A Neopagan Reads the Bible

“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Ge 12:1-2, NRSV)

God is calling Abram and Sarai to go to a new place and to become a blessing to the people there. In previous readings, I’ve missed this part. The focus seems to be on the “great nation” part, which doesn’t mean much to me, personally. But the idea of being a blessing is a wonderful idea.

God doesn’t expand on how Abram and Sarai will be a blessing. First things first: pick up and go to the place I will show you. Why? To become a great nation and to be a blessing.

Wikipedia defines “blessing” as the infusion (or bestowing) of something with holiness, divine will, or one’s hopes. So Abram and Sarai are to be infused with holiness and the consciousness of God’s will. This is the gift they bring to the new land.

No matter what I read in the Bible, it always ultimately comes back to the same thing: spend time with God, open yourself up to God, orient yourself to be in harmony with God — and you will be a blessing, you will be love, you will be a Christ-carrier in the world.

I do want to be a blessing in my world. This is my intention for today.

“Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within its citadels God has shown himself a sure defense.

Then the kings assembled, they came on together. As soon as they saw it, they were astounded; they were in panic, they took to flight; trembling took hold of them there…

Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels, that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God forever and ever. He will be our guide forever.” Ps 48:1-6a, 12-14 (NRSV)

Psalm 48 tells a story. It begins with praises to God and the mighty city of God. Then we hear about an attack by the assembled army of all the kings. But they do not even dare to attempt to attack such a great city. In fact, as soon as they see it, they are utterly terrified and flee in panic. The Psalm ends with praises to God and God’s well-defended and secure city.

I don’t live in a safe place. It’s a very low income area with lots of crime and break-ins. But beyond that, my life doesn’t feel so safe these days. I’ve learned that illness and crisis can strike without warning and can destroy my sense of personal and financial and relational security. At an even deeper level, I’ve learned that the very ground I stand on isn’t always safe. My most basic foundations, the ones I received from my parents and then from my church, turned out to be on very shaky ground.

I’ve learned that life isn’t always safe. The worst feelings of unsafety have come from surprise attacks: my child’s cancer, my spouse’s psychiatric diagnosis that turned our lives inside out, and my own major depression that has left me unable to work and spiraled us down below the poverty line.

So the idea of living in the city of God — the penultimate safe place — is very appealing. I can feel myself letting go of my chronic anxiety and taking my first truly relaxed breath in a long time. It feels like I’m going back to the safety of the womb, a place where nothing bad can happen, where I was cradled and buffered by protective waters and nurtured by the heartbeat and blood of my mother.

For too long, I’ve felt alone in the world. I want to reclaim the feeling of safety that comes from living more closely connected to God. But here’s the catch…

Ultimately we have to leave the safety of the womb to be born. We have to begin our lives in the world, challenging and difficult as it can be. This unsafe world is the very place where we create our lives. And God invites us to a work of co-creation. God is the master artist and invites us to live closely connected to the greatness of God’s creative spirit, so it infuses us and inspires us.

I’d love to live in God’s city for a while, to regain my strength and to just rest. I long to be nurtured and cared for in this safe city. But then I think…

What then? Wouldn’t I start to get a bit restless, to miss the challenges of the world outside? Wouldn’t I want to experience adventures and victories? Yes, there would be some defeats, too. But I can always return to the city and build up my strength. Over time and with experience, I would become much stronger and go onto bigger adventures and battles and the joys of overcoming difficulties.

The city, of course, is allegorical. As a figure, it reminds me how I start to go under the moment I try to live in the world alone, without all the resources and the safety I get from living in the city of God.

In reality, the city of God can be found in prayer. There are so many ways to pray and each has its place. There was a time when I set out to learn and practice many of these different forms of prayer. During those times, I experienced a deeper closeness to God and felt invincible. I thought: “Let the world throw at me what it may! With God I can survive it all and turn my own pain into something beautiful!”

I want to recover these prayer practices in my life. Reading the Bible without praying it becomes just another intellectual exercise. That’s why I’ve been trying to read it with my heart, not my mind. And now I feel called to immerse myself more deeply in the practices of prayer.

God promises Abraham:

“I will make you exceedingly fruitful” (Ge 17:6a, NRSV).

The older we get, the more we want to see the fruits of our life manifesting. For Abraham and Sarah, this took the form of having many descendants. In today’s society, our fruitfulness, what we leave behind for posterity, can take many different forms.

Having children is still an extremely important form of fruitfulness, even today. When I think about what I’ve created in the world, my son comes to mind first. He’s a young man of vibrant, life-changing faith. He’s gentle, kind, has deeply grounded values. I’m proud of how he thinks independently and how he is working out his own life in a conscious manner. His life hasn’t been easy — he’s had more challenges than most. But he’s overcome them by his faith and he’s more alive today than I’ve ever seen him.

My spouse and I are also co-creating in our own and each other’s lives. Our marriage is infused by a deep love that has been tested through many fires of extremely adverse circumstances. Our love is a healing influence for the other and we’ve both grown enormously as individuals throughout the course of our marriage. This is another important fruit in my life. I’ve learned how to love and I’m confident of my ability to love another person selflessly, to be vulnerable, to be intimate, to be always respectful of the personhood of the other.

But there are areas where I’m struggling with my lack of fruitfulness. I’ve been blessed with a multitude of gifts and talents, but co-existing with these I’ve also been give ADHD and its associated tendency for depression. Add major family illnesses and poverty to this mix over the past 10 years, as well as the scrambled hormones and mood swings of menopause, and you don’t end up with anything that seems to resemble fruitfulness.

This is the precise place in my life where Genesis 17:6 speaks to me. I’ve been judging my fruitfulness by the world’s standards and the world’s timetable. Abraham and Sarah were OLD when they manifested God’s promise of fruitfulness. Perhaps that’s the time of their lives when they were ready to receive it.

I’ve been harshly judging myself about my lack of fruitfulness. I’m also panicking about being 50 and not being as fruitful as I would like to be, in the ways I foresaw.

But perhaps God sees a different kind of fruitfulness in my own spirit and in the lives of those closest to me.

Today I plan to reflect about the theme of fruitfulness as I think about putting forth my intentions for my life. I need to appropriate God’s promise of fruitfulness: It has been accomplished, whether or not I see it yet.

Perhaps it’s about exercising faith.