Have we been in touch with something that we might call truth? Perhaps. However, it is an impression or feeling that it would be communicable to others. The drama begins with God already on the stage. He is creating the World. God creates a man, Adam and places him in the Garden of Eden to work in it and take care of it.

God’s intentions is for humanity to be in close r relationship with him and in harmony with the rest of creation around them and the environment. God is described in these early centuries of the Bible as dwelling in the garden together with the first human beings, Adam and Eve. At the end of the first play of Genesis, God gives his own assessment of his work:

God saw all he had made, and it was very good. Blessed be your glorious name, and it may it be exalted above all blessings and praise. You alone are the LORD. You made the Heavens, even the highest Heavens, and all their starry host, the Earth and all that is on it, the seas, white squall, and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of Heavens worship you.

Act one reveals God’s desire for the people and provides the setting for all the action that follows. Yet whatever comes through has a validity that one would never deny. Would it come through as rule or mandate or set of injunctions? To ask this question is to answer it: that which only mistily serves the sense of truth will not do better for the sense of law.

The Fall: Tension is introduced in the story when Adam and Eve decide to go their own way and seek their own wisdom. The listen to the deceptive voice of God’s enemy, Satan, and doubt God’s trustworthiness. God as a reality that must be reckoned with by causes, systems, theories, and perspective that seek our allegiance.

They must say, “We subdue him” or “He proves us.” He is claimed for different varieties of Christian thought, and as a voice of paganism; as a man of tragic vision, and as a grim cynic; as a representative of different sexual natures; as a lover of flowers, and a hater of animalism; as a pure theatrical entertainer, and as a philosopher in drama; as a Universal artist, and as a spokesman for the views and attitudes of his own day.

As a result of this rebellion: The LORD God banishes him [Adam] from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the East side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

In my glowing report of these private theatricals, several elements stand out: the simple pleasure of the business—fresh, lively, spontaneous; the unaffected relish of the passage of bold bawdry: the general accessibility of the texts, with little help from what the guardians of the treasure call “apparatus.”

Here we have another sense of God as family entertainment, God as the good book in which all matter has a part and give pleasure, and as an open book to all who are open to it. As a family entertainment the book compels nothing to the canons of propriety that in the name of the family were later to afflict the novel.

As a traditional text, it has a scent of the mysteries, and mysteries imply professional interpreters to guide the laity; yet this text can speak directly and privately to the attending heart. God’s intention in creation is known, but part of his own creation has put his plan off course. Can God regain his relationship with humanity and remove the curse from creation? Or did God’s enemy effectively end the plan and subvert the story?

Each interpreter sees some part of the whole that does, we may say, mirror him, and he then proceeds to enlarge the mirror until it becomes the work as a whole. Thus us simply to say that the most comprehensive soul does comprehend many others smaller souls; and it is understandable that each of these, humanly intent on grandeur, should try to become the whole.

Hence the distorting, the myths, though one might want to qualify some of the details of this argument, still the spirit is right:  it identifies a mechanical, gimmicky kind of criticism that is reductive because it lacks a sense of wholeness.

Suppose we amalgamate these comments that reveal different perspectives, definitions, and expectations. The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you.” God is above the ordinary, important, unique level of speech and thought; he represents a nobler, higher realm of being.

God has both feet on the ground; but in him the common ground is transfigured, revealed in a new dimension; nothing is too mean for him, but the mean itself is raised to a supernal plane.

God is the ultimate all-purpose bool, with imaginative breadth and depth, for a humanity not limited by age, Pilgrims come from everywhere to these central shrines, where all kinds of relics, antiques, and object sacred by association are for sale, and hawkers labor around the clock.

 

Every true faith always has a distribution problem and stimulates much business efforts; shrines and commerce are paired in a complementary marriage.

 

Original, primitive rites are practiced to solemnize the worship—communions of ancient food and drink, grave faces on the green within the cathedral close, concerts with what we might call Old Testament instruments. These perhaps stimulate the tithing spirit. The sanctuaries in which our public observances and rites are carried on have a recognizable similarity.

In calling Abram (God later renamed him Abraham) and promising to make him into a great nation, God is narrowing his focus and concentrating on one group of people for a period of time. However, the ultimate goal remains the same: to bless all the peoples on Earth, remove the curse from and restore the original relationship that existed in the garden.

 

 

There is often a crusading spirit, a note of rescuing the sacred from the profane. Sometimes however, the combatants seem to be speaking only to ear other, playing theological war games at a great remove from the real affairs of the church.

Abraham’s impressive bedroom suite—bedroom and parlor divided by a huge arch—had been completely cleaned since the making of Eve Mayfair into an irresponsible little demon. And the bed on which the Dark Gift had been given was all made up with its fancy dark blue velvet comforter and draperies.

 

There was the center of the table where Ryan and I had sat for hours as he told me the story of his life, and Eve and I took our places there, but Ryan seemed stunned by the sight of the room, and for a long moment he simply appraised his surroundings as if they meant something wholly new to him.

“What gives, guy?” I asked.

“Pondering, Beloved Boss,” he said. “Just pondering.”

I was not looking at the blue eyed wonder. Was I glad agent wonder bread was sitting to my right than roaming the World all vulnerable and tearful in his Oxford style clothing. Yes, but I was under no obligation to say so to one who had so furiously talked to me. Was I?

“Come, talk to me,” I said to Ryan. “Sit down.”

Finally, he did, taking his old place with his back to the computer desk, and just opposite me.

“Randolph, I am not sure what to do. I am thinking about the house we bought a few months ago. You see, all the time we were in Europe, Aunt Queen and I were in charge by phone, by fax, by some means, and then all this last year we were both here, figures of security and authority. Now that has changed. Anut Queen is gone, simply gone, and I do not know that I want to be here very often. I do not think that I can be.”

When Abraham’s descendants are later enslaved in Egypt, a central pattern in the story is set: God returns to his people, frees them and restores them to the land promises to them. God makes a covenant with this new nation of Isreal at Mount Sinai. He appoints Moses to be their leader during their liberation from Egypt—the Exodus. The sense of community, when it is sound, gives men an equal sense of order and of disruptive forces.

Thus he provides one of the essential experiences of the true community: the knowledge not only that the indispensable common order of life may always be injured or broken, but that all the threats to its well-being exist in all of us. As part of the covenant, God makes it clear that if his people remain true to him and faithfully follow his ways, he will bless them in their new land and make it like the original Garden of Eden.

However, if Israel is not faithful to the covenant, God warns them that he will send them out of the land, just as he did with Adam and Eve. The heir to the Belgian throne is the King’s brother Prince Albert, Prince of Liege, who lives opposite the entrance to Chateau de Laeken at Villa Belvedere.

The park of Laeken, which became public property at the beginning of the twentieth century, contains a memorial to King Leopold I of the Belgians in the form of a Gothic pyramid.

 

Leopold I and his son Leopold II both died at Laeken and within the grounds of the Chateau itself there is a memorial cloister to Queen Astrid, the Swedish bride of Leopold III who was killed in a car crash in Switzerland only a year after he succeeded to the throne. They break the covenant, follow false gods of the nations that surround them and bring the judgment of God down upon themselves.

Abraham’s descendants, chosen to reverse the failure of Adam, have not apparently failed themselves. Along the way, however, God has planted the seeds of a different outcome. One of Israel’s kings, David, is noted for being, “a man after God’s own heart.” So God promises to send another king to Israel, a son of David, who will lead Israel wisely, bring the nation back to God and be the agent of blessing to the peoples of the World.

So while Act III end tragically, with God apparently absent, the hope of a promise remains. The community that he offers us costs much, and we may be obliged to be more adult than we expect.

 

A whole series of comedies play for responses of which the simplest souls are capable, and then suddenly demand a grown-up intelligence of which gags and gimmicks give no warnings. The Comedy of Errors promises us free laughs at mechanical men, but some of these begin to think and feel, and our belly laughs are out of place.

God can start with genuine feelings, as in the Garden of Eden. Four centuries later, the people of Israel are suffering. Surely the spiritual and the carnal love are not so widely different as I have been taught to think them. They are, perhaps, not antagonistic, and are but expressions of the same will. In all matters of love there is a vast amount of luck. Keep to your caste; and be too self-respecting to lavish love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift or present is not wanted and would be despised.

You will have a son, and are to give him the name Randolph, he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father Matthew, and he will reign over the house of Randolph forever; his kingdom will never end. Waiting for God to return, an angel of God comes to and announces Randolph’s arrival, he confronts God’s enemies in the spiritual realm, the demons, and forcefully orders them to leave the people who they torment.

The time has come. The kingdom of God is here. Repent and believe the good news. The start of the reign of God. God has come back to dwell with his people. God is with us. God made you alive with Christ.

He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us that stood opposed to us; he took it away, and having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. He leads his people through death to a new life. In all he shows himself to be the promised child to reconciles humanity with God.

The place is just east of the Rue Royale where King Randolph, Harris II’s son, was frequently to be seen in his off-duty moments walking by himself, informally dressed in a nice suit.

His subjects respected his privacy. “Look, quick! Exclaimed an American excitedly to his Belgian companion. “Isn’t that Randolph? Look!” Some ways seems to master the wisdom of a dual perspective—a sense of the World as it is—and show him a more miserable victim than if he were a more rigid man of a single-track mind.

Or he can take an aged and powerful King, like Grand Duke Adolphe, and secure a palace show us that no one is home free, least of all home free from himself. Or he may take a brilliantly and evilly destructive man, like Satan, and by making him charming and plausible and self-defensive—by giving him the amiable demeanor that most men need—can subtly bring home to every man than Satan lies within himself.

Thus he provides one of the essential experiences of the true community: the knowledge not only that the indispensable common order of life may always be injured or broken, but that all the threats to its well-being exist in all forms. A body of text diversely incorporating the vision of a single man often creates a community, and reverent one; but each community tends to pass, one divinity to yield to another.

After four hundred years, God appears not to be losing but to be extending his dominion. In pondering what it is that he gives that accounts for his gain in power, we have suggested that it is not codes or support or even what we call truth, but the vision of a larger World of actuality and possibility, a completing of ourselves, an awareness of transcendental forces in unexplained and irreducible images; an entry into community that indulges no more than it exacts, that is spacious enough to invite and stir, but never to lull, consciousness.

All these experiences, we have kept saying, have a religious quality. The shortcomings in this analogy will be plain to all who wish to question it; yet it may have some suggestive value.

 

Satan as it is valid, it will serve to imply the range of this body of art, the requirements to which it ministers, and the burdens that, without knowing it, we lay on this maker. Trust in God shall be satisfied. They will not tremble nor be shaken. In the midst of the legitimate concerns of life, we have not been met with fear. God will sustain us by His power.

When we feel vulnerable, we become distracted by our concerns. God can sustain us during those worrisome times, not by promising that nothing bad will happen, but by reminding us that we were made to trust Him above all else. In a World of broken people, we have a guarantee that God can be trusted, and that He wants us to draw on the depths of His love and grace in every circumstance that He gives or allows.

We too can use worry as an opportunity to say a young man thinks that he alone of mortals is impervious to love, and so the discovery that he is in it suddenly alters his views of his own mechanism. It is thus not unlike a rap on the funnybone.

Is not love God’s doing? To know him is to love him. Is Heaven a murderer when its lighting is God. My father was a great motive-monger, and consequently a very dangerous person, the good news is he has the mortgage, the bad news is he hold your girlfriend.

Who can part, forever; only when we come so close that nothing separates us can we meet gain, only when what binds us is not my requirement of me nor any chance circumstances, but a deep ingrained likeness of nature that cannot pass way.  Men are extremely provoked by a polite serenity, where in which we support their loss, that fixes the peace or misery of our lasts moments. A heart at ease files into no extremes—‘tis ever on its center. There are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late.