“I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.”
What’s happening in the news today is not history. You might call it “current events” but not history. If it is worth anything it will be called history after many years of reflection upon what happened today. It’s like Monday morning quarterbacking in the short term. Did you watch an NFL football game one Sunday – on TV or from the stands? You saw a little of what happened while the game was played before your eyes. But come Monday – when the game has become a past event, you’ll get the fuller story of what happened from the reflections of your local sports writers. The game will have become history.
Or even take the history of the United States. I read a lot of history books about the American Civil War – and as a consequence I know more about that war than the generals and soldiers and population that experienced it between 1860 and 1865. To prove my point, when the centennial of the Civil War began in 1960 some publisher in New York reprinted the weekly copies of Harpers Weekly (almost like the Time magazine of the late 19th century) for the full five years of the conflict. I subscribed to the reprints because I thought it would put me closer to the events of that crisis than would a history book written a hundred years later. Was I disappointed!
The news in the periodical was never up to date – given the slow pace of communications, the lack of perspective. For instance, the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) was not reported until September 1863, and even then in fragmentary fashion. I mean here I am by way of my subscription trying to stand shoulder to shoulder with contemporaries of that battle – and (thanks to history, to the Monday morning quarterbacking of later writers) I already knew more than the citizens who in 1863 read the 1863 issues of Harpers Weekly.
So what about today’s first reading from the Book of Genesis? Well, even as the Monday morning quarterback’s attempt to clarify what happened on the football field on the prior Sunday or a historian’s later attempt to clarify a past event like Gettysburg, scholars see the composer of our Genesis reading doing the same thing. The composer sees and even experiences our current human plight: human beings feeling naked before the elements of Nature, fearing snakes and other animals; knowing pain (as in childbearing); sweating out a living, trying to exact from life something more than thorns and thistles; knowing death, the death even of their children, the malice of Cain and others like him, knowing loneliness.
And from this always current starting point the Genesis composer is inspired to stand back, gather some distance, a Monday morning perspective, to clarify the wider context of what has made our condition so desperate. And the wider context he derives from this more distant vantage point shows our every day anguish to be traceable to our persistent ambition to replace God Almighty – and force our will upon one another, to dominate the earth, indeed the heavens as well (as in the Tower of Babel story). We know no limits. The result? Suffering; we lose touch with a world that could be a Garden if we dealt with it, if we conducted it as a symphony.
Knowing that, the Church would have us look forward to Lent as a new beginning, a time when a new Adam (with an Eve named Mary) will arrive among us and even die in an attempt to make us human, not in place of God but in the image of God – nor will this new Adam (and an Eve named Mary) allow death to be our final fate but rather a prelude to our recovery of what we can only imagine to be a Garden!