Old-Testament Thoughts

After recovering from the initial hardships of my heartbreaking choice and my loss of Laurel, I felt like an outsider in my happy-go-lucky culture.  I was drawn towards older women.  Women like my grandmothers, at an age where loss is expected, and of a generation where infant loss was more commonplace.  I retold myself Grandmama's story of kneeling on the hard tile of her bathroom floor and holding her best friend's miscarried preemie in the palm of her hand like a pear, or the stories passed around my family about my great aunt who lost a baby within days of birth due to heart defects.  When this aunt herself passed away, it felt strangely comforting, too.  Death happens everywhere, to everybody.  Not just to me and my baby.  I craved a more familiar world where life is hard and bad things happen to good people.

I knew where to read for this.  The Old Testament.  I chose The Brick Testament  for my text (sometimes you have to keep it light) and supplemented with a lecture series from the library.

I love The Old Testament.  I do!  I love it now for all the reasons I hated it as a sensitive, compassionate little girl.  Life is so hard, people are so bad, and God is cruel, and just a little bit nuts.  It's crazy, and I love it.

This is my world after Laurel.  I can relate to these people with their 900 year lifespans and their half dozen wives and gaggles of concubines and their frequent burning of goats and stoning of naughty children.  We're not so different after all.

In the Heartbreaking Choice community, there are a great many lost baby boys named Isaac.  It's obvious why.  Isaac is the son that God demands Abraham sacrifice.  No reason is given beyond the usual. "Prove you worship Me and only Me."

At this point in my scholarly CD, the professor begins her metaphorical interpretation with, "now, we know that in modern times God doesn't come down and ask any of us to sacrifice our own child!"  *chuckle chuckle.*

Yeah.  Chuckle. Chuckle.  Good thing that doesn't ever happen anymore.

But it does.  It happens over and over again.  It happens to the faithful; it happens to the godless.  It happens to the rich; it happens to the poor.  It happens to liberals; it happens to conservatives.  It happens to all colors of people, speaking all languages, voting for all parties.  It happens to anyone who has access to prenatal diagnostics  and it happens to people who have nothing but a seizing baby in their arms.  It happened to me, and if you're a woman of fertile age, it might just happen to you.  So many of us feel called to let our babies go.  So many of us feel as though we are being asked to make this sacrifice.

They don't talk about abortion in the bible.  Not at all.  Though the procedure has existed in various forms for a very long time, it doesn't come up, and I'm not trying to say that this story is about abortion.

Yet it is an incredibly powerful story for women like me.  Many women of faith make the same choice that I made.  They often speak of feeling called by God to end their pregnancies.  None of us understands why any better than Abraham.

No ram appears conveniently in a bush for us.  Nobody stays our hands.

***

I can here someone yelling through the screen right now.  "You stupid atheist, the whole point of that story is that we DON'T make human sacrifices!  Didn't you read it to the end?"  Yes, I read that part.  It's just hard to take Yahweh seriously.  He's pretty erratic and inconsistent.  But when he decides to test you, his word goes.

I'm not trying to change any religious minds.  Really, I'm not.  I don't believe the bible is literally true.  But I do take comfort from the stories of tough times and drastic measures.  I am moved to know that Abraham and I are part of this crazy world together, to understand that, God or dumb-luck, it's inherently beyond our understanding.