover story, an alibi, the consolations of a family tree. It's troubling, to be so rootless, to discover such uncertainty when we look for our ultimate home, to find echoes of this amnesia in our lives—we lose ourselves, after all, quite easily. The moment when we fall asleep, the one when we come back, fully awake—they both escape us. And the point when we first became aware that we were ourselves and other things were not, were separate—that slipped right by us, too. This is perhaps because awareness seeped in gradually, our knowledge nudged along by a particular burst of hunger, or an unusually pleasant touch: a sound, a movement, that we didn't make, couldn't make: something arising from somewhere beyond our will. Or perhaps it came in suddenly and complete—ourselves announced to ourselves, the earliest intimate visitors to our minds, erasing our first entrances, even as we arrived. Either way, it's impossible to recall. And when did we start to be knowingly dissatisfied, unhappy, or uncomfortable, wicked, good, afraid? Once again, we're not sure: There is only a muddle of incident, like a bundle of random family photographs: poignant, irrelevant, stilted, intense.

For me, there's the discomfort of chicken pox, my fear of the waiting spider in the fern beside the gate, a sad story about a green dress, my parents' shouting, the day when I cut my foot open, mumps—and that time when I slapped a comic book experimentally toward a fly and actually hit it. For a brief while, I was triumphant and then could do nothing but watch, stricken with guilt, as the fly lay where it dropped, apparently dead and my fault. Then, remarkably, a wing twitched, the legs next, and it recovered itself, filled up again with whatever constituted its tiny life, and flew away, resurrected, as if my wishing could have made it so.

Which is part of the story I'd tell you of me, the way I'd explain myself and how I came to be, even though I'm missing any knowledge of my first 3:57 A.M., of all those initial sunrises and nights. I tell my story, at least in part, to make up for this lack—and like any other piece of autobiography, it is a blend of memory and reported fact and the way that I feel I ought to have been and hope that I am and wish that I will be. It is an exercise of will. I make myself in my own image, what else do I have?

The knowledge of a Will above mine? I couldn't say when that particular awareness first announced itself—I only know He was there early, my God, a personality outside what people told me, beyond religion and the usual prayers.

At that age, of course, I had no need for anything beyond the usual prayers. Nothing about my personal life was large enough to bother God with in any official way: I pushed up the words I was told to use almost as if I were reciting a poem, something formal for a distant and habitually invisible relative. I knelt, as required, and asked that God should bless my mother and my father and my grandparents—both sets—no playing favorites, God should be told about everyone. I may also have mentioned unfortunate strangers, illnesses, that kind of thing.

And, in the beginning, I went to church, and that was simple, too. For a while it made sense that I should sit beside my mother in my least comfortable clothes while she made sure I stood and sang and sat, opened and closed my eyes at appropriate moments, and was put in the way of a gift I believe she had come to regard with some ambivalence. Trained as a Methodist lay preacher, she had studied the Bible enough to find its inconsistencies: the dubious spaces between words that were, in themselves, the products of translators and interpreters, political massage and cultural theft. Add this to the fact that my mother was often trapped by the bewilderment of a good person living an unreasonably painful life and you can understand that hers had become an, at least, unpredictable faith. Still, she put me through the motions of conventional worship, and together in the pew, we could look up and see my father—the evangelical atheist—perched high with his back to everyone and playing the church organ. Unbeliever or not, you'll end up in church if you want to play the organ with any kind of seriousness. He would operate its mystery of pedals and stops, glancing now and then into the carefully angled wing mirrors that made the instrument look like some huge moored vehicle, helplessly straining out music as it fought to race away with the building, drag us off to who knew where.

So there I was, a work in progress, with no way of knowing if I would ever be as frightened as my mother, or as violent as my father. What image would I be made in—the one of a woman who stayed in a marriage to give her child a father, or the one of a father who terrified his child? Of course, I didn't know, and for quite some time, this didn't concern me—my life was my life, without questions. I also thought very little about the contradictions of our family's religious observances. If I considered them at all, I simply assumed that God understood our situation and was entirely satisfied by our dressing oddly and then singing or speaking to Him. I assumed that He found the sermons as boring as I did. I assumed that He was He and not a She—I always have related better to men. I assumed He wouldn't be offended when I didn't think of Him as a Father. I assumed that He didn't mind when we moved house and no longer visited His church.

By the time I was five or six, our attendance, or rather lack of it, rarely occurred to me. I had the feeling that I was alone in wanting any more to do with God and made a little cross out of dry spaghetti bound up with green gardening tape—these being the only materials that came easily to hand. I used to bring out the cross when I prayed. And then my prayers became more personal and more plainly ineffective. And then I lost the cross. And then I didn't pray.

Until the next beginning—the one that means you're adult, fully responsible and powerless—until the sour, scared opening: "Please, God." In this beginning your requests are always personal and brought to God because you have nowhere else to go. Your pressing requests will vary: Let the sick not die, let the loved not leave, or the love, let the pain fade, the fear diminish, or let whatever mess I've made for myself be somehow lifted clear away. And because you've worked out that He isn't Father Christmas, isn't a Father with only you to love, then this is when the bargains start—when you promise you'll be good, or you'll be sorry, or you'll speak to Him more often, dress better, never do whatever you shouldn't have done again. But who are you talking to and how did you get here to be with Him, being you?

Which brings us back to our official beginning—Genesis—one of our species' more famous attempts at outlining its inheritance, its bloodline. This is the story we tell to each other, the way we explain ourselves and how we came to be, even though we're missing any knowledge of all those initial sunrises and nights. This is what and why we are, with those opening lines that are so quoted, so authoritative and so elegant, no matter in what version. With the lovely simplicity of poetry, physics, faith, here is the record of chaos being divided into forms. And we know this undoubtedly happened, one way or another, and here we are and why not cut and paste (rather badly) a number of slightly contradictory creation tales together and say this was, definitively, The Way? The best current guesses of science have the same simplicity and beauty, along with that prudent dash of justifiable awe.

Whatever the reader's level of orthodoxy, Genesis represents an attempt to catch the Almighty in letters. In the beginning is the word, because we justify our existence, our every action, in words, in stories, and why not do the same for our world, for God? In the beginning was the word, because it was natural to make our making in our own phrases, music, images, to recite it in the desert evenings like a spell. In the beginning was the word, because that's all that we could grasp.

It would be pointless to discuss here how literally you choose to take the Bible's word. Do you find God in gravity (unmentioned in Genesis) but refuse to see His hand in evolution—do you accept the workings of time but not of genetics—do you pick and choose amongst the rhythms of nature? What do you find in the word? Does it offer an Eden of the mind, a garden for the spirit, a beginning shared by Muslims and Christians and Jews, or the literal four rivers and Edin in Western Iran, or each one of these and more? Whatever the story and its origins, we needed to come from somewhere. Subject to grandiose hopes, to occasional feelings of loss, abandonment, we seem to have needed to feel our true home had once been Paradise. So we told ourselves we were the children of perfection, born in beauty—and, as what could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, it had promise. We gave ourselves a bloodline touched by angels, the gift of everything, there and ready for us before we could ask.

But we can also be lost, even in Paradise, and the ambivalence of the gift is there in Genesis, too. Among the fruit trees and the fertility, the admiration of prose style and our elevated origins, the arguments over heresies and textual analysis, we can miss the terrible truth in the loveliness of the book's initial verses—a truth far more immediate than expulsion from a garden we never quite knew. Here we are told that chaos was shaped into matter by God. However this came about, our universe is, indeed, filled with separate objects, among them our earth, which is, in turn, busy with substances and shapes and various forms of life, among them Homo sapiens, female and male. Which means, delightful though the earth can be, that we are ourselves and other things are not. We live in a universe of numberless solids that can kill and injure us. Our bodies are subject to damage and decay. Our present home is a place of drowning, crushing, burning, earthquakes, lava, diseases, suffocation, and unexpected blows. Measured by the scale of Genesis, conjured out of its spell, we are less than tiny and fatally at risk. Even left in each other's care, we are shown to be frail, and—no matter how we act and how long we last—we do all die. Even in Paradise, we never had eternal life—each of the beauties around us would have an end. And, written for the descendants of the fallen, the expelled, this version of our origins makes it clear that we will be harmed and killed by the natural laws which rule us. Nature—God resting behind it, His job done—insists that we and all we love must be hurt and then cease to be. Genesis offers no alternative creation, no other choice.

Equally, it makes plain that we are condemned to a further, intimate separation of male from female, of lover from love, that other ghost of Paradise. It tells the tale of a time when there was only one pair: one love and one beloved: made for each other. Adam, the man named for red earth, and his wife, the woman of bone, have to be with each other, and they consider nothing else—that awkward other woman, Lilith, banished to other legends. They weather remarkable trials, unseparated: They love, make love, betray and blame, feel ashamed and hide from God together. However sexist the archaic spin, the world's first marriage is recognizable to any human who has ever loved. And, beyond this, there is no thought that Eve and Adam could be possible, or fully functional, alone. With or without the knowledge of good and evil, inside or outside the garden, Eve, her husband, and her children are never entirely solitary. The only pain absent from Genesis is that of loneliness. The whole book retains that particular mercy of Paradise, that flavor of nostalgia and loss unaltered by faith or doubt—the faint aftertaste of a home where we were never lonely.

But we're far from home now. Dwarfed by our surroundings, torn apart from all that is not us, we can hardly be surprised that we sometimes call out for a help that transcends us, that breaks and makes our rules. The beauties and, more often, the horrors of Creation can drive us toward the Creator and prayer. Genesis, after Eden, has its fair share of laments. Naturally, the human mind can't be expected to produce anything like a coherent or comprehensive picture of what a supreme being might actually be like. For the unbelievers this is obvious—a nonquantity cannot be described. For the believers (myself among them) it seems equally obvious that the finite will fail to grasp the infinite. The more literal-minded and devout will, of course, demand an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnicognizant God who can also be rendered easily in print by generations of variously qualified scribblers. I tend to find—no matter how divine the available inspirations—that the assumption this might ever be possible cannot be anything other than ludicrous, if not insulting, to the deity concerned. And, of course, the Kabbalists have (who knows quite how) calculated the dimensions of God and are among those who are happy to totemize each of the Bible's words—to say nothing of their numerological values—in the sure and certain hope that God is literally in the details and accessible if only stared at hard enough.

Genesis does not show us God. But it does something very human in its attempts to approach Him. The book makes its own highly subversive summary of our efforts toward shaping a something out of Everything, a focus we can aim our prayers at, for fear of their going astray. We write that He makes us in His image, but we have to make Him in ours before we can reach Him. This, in turn, provides an intoxicating pattern we can judge ourselves against: the touch of God in our flesh that excuses and justifies, that blesses and inspires. But the pattern is changeable, treacherous: It can also appear to be a record of God's separation of Himself into various, mystifying forms—a testament to contradiction, uncertainty, fear, and peculiar tenderness. This is not God the Father but the Self that defines Itself: terrible, incomprehensible, loving, and absurd.

First, of course, there is the handyman God, the perfect craftsman, the watchmaker who leaves us his finest watch. This is the God we thank for sunsets and healthy children and the touch of our lovers' hair. This is the God we used to emulate in our cathedrals, raising ourselves to make the unseen ornaments of our masonry as highly finished as the pulpit, or the font. This is the God we really do find in the details, whether we are monks who see His signature in the arithmetic of flowers or anatomists who open the body and find it carefully packed with unnecessary beauties. This is a straightforward, practical God. Our lives have risks and inevitable endings, but that's only to do with the Fall—even outside the garden things aren't all bad. God gives us a world that can seem to fit almost as well as Paradise, and we can be grateful and dress up and praise Him, sing those songs. Having made perfection, He does not then put His feet up infinitely. He still appears to tinker, like an amiable, cardiganed father. Or, at least, we do most often pray with the hope that He might interfere if we ask Him. Genesis suggests prayers can be answered.

Equally comforting for us is the idea that God is the one who names the more overwhelming elements: earth, seas, trees, and so forth: and that, once he arrives, Adam can manage the categories from there, trotting about the garden like a schoolboy naturalist, naming the smaller bits and pieces of Creation, the ones on an appropriately human scale. To know the true name of something is, naturally, to have power over it. It is entirely predictable that human authors might emphasize the elements of a creation story that portray the world not just as our home and a massively elaborate gift entrusted to us but also as something which we have a manifest destiny to dominate. It could be argued that all civilizations can be divided into those whose creation myths lead them to be part of their environment and those (the Peoples of the Book among them) who are encouraged by scripture to expropriate responsibilities for which they are not suited—"And the fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth...into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you." Taking Genesis as their cue, more and more civilizations have eliminated many of the living things that some of us presume Adam took the time to name and then Noah to save. Our own description of an indulgent Maker has left us, like spoilt children, destroying out of greed, stupidity, and simple curiosity. Today the elements with names reserved for God alone—earth, seas, trees, and so forth—are all afflicted by mankind.

Not that Genesis really expects any better of us—the picture it paints of humanity, of key figures in three major world religions, would be attractive only to the highly perverse. Once mankind gets to work on it, life beyond the garden goes a long way toward confirming the Cathar heresy that Hell is on earth. It's perhaps significant that God declares His completed Creation "very good" and that Adam is an afterthought, his goodness unspecified. Abraham, Jacob, and the rest of his descendants are beset by enemies and used to war, but they're mainly at risk from their own families. Of the first two children in the world, one—rather famously—kills the other. In Genesis your brother is never your keeper and your family is not the solid, sunny unit idealized by the religious right. Jacob betrays his brother, Esau, and his own father; Jacob's children include Joseph, whose brothers consider killing him and then simply leave him naked in a pit; Joseph then torments both them and Jacob, civility only reigning when they act as if they are all strangers. Abraham comes a hair's breadth away from sacrificing Isaac, his own son. Lot's daughters get him drunk in order to fool him into impregnating them incestuously. Throughout the book, in fact, the irresistible drive toward coupling and fertility drags almost every couple into a variety of other desperate liaisons. Adam and Eve (of course) can produce the rest of humankind only by combining incest with adultery. Both Abraham and Isaac claim their wives are their sisters, in case they are murdered for them when they are abroad, and never mind the inevitable threat to both women's virtue and the rather more ghastly risk (usually run by poor Abimelech) of households being struck barren by God for unwittingly dishonorable advances made to apparently single women.

This is a grubby, morally compromised, violent, scheming world—one that's not exactly hard to recognize. The customs, names, and life spans are unfamiliar—the unremitting lists of begats, the land deals and the livestock, may seem strange—but the atmosphere is not. As God says of man before unleashing the flood, "Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil, continually." But if this is the nature of man, why did God make it so? If our troubles come from the knowledge of good and evil, why is it that we ate that fruit in the first place—why were we already likely to go so wrong? Weren't we perfect before then? To make a wrong choice, we must already have had free will—that's something we've never been able to deal with too well—and didn't God know we would fail? Couldn't He foresee the Fall? Can't He foresee everything? How can Original Sin be our fault? What game is He playing? Certainly nothing as straightforward as dice.

Genesis knows our nature—yours and mine—the one it implies God gave us. It predicts my lust, my envy, my insecurities, my desire to possess, and shows very little of what I might see as my redeeming qualities. When Joseph's wicked brothers cry out, "What is this that God hath done unto us?" we can find it amusing—after all, they are sinners and their sins have found them out. But if they have a nature that allows them to sin, which seems to predetermine the directions of free will, then whose fault is that? When I do what will harm me and others, when I long for what I should not have, surely I should be able to ask, What is this that God has done to me?

There's no point asking Him, of course. Genesis shows another familiar guise of God—the Absentee. God makes the snake "subtil" (and perhaps not recognizably a snake—he goes on his belly only later, remember) and yet does nothing to prevent the inevitable, and frankly rather rapid, application of serpentine subtlety. God is elsewhere when Eve and Adam eat the fateful apple, likewise when Cain kills Abel. God somehow loses sight of Sarah's maid Hagar when she is unjustly cast out and catches up with her only when she pauses by the well. This is the same God who has only heard of Sodom's evil and has to send angels out on reconnaissance. God is not there when the innocent Joseph is attacked and sold into slavery—He is only "with him" once he's unjustly imprisoned on the word of Potiphar's wife.

We recognize this God. At Wounded Knee and in Auschwitz, Kanpur, Soweto, Srebrenica, Sabra-Shatila, Belfast, in every other killing field—we find ourselves asking, Where was God? What is more frightening—that God could be withdrawn from a part of His Creation, or that He would actually be there, unseen but looking on—a voluntarily powerless voyeur, while Pol Pot and Stalin, Kissinger and Papa Doc, Eichmann and Idi Amin and the rest of the bloody regiment were both undeniably monstrous and unmistakably human? The torturers, the murderers, the rapists, the wife beaters, the child molesters, the extortionists, the tax-avoiding city gents and self-serving politicians who impoverish and mutilate by proxy, all the fathers who terrify—the Lord God made them all.

Why? Why make us so vicious? Why abandon us in such savage lives? We reach up with unanswered words, not knowing if God has hidden from us or if we have turned from Him. We see humankind and its Maker first part ways in Genesis. But not before we've learned that we're alike, that we're in His own image—an image that includes "the terror of God." This isn't God the Father, yet, but there seems to be a family resemblance. Genesis describes a little of man's terror, his small-scale misery, deceit, kidnapping, rape, and bloodshed. The epic havoc is left to the Destroyer God—the one we half admire and would wish more powerful yet, as long as He's on our side. Because it scares us when God appears to stand on the sidelines, but it can be even more terrifying when He does intervene. Acts of God, after all, are the precursors of insurance claims and closed-casket funerals.

It's that divine touch in our beginning, that bloodline—we see it in ruined cities, poisoned rivers, the ingenuity of bombs. We humans take after the Destroyer. It may not be what we want, but we can't seem to help it. In the same way, I see my parents' faults emerging in me—in my choice to try out my father's temper, or my mother's martyred love—that tendency toward brooding secrecy—and do I lie like my father, or only like myself? I can ask why it seems so difficult to emulate their finer qualities, their moments of nobility and dignity. I can ask why it seems so difficult to follow the gentler, more merciful God. Genesis offers a harsh answer—the path that mankind follows is frequently bloody, downward, dark: We find it difficult to create, we rarely recognize what is blessed. If this is meant as a warning, we have tended to use it as an alibi rather than take it to heart.

But there are degrees of wickedness. We don't all fall, all the time. And as long as we try to be good, we hope that we may be protected, that the Destroyer will be on our side—appalling, but ours. Sodom and Gomorrah are annihilated because both cities contain not even ten pure souls. The Tower of Babel is never completed, because it is a sign of overweening arrogance, an attempt to touch Heaven punished by the removal of man's common language, the word that was with us and made us strong. And, of course, there's the ultimate intervention—the deluge. God looks out at the evil of men and simply decides to start again. It's the story that captivates schoolchildren, that has counterparts in Babylonian, Greek, and Indian myths, and may well reflect a communal memory of an actual, cataclysmic flood. Whatever its historical basis, Genesis uses the story of Noah to reassure. God could do this again at any time, but He says He chooses not to. He seems almost apologetic—"I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake....While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." So we have that to rely on, at least. And from now on there will be the rainbow, reminding God (how can He forget?) of His promise not to kill us all. If God can be a monster, He can be with us, contained by His word.

And our goodness may be defended by our adherence to His word. The world of Genesis exists before the Commandments, but God is already commanding. He asks for flesh offerings, doesn't think much of vegetables and fruit. Some animals are classified as clean and some are not. Bloodshed should be answered with bloodshed. The ark must be built and be built just so, the animals collected according to divine instruction. God tells His favorites where and how to live. Disobey and you lose Paradise, are blasted with brimstone, exiled, turned to salt.

But God may be moved by words—those prayers may be worthwhile. Cain the murderer haggles a mark of protection out of the Almighty, and his blood is not spilled to answer Abel's slaughter. Abraham can bargain God down to a figure of only ten men to save Sodom—although there weren't even ten, which perhaps God knew all along. And Lot asks God to save Zoar for him to live in when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed. God even consents to a particularly convoluted selection process to pick out Rebecca, the future wife of Isaac—although He must have had all the time in the universe, so why not? And God makes promises, too. He selects Abraham when nothing in particular recommends him and promises him land in perpetuity and the right to found a people. He promises the former black sheep Jacob much the same. Abraham, of course, has to pay for his privilege by circumcising all the males in his care—and he also must consent to a change of names for him and his wife—God gives you a name to make you His. He'll do this again, turning Jacob to Israel. This is the God of mercy. He makes coats of skins for naked Eve and Adam. He catches Himself in thorns, descends as an angel, sets a ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac. Perhaps He does love us, after all.

Or perhaps we needed to write that He does. Certainly, some of His expressions of love can trouble us today. We all want to be chosen of God—the promise of land and dominion to His favorites in Genesis makes a simple, unequivocal bedrock for a number of fundamentalist claims. The Christian Crusades and the British Empire justified political agendas of massacre and theft with the help of declarations that God was with them. A story written by children of Israel, disingenuously promising them land in perpetuity, continues to bathe that land in blood. Even beyond the early political spin, Genesis shows that whatever God the Giver provides, the gift is ambivalent—the beautiful and fatal world, the tempting and condemning fruit—why would a promised land be any different? The ram in thorns God produces is necessary only because He has forced Abraham to the brink of killing the son he waited a hundred years to conceive—Isaac, his obsession and his future as a patriarch. The skin garments are handed over as the gates of Paradise are closing with Adam and Eve on the wrong side. Those clean and unclean animals aren't actually specified, and sometimes their classifications seem not to matter at all. Circumcision makes a covenant for Abraham, but when the Hivites are circumcised, their menfolk are still slaughtered for the sake of Jacob's daughter—even while Jacob's camp contains "strange gods." Cain gets away with murder.

In Genesis—as in the world—God can appear to make no sense. Sexual misconduct of all kinds seems to be accepted, unless it isn't. Murder is fine, unless it's not. Which is to say, God's favorites can commit adultery and kill, sleep with handmaidens and relatives and be either only moderately chastised or entirely unpunished. Even amongst God's chosen there is an arbitrary quality to God's decisions, which is terrifying when combined with omnipotence. Abel the hunter is loved, Esau the hunter is not. Noah gets drunk, passes out in a state of undress, and his son, Ham, sees him naked by accident—still, Ham and his offspring, the children of Canaan, are cursed forever. Esau is swindled out of his birthright and even his father's blessing by Jacob, who then goes on to steal an extra wife from Laban—a wife Jacob subsequently hates. Jacob's punishment for this is service to Laban that only makes Jacob rich. And God shows Jacob "the gate of Heaven" and then forms an angel to wrestle him and touch him to the bone—"I have seen God face to face," Jacob says, "and my life is preserved." The brothers who founded the Twelve Tribes have their good points—"Naphtali is a hind let loose: He giveth goodly words." And "Joseph is a fruitful bough." But this is the same Joseph so soured by his early trials that he inflicts emotional torture even on his own father. His eleven brothers were the men who left him to the pit and the slavers. Simeon and Levi are murderers with "instruments of cruelty...in their habitations," and Reuben has defiled his father's bed and is "unstable as water," while "Benjamin shall ravin as the wolf" and "Dan shall be a serpent by the way"—the book ending as it began, with the threat of a snake.

A believer could be forgiven for thinking that Calvin was right—that places in Heaven are reserved for the justified, however they transgress. God, it seems, commands but is not just. He kills my grandfather but not Pinochet. When I keep to His rules, I don't benefit: When I break them, things go wrong. I have the capacity to love children and yet I have no child. I pray for the relief of solitude and I am alone. I see the good suffer and the guilty prosper and I pray to God the first anesthetist, the One who made Adam sleep while he lost his rib and feel no pain. I pray for the relief of pain. Genesis brings us the wonder of acknowledging God but also its despair. The more its authors try to describe God, the more we fear, the less we understand.

So it is hardly a surprise that the book's only references to real companionship with God are elusive and brief. How Eve and Adam speak to God in the garden is a secret we have lost. And later, almost as an aside, we are told that Enoch "walked with God." There is no mention of rituals or bargaining between them, no commandments or promises, only perhaps the thought of an amiable stroll, of companions who go forward, side by side, no words needed. Perhaps God isn't so pleased by singing and praying, after all, perhaps it is silence He craves, the kind of relaxed stillness that grows between old companions. We are here, after all, and—should we choose to believe it—so is He and the world is as it is and we have free will to try to change what we don't like. Perhaps God allows His favorites to sin because He is not so very interested in sin, because it has its own penalties and rewards, morality operating like evolution—something that is unavoidable but takes time. This is emotionally unsatisfying and calls for the patience of saints, but it may also be true.

From Australia, to Scotland, to 3:57 A.M., and without explanation, there I am. And my parents were themselves and no one else for reasons they could not fully grasp: the shouting, the moments of violence, the silences and crying: I would have liked to understand them, but I never truly will. And my own life: the love and fear of men I have from my father, the love and fear of tenderness I have from my mother; too old still to be single, too old still to be childless, an end to the bloodline; locked in a profession built of words—what sense that really makes is beyond me. Perhaps it is intended to be meaningless, or simply an encouragement to prayer, or to silence. I can't tell.

The God of Genesis, a God I recognize, is inexplicable. I try to be glad for those dashes of unforeseen compromise and kindness—the times we don't get what we deserve, but better. I never ask, for instance, why Mother Teresa is dead and I'm alive, why my friend Paul was killed by brain cancer, and although I am much less good and useful, I was not. Above all Genesis, not to mention reality, seems colored by the peculiar, magisterially dark sense of humor which a remarkable number of religions agree is wholly characteristic of God. He is, if not playing, then playful. Which, for example, allows me to call Him Him. Never the Father for me, but I still think of Him as male, because my nature inclines to the physical love of men. It makes sense for me that part of my longing for God would be flavored with the longing for a lover, the other half to complete the pair—the precise love it would seem God refuses to grant me. Naturally, He must actually encompass every possible sexual identity and the absolute absence of sex. It is absurd to address my Creator at all—we are too different—but if I must, I would rather do it with love, rather have it as a kind of private joke with the Almighty.

This kind of God—incomprehensible, distant, ludic—leaves us with the loneliness of adulthood and the responsibilities of a world where actions always bring reactions, often of an unforeseen kind. We can choose to pray, but prayer may not bring the desired results. Many religions agree that prayer alters the pray-er, if not the prayed-to, or the world. Prayer may, in fact, operate according to natural laws, a closed system, God at one remove. Genesis offers tantalizing suggestions that it does still constitute some kind of communication, however unpredictable, with a God we can't meet face-to-face but who is still willing to appear in dreams, in words. This may not be what we want, but it seems to be what we've got. Only Enoch, the quiet friend, gets a better deal, living 365 years and then "he was not; for God took him"—the one human in the whole of the Bible's first book who gets to go home.

More redemption than this is hard to find in Genesis. Still, its closing verses do tell us to "fear not" and do attempt to explain that we are praying and dying, loving and murdering, hurting and joking, living within a Creation we are not made to understand. With every pain, every despair, we have to hope, as Joseph says, that "God meant it unto good" because we have very little choice, beyond the possible relief of self-destruction. Our position is, in itself, not unamusing, the darkest of black jokes. Such a high level of absurdity—a beguiling, lifelong trap constructed of freedoms: torture and joy if you love it, torture and joy if you don't—this can really be bearable only if it's funny, unless you can arrange to go insane. Creation is funny if there's no God, no designer for the trap. And, naturally, it's funnier still if there is God, if He's been with us all along, since the beginning.

Copyright © 2004 by A. L. Kennedy