Advent 2019, day fourteen

In the ancient imagination of Genesis chapter 2, God forms the human being from the soil, for the soil, blowing into his nostrils the breath of life in order that the human become a living creature. As the story unfolds, in chapter 3, the Lord curses the soil for the human’s sake (certainly, the text can be understood this way, even if that is not a traditional Christian translation), until the human return to the soil from which they were taken. Then God drives the human out from the divinely planted garden that needs no tilling, to till the soil from which he had been taken.

To curse is to place limits on something; to bless, to release something into life. So, in the relationship between the soil and the human formed from the soil, for the soil, God both places a constraint on the soil for the human’s sake — preventing the soil from getting out-of-hand — and releases the human into the world, to fill it and to till the soil. This, then, creates a dynamic: the soil will produce thorns and thistles, but these will not overwhelm domesticated, edible grain; the human will need to labour, breaking sweat to water the soil, but will be able to feed their offspring. And the human from the soil will eventually return to the soil: soil set free by the life breath taken upon itself the curse, or constraint, of the soil from which it came.

This speaks quite literally to our interdependent place within the created order. But, as soil-beings, it also speaks symbolically to our own beings. To the blessing and the curse within us, both God-given, both for us — and for others.

So, when we allow what we have hidden as shameful into the light, truly into the light that came into the world in Jesus the Christ, it is not to revel in darkness but to see our curse as part of the whole. As the clouds in the night sky which temporarily obscure but cannot extinguish starlight. As the thistles constrained by the word of the Lord who says, let it be until the end of the age when I shall separate them from the grain without harm, that none of the lasting goodness be lost and all that has served its purpose be consumed by fire.

In my life and in yours, as much as in the lives of those we do not see eye to eye with, there is curse and blessing, frustration and flourishing, limitation and enduring hope. Let it be so, for now.