Wednesday 14 November 2012

memoir/interlude/The World Just Beyond

We played happily by day and went to our warm beds at night and our mother read us bible stories  for children.Of the world that lay somewhere outside our door,we had little idea.It was a world that lay just beyond and things would happen there that my mother never would speak of.

Bible storieswere selected for us out of two large,beautifully illustrated volumes.But not just any Bible stories.They were very carefully selected.Of course they included the story of Moses,who was discovered floating in a basket,had a close encounter with a burning bush and then went on to lead his people out of Egypt,before going up on a mountain and bringing down tencommandments on tablets made of stone.

They told of a shepard boy named David who killed a really big and a really bad man,a giant in fact.And they told of Samson,whose life seemed to hit the skids after a bad trip to the barber shop,and of Jonah,who got swallowed by a whale,then spit up on dry land because he disobeyed God..

Our Bible stories also told of Daniel who was thrown into a den of lions who were ,as it turned out,not hungry,and of three Hebrew boys who would not burn even though they were tossed into a firy furnace.

And of course,they told of Jesus.They told how he was born with animals in a barn and laid in a manager and how wise men came to visit.We were told of the time he fed a lot of hungry people with very little bread and a few fish,but no mention was ever made of turning water into wine.We were told how he healed sick people,but the words demon or madness were never mentioned.

Just as telling as the stories we were told were the ones we were not.We never heard of Tamar or Jezabel or Hagar or Haman,and it goes without saying that Sodom and Gommorah were never so much as whispered.

And John The Baptist?Well John was,how shall I say,peculiar,and there may have been some concern that we might meet someone like him.It simply wouldn't do to have children who took to eating grasshoppers just because they heard about it in a Bible story,and,moreoverJohn met with an unsightly end that I did not find out about for many years.And,while Jesus was nailed to a cross and stuck in the side,his story was somehow considered more wholesome,or at least more sanitary than the story of John The Baptist.Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he rose out of the tomb and went directly off to Heaven.In any event,there was just no way to send children off to their dreams by telling them about John The Baptist.

The story of Adam and Eve I found very strange indeed.Thats because it begs the question,so to speak.In fact it begs more than one question,even to a four year old.

Adam we were told was the first man andEve the first woman.They lived in a fine garden where they could eat anything,except,of course apples,because God told them not to,so,of course,they did.And this is why we are all bad.well,at least thats the uinderstanding I had of things when I first heard the story.But,of course,a finely tuned sense of the metaphorical is quite beyond a four year olds imagination.And that brings us back to The World Just Beyond.The idea of an apple setting into motion a whole series of events must be problematic when you want to keep The World Just Beyond,beyond.Because,you see,the whole point of the story of Adam and Eve is the selecting of knowledge over ignorance.And once selected,knowledge cannot be deselected.So,once you tell the story of The Fall,it cannot be untold,and you are faced with the immediate need to tell more and more things,which at first gently shake the World Just Beyond,then cause it to shudder and wobble,and,finally send it towards some inevitable apocolypse.But that does not mean that extraordinary attempts will not be made to save that world,The World Just Beyond.

By the time I turned four I had some sense that what I saw all day long was not everything.i knew,more or less that there were things I was deeply ignorant of,without knowing much about what these things were.But not knowing about them did not mean I could not see them.

So what of The World Just Beyond?What did it look like and how did it resonate in my ears and in my mind.How did I know it even existed,and,if I could conceive of it's existance,then why did it exist?

It turned out I think,throughout most of my childhood that there was a benevolent angel trying to create a world,the purpose of which was to deceive me.For if a malevolent diety could do such thing,the why not a benevolent angel to Hold The World Just Beyond at arms length?Why must we accept such things as being only malevolent?

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