In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
I suppose it was James Weldon Johnson's poem "God's Trombones" that first suggested to me that the void of chaos might be identified with God's loneliness. "I'm lonely. I'll make me a world." I initially heard the poem recited at a high-school speech-and-drama recital-recited by a white teenager for an all-white audience. Even there, it had the power to make me sympathize with God. It broke through the remoteness that I'd been taught to feel toward God. Although the poet was African American and I am European American, James Weldon Johnson named my primal separateness as a gay man, placed it in the heart of God, and identified it as the key to God's creativity.
As a queer people, we too have hovered in the darkness-alone. And we have known that we could only overcome our isolation if we, ourselves, created a world. The void held no place for us to find companionship.
Because we grow up in heterosexual worlds, our first knowledge of ourselves is that of distance, of aloneness. Radclyffe Hall, entitled her silence-shattering lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. The coming-out novels, autobiographies, and how-tos of the 1980s repeatedly tell the story. We thought we were "the only one." We furtively looked at library books, bought taboo magazines, or ventured into anonymous meeting places to discover ourselves.
The past quarter century has erased that lie for some. I envy those younger queer people who seem to "come out" without first having been in the closet. But even in them I find a hint of separateness, of otherness. It makes us sensitive to a deep loneliness that lies at the bottom of many a human soul. It enables us to identify with God, in the beginning, existing in darkness, formless, waiting for something-for someone-to answer.
Depending on the translation, the verse says that a "wind" or "spirit" or "breath" from God swept through that void. In Hebrew, ruah can mean any (or all) of the three. We must discern the meaning of ruah from its context. But in this formative verse, the context does not help. (I can think of no better argument for the inspiration of Scripture than the fact that the Holy Spirit moved this author to make this first verse so potentially multi-faceted and layered with meaning in its use of one word.) Each would make sense. I am tempted, whenever I read it, to say all three at once, but that is impossible. One always comes out first and the others after, no matter how fast I say them.
The wind sweeps through. The spirit hovers over. God sighs. Each one of these lacks form. Rather, each possesses a living formlessness, filled with potential. What else could answer the watery void's formlessness? In these initial words of Genesis, the loneliness of God reaches out to the loneliness of chaos to make companionship possible. Formlessness meets formlessness to bring forth a new reality out of the absence of reality-like James Weldon Johnson bringing forth a poem, or Radclyffe Hall, a novel.
Despite their familiarity, Genesis's first words have not lost their capacity to leave me awestruck.
Water. It is formless, ambiguous, beyond human control. Water is absolutely necessary for human life. We may live longer than a month without food but only a few days without water. Yet water also threatens human life. We can drown in water. Water cools, soothes, and cleanses. It also bears disease, promotes rot, and destroys. Our bodies are mostly water. Scientists tell us that life began in the sea and later emerged onto land. We each experience the same progression. We live nine months in the watery environment of our mother's womb and then emerge into the dry world of breath.
Breath. It, too, has no discernable shape. Human life depends on breath. Breath and breathing often define living in the Bible. For example, Ezekiel prophesied to the bones in the valley and they came together and grew flesh. They even stood up. But until the breath of God blew through them, the dry bones did not live (Ezek. 37:1-10).
Although not a scientist nor an obstetrician, the author of Genesis touches humanity's deepest memory as a species and our first worldly experience as individuals. We emerge from the watery womb and, breathing, we live. The words bear the drama of birth-emergence into a potentially nurturing or potentially destructive world.
But if the verse taps a certain universality, it also touches my experience as a gay man.
"A formless void . . ." The words evoke memories of how my deep, closeted beginnings left me with a sense of formlessness, lacking complete identity. In his exploration of queer identity development in college, Robert A. Rhoads points out that queer youth are "secondarily socialized" into our communities (Coming Out in College: The Struggle for a Queer Identity, Bergin & Garvey, Westport, Connecticut, 1994, p. 156). Most "minority" youth are raised as members of their community (or at least given their community identity) from birth. As a result, members of those groups grow up being socialized to belong to people with a similar identity. We who are gay or lesbian are raised to be heterosexual. The messages of identity sent to us by our bodies, our spirits, and our souls conflict with the messages of identity sent to us by our society. We experience ourselves as lacking heterosexuality or as failing to conform. What we experience seems formless and void. So when I read the story of God's wind or breath or spirit moving over the watery void, I hear the potential for life-giving companionship-a new creation.
Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
I like the fact that God did not put an end to darkness with light. God cherished its uniqueness, giving it a special function. The darkness nurtures God's creation as does the light. Human cultures measure each day by darkness and light. Judaism marks the beginning of each day at sundown. So the day is conceived in darkness. Night's womb gives birth to dawn.
Those of us with vision define our world by light and darkness. We distinguish where one object ends and another begins by contrasts between light and shadow. Christian theology places the Fall of humanity well after the first week of creation. But I already see seeds of the Fall present in this separation. The creation of distinction obliterates the formless void. It enables God to pronounce the unmitigated good of every distinct individual in creation. But it also contains the potential for human value judgements. In separation, we find the opportunity for comparison. We assess one thing superior to another.
I find it easy, now that I have come out of the closet, to judge the closet an evil place. The selective silences in friendly banter, the isolation that called life into question-I acknowledge much that was evil there. But the closet was also a womb, a protective darkness in which I grew strong enough to emerge.
In God's creation, the dialectic of darkness and light do not make a dualism. They share creation and interact in its rhythms. For me, they offer a model for sexuality. In God's creation, homosexuality and heterosexuality do not oppose each other as enemies. Ideally, they find unique places and functions together in one universe-each blessed by God. God creates a world big enough to hold us all.
And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so.
Chaos has its comforts. The shapelessness of the closet soothed me. It protected me from responsibility for my loneliness. It allowed me to avoid being identified, pinned down, and defined by others. I played on the mystery of the closet for so many years, letting people guess and guess and never quite be right. The closet gave me a power-the power to control and define my loneliness.
To accept the breath of God, I had to prepare to live in a new creation. I had to be ready to let my identity find its place in the new creation, just as water and land had to find places.
To allow myself to be touched by God's Spirit, to feel the wind, and breathe God's breath, I had to admit that I was no longer alone. To come out of the closet, I had to admit that I was not the "only one." I had to get ready to live in honest relationships with God and those around me.
God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together God called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. God made the two great lights-the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night-and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
God "saw that it was good." The refrain pulses through the first chapter of Genesis. It reinforces the goodness and applies it to everything:. "God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good" (1:31).
Queer people do not usually hear this theme recited to us. Society ties the measure of goodness to heterosexuality. So we often find ourselves predisposed to question our created goodness. Recently, I picked up my cousin's copy of People magazine and paged through its brief biographies of the world's "fifty most beautiful people." In a quick scan of the article, I found only one personality for whom the authors had not found some way to at least imply heterosexuality: careful mention of a wife, husband, or a date of the other gender. Apparently no beautiful people find a primary companion or partner of their own gender. We are not very good-or at least not beautiful-in People's world.
Much of Christianity declares that I am a distortion of God's intended purpose. Most of its straight white male leaders create God in their own image, equating heterosexuality with the image of God. Gay and lesbian people, they declare, "violate Scripture" and behave "contrary to God's will." My sin-as they would have it-is my failure to become heterosexual like them. Homosexuality supposedly has no original purpose; no goodness lies there to be restored. They consider my intrinsic nature beyond redemption. To be saved, I must exchange my nature for an alien heterosexual nature. (Or at the very least, I must suppress my nature entirely.)
Genesis's refrain, "it was good . . . it was good . . . it was very good," repudiates such apostasy. Seven times I am reminded of creation's goodness, from the first light to the last human. God created me. I am good at the core. My task is to rediscover that soul of goodness and live out of it. To honor the God of creation, I must find the queerness of God at the root of my creation and reveal it fabulously.
Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."
So God created humankind in God's image,
in the image of God, God created humankind,
male and female God created them.
Theologians throughout our history have debated what constitutes the "image of God." Is it human intellect, human dignity, the capacity to make moral choices? Each of these options has found its advocates among the doctors of the church.
Gerhard von Rad, a masterful scholar of the Hebrew scriptures, points out that image has a physical dimension to it (Genesis: A Commentary, translated by John H. Marks, revised edition, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1972, p. 58). But our society flees from the notion that our tactile bodies may feel as God feels. We still equate flesh with evil, sensual sexuality with dirt. My radical Reformation tradition recoils in horror if I begin to take the word at face value. Image as likeness, as similarity of form and function-this ventures too close to idolatry. Yet my gay sensibility makes me ponder the possibility that even our physical flesh reflects the glory of God. Genesis 1 suggests that every form of human flesh possesses that glory: Susan B. Anthony and Greta Garbo, Marlon Riggs and Bob Paris. The queer celebration of the body, of feeling, of pleasure, intuitively touches our divine image. The danger of idolatry comes not from seeing the glory of God in physical flesh. It creeps in when we narrowly equate one shape, one form-or even a limited range of forms-with God. The queer reflection of God's image in all flesh militates against idolatry. It grants God a glorious complexity that cannot be captured, controlled, or limited. It inspires awe.
Just as significant, when this story was written down, "image of God" was a loaded concept. It was tied to the authority of God. Ancient Near Eastern societies often reserved the idea of the image of God for royalty. This bolstered the social and political structure of the day. Mesopotamian creation stories, for example, depicted human beings as slaves of the gods (Clifford, Richard J., and Roland E. Murphy, "Genesis," The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1990, p. 11). Those who bore a god's likeness bore the authority to rule over other human beings.
Genesis 1 invests all humanity with a status generally reserved for rulers. It implicitly levels human power structures. At the least, it relativizes social and political constructs that classify people hierarchically: for example, ruler over slave, male over female. According to many biblical scholars, this account of creation was first written down for the people of Judah who had been exiled to Babylon in the sixth century before the common era. How could those exiles hear less than a subtle undermining of their oppressor's ideology?
Genesis's powerful declaration of human equality in God's image is reinforced by the poetic movement toward "male and female, God created them." Hebrew poetry often presents the reader with repetitions of phrasing meant to help define one another. "In the image of God, God created [humanity]" parallels "Male and female, God created them." This suggests that the phrases "image of God" and "male and female" interpret one another. In other words, male and female are inextricably bound together within the personality of God. Humanity is not made up of two species, one or the other of which can claim a special relationship to God. Humanity is one, no less than God is one.
This integration of male and female harks back to the very first verses of Genesis. The spirit/wind/breath-ruah-is feminine in Hebrew, as is "the deep"-tehom-over which she sweeps. This suggested interesting lesbian possibilities to me until I remembered that the words for God, elohim, and for waters, mim, are masculine. Thus from the beginning of the story, masculine and feminine come together in both the divine and in the void.
If I confess that God is one, I cannot appeal to even the most fundamental human differences, such as male and female, to rationalize setting one group above or against another. To rightfully consider our human sexuality, we must begin from this fundamental premise: that all human beings share equally the image of God in our creation. When we find ourselves, or others, using Genesis to divide one group of humanity from another, we must stop. To divide male from female, African from European, heterosexual from homosexual, betrays the God of Genesis. To use the passage to institute a hierarchy of human value-husband preferred to wife, master better than slave, heterosexuality more acceptable than homosexuality-defies this creation story's purpose.
Historically, opposition to same-gender relationships among men is rooted in misogyny-the hatred and devaluing of women. In Western (and many other cultures) women are lesser creatures. Sons are preferred to daughters. Masculinity equals power and femininity is weakness.
Discomfort with drag queens or sissies who swish, distaste for dykes in leather, all tell us that we have not yet fully grasped the image within us. We are still more in touch with our society's devaluation of women and insistence on male superiority than we are with the universal image of God in humanity. The stereotype that a gay man is womanish or that a lesbian woman is manish, may be inaccurate as a universal construct. Yet it unwittingly suggests that we hold together the attributes of male and female in our personalities just as the Bible holds them together in the personality of God. The best retort to the charge of being a "sissy" may be, "Thank you, but I'm not really that divine."
Genesis 1 calls me to seek the good image of God in myself and others. Difference need not threaten me. In difference I discover more of my Creator; so I more fully understand myself. I share out of my particular and limited experience so that others may avail themselves of the same opportunity, should they choose to. Genesis 1 reminds me that I am not universal in myself. God's image holds me together with every other human being.
God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
The people from Judea, exiled to Babylon, had lost their nation, their lands, their power. They were living subject to a foreign power in a strange land. Telling subject people that they share dominion with all humanity is subversive. That subject people will multiply, overwhelm the land, subdue, and have dominion is a ruler's nightmare.
More important, such a blessing preserved the dream of liberation. An exiled people might indeed gain control over land and its produce. That would mean life and social possibilities. In such a context, the blessing has the potential to give hope. It promises safety and sustenance.
I, too, long for a sense of control over the resources of life. I, too, want to know that life's necessities cannot be withheld or withdrawn arbitrarily. I covet a sense of dominion because it whispers "security" to me.
My insecurity rises as ballot initiatives in my country overturn antidiscrimination ordinances. By eliminating equal-rights laws, these initiatives seek to make it legal to deny housing to gay and lesbian people, to fire us from our jobs, and to deny us equal justice under law. Without a job and a place to live my life is threatened by hunger and the elements. As a gay man, who once was denied housing for being gay and who has lost a job for the same reason, I can appreciate the promise of security in the blessing of dominion.
But dominion also threatens security. I am part of a European-American culture that has imported this passage illicitly from its exilic context. We have bestowed "dominion" not on the powerless but on the powerful. Perhaps dominion was a useful construct during the exile and even in the largely peasant, agricultural world of ancient Israel. God ultimately owned the land there. Religion demanded that land lie fallow at certain times and that it be redistributed periodically. But in our culture, land becomes just another commodity to be used up and trashed. We use Genesis as the ideological underpinning for excess. We have transformed the blessing into a curse and moved the world away from the harmonious breathing of God back toward chaos.
Perhaps we need to return to the context in which these words were first written down-the exile of Judah's leading citizens to Babylon. During the exile, with political leaders executed or in chains, the priesthood-perhaps in collaboration with some prophets such as Ezekiel-rose in power. I am not surprised that, in pulling together the traditions of creation, these leaders chose to move dominion away from kings. But I am surprised that they did not transfer dominion to the religious establishment. Instead, they chose traditions that transferred dominion to all humanity.
Might it not be our task to continue the movement? Just as they had the genius to conceive of all humanity in the image of God, should we not now begin to see all of creation in that image? In that day the dominion of a few over most of humanity was the problem. Today, the dominion of humanity over the rest of creation is equally a problem.
As a gay man of European descent, I have a high stake in ending humanity's unbridled exercise of dominion. Alienation from the natural world has been particularly destructive to me. Sexuality is rooted in the natural world. Formerly, the notion that I must dominate creation put me at war with my own body. When my body sent me messages of queer affection, I exercised dominion to suppress the messages.
Equally damaging has been the way in which our separation from creation creates a culture of disposable commodities. We need not look beyond our television sets to realize that sex itself has become a disposable commodity. As a people bound together by sexuality, queers too become disposable. And to the extent that we buy into the larger society's alienated equation of sex with tradable merchandise, we make one another disposable. We have imported uncritically from the rest of American society its worship of youth and narrowly defined beauty. Tanned, chiseled faces, hard pectorals, and washboard abdomens function as currency. We can trade them for relationships to end our loneliness. They give us power and security. But the apparent blessing found in such alienated dominion soon becomes a curse. It dominates us. We hate our failures to live up to the "ideal." We fear losing those aspects of the "ideal" that we do achieve.
If we just read a little farther, we might notice the irony. "Dominion" is granted in a context where domination is unnecessary. "See," the Creator says, "I have given you every plant . . ." God has already provided what humanity needs to live. Humanity need not plunder earth's resources for capital as an investment against the future.
Similarly, we need not go to war with our bodies. Alienating ourselves from our sexuality sufficiently to "sell" it-economically, emotionally, or socially-will give only a lesser security than the blessing already granted.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that God had done in creation.
Rest is rooted in creation. The rest of God invites us to rest.
We gay men, who are derided as "fruits," have perhaps been all-too-appropriately nicknamed. We are famous for overcompensation. We keep striving to be "the best little boys in the world" in order to prove our worthiness. We fulfill the command to "be fruitful" with a vengeance, overfilling the earth with our productivity. It has often been said that those on the margins of society must work twice as hard and twice as long to achieve half the recognition and half the reward that those with power take for granted. In a world that does not love us for who we are, we strive valiantly to make society value us for what we do.
Like many gay men of European descent, I am especially vulnerable to this. My white male privilege gives me a taste of power and control. I participate enough in the masculine power structure and gain enough of its benefits to be hooked by the occasional rewards. Like a gambler at a slot machine, I win enough to make me keep losing. (I believe this also holds true for most straight white men who possess much less control than they have been told they have and who must come to terms with their own domination by social and economic powers-but that's another commentary.)
So I try to make the "American dream" work. And I live out of the desperate fear that my efforts will not save me.
"Be still," the voice of God says in Psalm 46, "and know that I am God." Creation is complete. At our source, we are complete. Come, God says on the seventh day, join me at rest in the knowledge of that completeness, that perfection. Cease your frenzy, and discover that God's work in you is sufficient.
To understand myself as a spiritual person I must rest-become completely comfortable-in my gay psychic, physical, and sexual nature. Paradoxically, knowing my own sufficiency makes ending my isolation possible. To the extent that I can rest in my own created being, I can relate to another.
Rest provides the key to understanding the difference between exploitive relationships and holy relationships. An exploitive relationship arises from feelings of incompleteness. It seeks to make up for what is lacking in oneself by taking it-emotionally, economically, sexually, or socially-from another.
We cannot be vulnerable and open to one another when our ulterior motive is to take from another what we see lacking in ourselves. When we are unable to trust our own perfect creation, we are unable to trust it in someone else. All that destroys human relationships stems from our failure to achieve Sabbath satisfaction. Economic greed comes from the sense that not enough material resources exist to take care of everyone. Jealously grows from the conviction that there is not enough love. Violence assumes that there is not enough justice. Sexual manipulation and assault come from the fear of our own impotence. Each of these conditions arises from the anxiety that if we don't do it, it will not happen, and if we don't accomplish it, we will be lost.
Without a sabbath, the blessing "be fruitful and multiply" becomes a curse. Our desperate striving to "make it happen" makes us unable to achieve the relationships that make fruition and productivity truly possible. Fearing our own incompleteness, we see others only as resources to complete ourselves rather than seeing them as partners with whom to add wholeness to wholeness. Our fear that we earn our place in creation by productivity leaves us unable to rest. We can't be completely open to others for fear that they will take from us what little we have while we're trying to figure out how to get what we need from them.
A holy relationship arises from knowledge that I and my friend or relative, I and a stranger, or I and my lover are mutually complete creations. What is given to the poor overflows to us. (Republican economists might consider this trickle-up scenario. History testifies that what we give to the poor more likely will wind up in the hands of the rich than vice versa.) Justice for others means increased security for us. Instead of using sex as a tool to dominate those we fear or hate, we receive pleasure by offering it for the pleasure of partners who desire it. Economically, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, we offer our wholeness to one another in litanies of mutual celebration.
If creation began in loneliness, Sabbath completes it in relationship. God's rest on the seventh day tells us that God is satisfied with creation. God is truly satisfied with us. Productivity is a blessing, a gift from the creator. It is not dependant on us. We need only to cease our struggling and rest with God.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. The Hebrew-English dictionary on my bookshelf translates this the "begettings of heaven and earth, i.e. account of heaven and earth and that which proceeded from them" (Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament," Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, p.410). The end of creation is no end but its beginning.
We have come full circle. But now the breath/wind/spirit breathes with an even rhythm. The darkness lives in quiet potential, not in a restless, formless void. The deep is no longer lonely. Loneliness has been transfigured by communion. Divine companionship begets divine and human friendship, partnership, and loving.