There can be no impediment to necessity. Even porcupines can mate. Even warthogs find a mate. No magnet has only one pole -- even if it has to flip itself, it will find its bond. A point has no mass. A line has no area. A plain has no volume. Only space can be held, space and what occupies it. And what can be felt? Only a dimension exceeding space, and more encompassing than time, allows feelings.
But what of that Adam with all his ribs? He has no soulmate. He has no kindred spirits. He is alone, not by choice but by nature. Not the first of his breed, not the last. But his breed exists one individual at a time, like a stone skipped across the water.
How was he even born? Into what family did he appear? What real child was lost, that he might take its place? Whether met with brooding hostility or incomprehending love, he counts it as human contact -- he's just not sure he's human. Changling and alien, he occupies the shadows or is held under the harshest light. He feels translucent and he feels like the center of reality. He slips largely unnoticed between the strangers in his path, exchanging silent smiles with the few who see him. He pauses sometimes at some ring of fellowship -- after careful observation he has learned to compose his features into positions that grant him entry. It is not false, this similitude. Necessity is his justification.
He is an illiterate man lost in a library, and a scholar in a world without books. His soul grows dry within his skin until it tears loose and clatters in middle age like a tumbling casket. Now he is a bird in too large a cage -- flying and falling have no distinction. When he dies, it will not be to infirmity. Oblivion rises to meet him from the same dim pit that issues every dull moment of solitude. He folds into himself then, more still than final grief, until he remains only as a brief unspoken word, and is forgotten. The world will not miss him. It didn't even know he was here.
He would gladly have given up a rib. But God, thinking His work finished, is resting.
J
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
The rib was not an option in his mind at that time. He did not know of its possibility nor was it his idea. Only from an all knowing and ever present Family was his needs adddressed. His was one of trust inspite of his aching loneliness.
Perhaps God was waiting for Adam to accept the gift (of suffering) before He could finish His work. Perhaps Adam's process was not complete - he was not fully created - and this rib experience was only a culmination of a greater process. The rib could not be taken until sleep occurred and sleep could not occur until weariness from the aching loneliness reached its breaking point and exhausted he colapses...into the arms of a loving Father.
Odd, how something always has to be missing. To become whole, he had to become incomplete -- a loss of physical perfection so that he could be an adult. Even God needs a Son. Yet Adam was made ... not sterile, not impotent, but alone. Of course, there was a time, some few hours, when God was alone. But He knew it would end. Hell doesn't end. Adam had neither words nor concept of his situation. He just knew that God wasn't enough.
J
Post a Comment