Family Tree

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Aboriginal Australian woman

The friend I was visiting in Chicago is a genius researcher. She researches family genealogies and then prints the family story as a gorgeous coffee-table book. She has spent days helping me trace my own family back as far as I could go. I found I'm a mix of Irish and English and German. I also found out I am a Daughter of the Revolution. My great…Irish grandfather, Henry, the revolutionary soldier, was stationed in Pennsylvania, where he met Eva, a German immigrant. The two of them were married in a Lutheran church and managed to do do something to get themselves in trouble, because the church records show an official reprimand for them (hmm).  Later the couple was given refuge by the Moravians after their settlement was attacked by Indian folk. The records say the brothers gave them stockings. Cool. But I’ve got older family history yet. And this stuff is BIG and also involves an Eva.
When we look at God’s family history, we have to go much further back to tell the story. If we think back, way back, farther back, until we are at the beginning of time, when the world was being shaped and spun into space, what image do we see in our minds? A spirit hovering? If we go back even further, back even before the creation of the universe, what do we see? Maybe angels worshipping? Myriads of creatures surrounding the God of heaven? What about back further yet? What image do we hold of a “time” before angels? Anything? Of course eyes can’t see what we are imagining, but that never stopped anyone before. Do we have some image of God? And how do we imagine him back then, before all else was created? I’m asking the impossible, but that first image may tell us something.

Is it lonely? Is it of a God alone in all the unborn universe? Or is it something quite different? Is it a society, a community, a culture, a family? Because this is where we start. With the fact that God has never been alone, never been lonely, never been one single Person. God, as Trinity, as Three Persons so united in love that they are eternally Inseparable, has always been One Community. The relationships that we have in this world are but pale reflections of His. God doesn’t merely love. God, in His very nature, lives out love as the union of perfectly bonded Persons. God truly is love. It is the essence of His existence. And out of this love comes such an exuberance of Joy that it cannot be contained. Love wants to share itself. Give itself away. Grow. Why else do married couples, perfectly in love, risk it all, and bring babies into their harmony?

God, then, risked it all and brought babies into his harmony. Out of the joy of his existence he created a beautiful universe and called it good. He created a solar system and called it good. He created the earth with its verdant growth and lush ecosystems and called them good. At the end there, he created man. And what a man. Adam stood before God in perfect male-ness: an intellect prepared to manage the world; a body balanced and muscular. And Adam’s relationship with God was not tainted. He was perfect. But God looked at Adam, and for the first time in the story, God did not say that this thing He had done was good. No, in fact, He said it was not good. Adam was perfect, but because he was alone, something was off.

If you take one second to think about it, it makes sense. Adam was sentient, aware of God and himself, but he was alone, and no One had ever existed alone in God’s culture. It just didn’t fit. So God took some bones from Adam’s side, fashioned Eve, a woman, and history’s first Match Maker introduced them to one another, arranging for them a marriage made in heaven. I’m sure He had a twinkle in His eye. When God put the first people into a relationship, He didn’t just bring Adam a friend. No. He brought Adam a wife. Just imagine poor Adam seeing Eve for the first time: that smooth, soft, voluptuous body, that voice that warmed, that face that smiled. What choice did he have but to fall madly in love with this first woman? And Eve in her very body represented all that had to do with human relationships. She could be Adam’s soulmate and lover. She could have babies. She could reflect the aspect of God’s nature that makes love grow and reproduce, which had been missing. In fact, the whole femaleness of God had been missing so that his image was not well reflected yet. When that first couple, holding hands as they walked, joined God in His afternoon garden stroll, He could finally say that things were good.

Knowing where you come from can make a difference. I am glad to know that I am child of soldiers and immigrants and pioneers. I hope they were brave and good. Best of all, I'm glad to know that ultimately I come from a love story. I am a descendant of an expression of love, an outburst of love. I suppose this is my Big Bang Theory of Love.