A Cherokee Legend
Here is the story: It is called "Grandfather Tells" and is also known as "The Wolves Within."
An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice,
"Let me tell you a story. I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times." He continued, "It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.
"But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.
"Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."
The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"
The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."
(http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TwoWolves-Cherokee.html)
Few of us in this church this morning believe unconditionally what the Bible says about the beginnings of the world. With varying degrees of generosity, we might speak about the Creation story of Genesis and its allegorical meaning. With less charity, we might even congratulate ourselves, because we “know better” than to read the Bible as literal truth.
One of the things we Unitarian Universalists pride ourselves on is our ability to go beyond mere tolerance to celebration and integration of people unlike ourselves. Yet I have observed that when it comes to being generous about the churches we’ve left, we tend to be edgier and less gentle.
Many, but not all, of us are known by some as “come-inners;” meaning that we come-in from somewhere else. We came from that other place because we didn’t agree on something there. So not only do we have the emotional baggage of what we didn’t believe in, sometimes the very act of leaving our faith of origin leaves its own wounds.
There are also the people here who grew up as Unitarians, or Universalists, or Unitarian Universalists. They may have their own confusion about the creation story of the Hebrew Bible.
Whatever our past individual relationships with the Hebrew Bible and its stories about the origin of the world, these tales are a formidable force in our culture. We can’t ignore them, because to do so would be shortsighted. So, how do we do this?
We begin at the beginning.
What if we re-imagined Creation? The Biblical Creation, I mean. What might it mean if we took the creation story that we all think we know, and really took a good look at it? How much do you know about the Creation story in Genesis?
Did you know there is actually more than one story there? There is Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” In this story, God creates everything in six days and rests on the seventh, which is why the Jewish people observe the Sabbath. Even though this is currently the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, there is much scholarship that suggests it is not the first creation story, but a second, later story, put in front of the original creation story.
Current Biblical scholarship suggests that the Hebrew Bible bears the footprint of four major schools of editorship. They are called J, E, D and P. J is for Yahwist, J being the first letter in the German spelling of YHWH, as German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen was the man who brought this idea fully to light. E is for “Eloist.” E’s distinction is based partly on the use of the word Elohim as a reference to God, and not Yahweh. D comes mostly into play in Deuteronomy, and was probably active during the 7th century BCE or Before the Common Era, a term used instead of BC-Before Christ. P is the Priestly editorship, which reflects the concerns of the priestly class, most active while Israel was in exile in Babylon, or shortly thereafter in about the 6th or 5th century “BCE.”
This morning we are interested in the Yahwist and Priestly editorship of the two separate creation stories in Genesis. If you’ll open up your Bibles to…… I’m kidding. I bet you’d thought you’d never hear that phrase in a Unitarian Universalist church!
The second story in Genesis starts in chapter 2, verse 4. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”
It could be very easy to now get lost in a whirlwind of discussions about language, translations, ancient documents that seem to demonstrate the age and relative dates of these Biblical texts, but we’re not going to do that today. What’s important for us is that there are two distinct stories, and that they are written by two different groups of ancient Hebrews.
Why is that important to us? Because it affords us the opportunity to ask the following questions: What did they think they were doing? What motivated them? What was their goal in adding a second, and often contradictory story, and placing it in a position that creates, because of its position in the written text, primacy over an older story?
And what can all this mean for us?
Now, I don’t plan to stand up here and deliver a lecture on Biblical scholarship. It’s a topic I never thought I’d find very intriguing, but in truth, it has captured some of my interest. I will, however, take the chance on suggesting it as a possible topic of thought for you. The Bible is not, from the accepted academic point of view (and I mean no offense to those who disagree), written by one hand. It does not have one author or even one editor. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were assembled by human beings. Inspired by God or no, humans put these books together.
And even humans inspired by God have an agenda. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their agenda is nefarious; in fact, my own belief in the genuine goodness of humanity allows me to say that I think each person who worked on the Bible from the time of its original assemblage probably did so with the best of intentions.
So these Priestly folk who placed their account of Creation in front of the Yahwist account... What were they thinking? Simply stated, I’m suggesting that they thought they were doing a good thing. I can’t guess, as a 21st century person, their exact motivations. Given my own theological standpoint that people are basically good, I’m going to say that I believe that the Priestly folk placed their story in front of the older story because they understood it as a more accurate account.
Adding material to a sacred text is serious business. This is about God. This is not about adding to a state’s constitution to take away the rights of American citizens. Think how upset some of us got when the citizens of California voted to strip gay and lesbian people of their right to marriage. And that’s just a law; a law can be overturned. And, hopefully, it will be.
Imagine for a minute what the responsibility would feel like to change the covenant of your people with your God.
Naturally, this is just the sort of thing that we do, isn’t it? We re-imagine our relationship with that which is Holy. It is part of our own spiritual practice. All of us accept and reject bits and pieces of the belief systems of others.
Now, I’m not talking about the Big Bang, or as I’ve also heard it referenced, “The Big Birth.” And I’m not talking about Quantum Physics either. The whole idea that all matter is mostly empty space is interesting, but not the point this morning.
We’re here. We had an origin. What is the tale we’ll tell about our beginnings? What will our tale mean to us and to our children?
Gordon Kaufman, in his book In the Beginning…Creativity, writes “I had come to the conclusion that all theological ideas—including the idea of God—could best be understood as products of the human imagination, when employed by men and women seeking to orient themselves in life.”
So, let us be about the business of orienting.
In her book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, Catherine Keller highlights, among other things, the very question of creation. Is it creatio ex nihilo or is it ex nihlio nihil fit? Is the reality of the story of the beginning
Another image that Keller invokes in her book is that of a 100 year old translation from Gunkel that God engaged in this act of creation by “vibrating over the face of the waters.” She goes further to say that this vibrating creates a butterfly effect.
I find the image of God vibrating over the deep of the unknown waters to be especially powerful, and though I’ve spent a couple of months thinking about it, I can’t really say why. Perhaps it’s because vibration indicates energy, and that energy is being employed to create WITH something other than God. Ex hihlio nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing. There has to be something there, right? So where did God come from? Where did the deep waters that God vibrated over come from?
These are not answers we can ever really know. None of us can go back in a time machine to the moment of the Big Birth with a video-cam and record it for the rest of us.
But we can still tell a tale of beginnings, and in that tale, we can give primacy to those things we think are important.
A surprising number of different Hebrew verbs are used in the Hebraic Bible to reference creation, with God as subject: bara, to create; pa’al, make; yasar, form; anahl, build; yalad, to bring forth. I bring this up not as a way to criticize the ancient Hebrews for their lack of consistency, but to praise their poetic sensibilities.
How do we begin our tale? What a difficult task it would be to write the story of the beginning of everything!
As Unitarian Universalists it seems unlikely that we might ever agree on a written single story that tells the origin of the universe, but we might agree on many themes. What are some of our shared values today? They should be in any tale that we tell about the origins of our common experience.
Of our seven principles, the first and seventh principles seem to me to be the ones we should really look at in any discussion about ultimacy. Our first principle declares that we Affirm and Promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Our seventh principle adds that we are all part of an interdependent web of existence. These are core values to us.
Every person has worth, and we are connected to all that is around us.
So as we tell this tale of the origin of everything, keeping in mind that there are those who don’t believe in a driving force behind creation, but also feeling a certain pull toward story telling, let’s re-caste the creation story in Genesis.
In the beginning of our tale, one possible of many, there was community. Actually, it was more of a proto-community. The gathering of people became a community after an awakening.
One morning, a young woman died in childbirth, leaving behind a baby. The eldest woman in the group saw the baby and was moved by the new, small and helpless animal. She encouraged a young woman who was nursing her own child, to also feed the orphaned baby. This child had no name, its mother likewise died nameless. The old woman also had no name; it was a time before names were needed, because no one thought of themselves as belonging to anything. We give names to our young to show that they have a place.
Until this old woman named the helpless child, no one ever needed a name.
This wasn’t a perfect community. It’s not that kind of a tale. It took the community a couple of thousand years to figure things out like farming, and building houses. Even after thousands of years of doing both, they still hadn’t perfected either process, and turned from eating what they planted to producing surplus to sell. From building the houses they needed in order to survive the elements, to attempting to transform the natural world into a world that was about comfort and status, they developed agri-business and real-estate booms and busts.
The community, as you can well imagine, has made a few mistakes along the way. We’ve forgotten that we’re all connected. That the person who died last week in the Gaza strip was killed by a cousin, no matter how distant.
We’ve forgotten that we are related to all things, if you go back far enough.
In his book Zooagraphies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, Matthew Calarco speaks about not the personality of animals, but their animalities. My own Mom violates this very rule all the time by remarking that her dog, Sassy, is a people person. Sassy is a dog, she doesn’t have a personality. She, if anything, has a doginality. The very concept of us having a personality goes against what Eve and Adam knew. They had animalities; an animal nature that connected them with the rest of nature. Calarco’s argument is more about the valuing of the non-human, our non-human cousins, than about devaluing humans. Just like the two people involved in the Gaza tragedy I just spoke about, so we are cousins, however distant, to the animals in the field, in the jungle and in the slaughterhouse.
Our Creation story isn’t over.
Part of being a practicing Unitarian Universalist is engaging in liberal theology, or the re-examination of your belief system. We are not the only church practicing liberal theology, nor does liberal theology guarantee a politically liberal identity.
As we continue to think about our place in relation to that which is sacred, part of that consideration must be about our place in the physical realm as well. Our own James Luther Adams once wrote, “The unexamined faith is not worth having.” I invite you today to think about your own place in creation and the story that we’re weaving everyday as we live.
Earlier, during the story time for all ages, before the kids went to their classes, I told the story of the two wolves that are inside each of us. Which wolf are you feeding? And how are you defining those wolves?
Adulthood is complicated. Given an absolutely limitless income, many of us would give money to charities we believe in, we would drive that hybrid we want to, we’d have energy efficient houses. We would be all that we could be.
But this is not our reality. Instead, we cut corners on our better selves. We choose to balance our checkbook, and make that rent or mortgage payment, and we keep driving that car whose gas mileage is not what we’d like.
We feed and clothe our children rather than build a new home that’s LEED certified.
And for some of us, it means not eating organically, locally-grown food, because we frankly just can’t afford it.
Part of what was so compelling to me when I first read the tale of the Grandfather, Grandson and the two wolves was the liberal theology aspect of it.
Dr. Mike Hogue, a professor of mine, and I had a talk about just what IS theology anyway? Mike is a recent Templeton award winner, which is given for excellence in theological development. When I asked Mike for a portable answer to the question What Is Theology, he told me “Theology is the way in which we engage with what we call the divine.” Action, actual verb-creation is the way that Mike Hogue sees theology. Doing is theology.
When deciding which wolf to feed, you are engaging in theology. What does your theology call you to do? Going back for a moment to Keller’s idea of God vibrating above the primordial waters, it is clear that we are in fact the co-creators of existence. God (by this I mean whatever force there is in this universe, not necessary the white bearded God of the middle ages) is still creating. We co-create right alongside.
And we’ve made some serious errors. Look at agri-business, factory farming, nuclear bombs, the exploitation of workers, twenty-first century slavery, holocausts….the list can go on. But also, we’ve done some things very well.
Each day, maybe even each moment, we are choosing which wolf to feed. This gives each of us innumerable times each day to start afresh. We continually have the opportunity to be our best selves!
Do we go beyond good and evil and move toward the responsible and away from the shortsighted? In our daily lives can we do what Eve did? Can we free ourselves from our past systems of behavior, governance and limitations by an act of compassion?
I say we can.
After all, Creation, like Revelation, is a never closing book.
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