Chapter 5: Creation —Woman for Man
CREATION —WOMAN FOR MAN
IT has been an afternoon of wild wind, with the sun showing only for brief intervals through the scudding clouds. I wanted to be out in the wind, so MacDuff and I went to Nantucket Sound, where we could run on a long, empty beach. The wind helped us as we ran, and we covered perhaps a mile before we turned around. Then the sand blew into our eyes and the wind held us back. I had to lean into it, and MacDuff flattened his ears and sneezed as sand plastered his muzzle. Halfway back I found a dune which would give us some shelter, and sat down. MacDuff was glad to sit beside me for a few minutes until it suddenly struck him that he ought to be digging. And dig he did, with furious energy, sending a blast of sand backwards from his powerful forepaws.
It is not hard to think of God’s greatness when you look at the sea and an immensity of horizon and sky. It is not hard to think of the power of His imagination when you study the designs of shells. (I say it is not hard to think of it. It is hard —it is impossible —to comprehend it. As an Eighth Century Church father, John of Damascus, said, “God is infinite and incomprehensible, and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.”) God is the Almighty, the Creator, a God of Order, Harmony, Design. We believe the creation story in the first two chapters of the Bible, and we delight in knowing that the Maker of all that list of marvels delighted when He looked at them. He made each thing according to the Word of His power, and when He looked at it, He saw that it was good.
He made man in His own image, and then for the first time God saw something that was not good. It was not good for the man to be alone. God determined to make a helper fit for him and it was after this decision, according to Genesis 2:19, that He made the animals and birds —as though from among them such a helper might be chosen. He even brought them to Adam, “to see what he would call them.” Imagine the Almighty Creator waiting “to see” what His creature Adam might come up with for names! Adam came up with them, all right. The power of his imagination was impressive too. He thought of names for every one of the cattle, birds, and animals. And he and God must have looked them all over together.
What a scene that must have been —God and Adam looking the animals over. Did Adam, contemplating these other beings, have even a moment’s identity crisis such as I would have had, asking, “Who am I compared with them?”
You and I love zoos. We stand and stare. We watched tigers mate once (a lady near us said, “Atta girl!” but a man said, “I’m getting out of here!”), and once, staring at an elephant when you were three or four years old you finally said, “How come they have those things instead of feet?”
The animals stare back, their eyes meeting ours through the bars. Something infinitely greater than those bars separates us. There is a great gulf fixed, a fathomless mystery which I sometimes think the animals understand —they gaze with such serenity —but which reminds me of how bottomless is my own ignorance. Men capture, use, control, and kill animals. Sometimes they love them.
We love MacDuff. No other word will do. We love him. He is a good companion, perfectly silent when he is here in the house and I am working, perfectly ready to do whatever I decide we are going to do in the afternoons, and perfectly dedicated to his divinely appointed (yes, I think it was appointed) task of keeping me happy. Adam, I’m sure, loved the animals who were his companions in the Garden. He might even have had a special friend in a dog or a horse or a unicorn. But what did he, what do we, understand?
I read just yesterday of a beautiful race horse who shattered her ankle and kept racing the race, doing the thing she was trained to do, until at last she had to halt. They tried to fix it, but when she regained consciousness she threw off the cast in a frenzy of fear and pain. They had to destroy her. The magazine picture of that magnificent creature held by thin reins as she reared confounded me. Her obedience to trainers and jockey won money for her owners, suffering and death for her. No one could explain to her or apologize.
The animals are there, fellow creatures with us of the same Creator-God, fellow sufferers, mute and mysterious. “But for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.”
God might have given Adam another man to be his friend, to walk and talk and argue with if that was his pleasure. But Adam needed more than the companionship of the animals or the friendship of a man. He needed a helper, specially designed and prepared to fill that role. It was a woman God gave him, a woman, “meet,” fit, suitable, entirely appropriate for him, made of his very bones and flesh.
You can’t make proper use of a thing unless you know what it was made for, whether it is a safety pin or a sailboat. To me it is a wonderful thing to be a woman under God —to know, first of all, that we were made (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”) and then that we were made for something (“The rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”)
This was the original idea. This is what woman was for. The New Testament refers back clearly and strongly to this purpose: “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.” Some texts are susceptible of differing interpretations, but for the life of me I can’t see any ambiguities in this one.