The
part of the story of Rebekah that always has intrigued me is that moment where
her family summons her and asks if she wishes to go away and journey hundreds
of miles to a new country to be the wife of a cousin whom she has never met,
and she says “I will.” It’s hard to
know what motivates her. Maybe she is
just being obedient. She is used to
going along with what her elders want from her and she’s probably good at
anticipating what that might be. Or
maybe she’s made a careful calculation.
After all, her latitude for making choices about her own life is pretty
limited. She knows that her father will
be looking for a husband for her anyway, and that everything about her future depends
on who she marries. So when she learns
that this Isaac is the sole heir of a wealthy man, and imagines that from now
on it will be her servants going to the spring to fetch water, maybe she decides
that this is as good an offer as she’s going to get.
Or
perhaps she listens to the story of Abraham’s determination to find a bride for
his son from among his own people, and of his servant’s long journey, and his
prayer for a sign, a sign that she unwittingly fulfilled, and something in her
own spirit is stirred and she intuits that this is invitation she can
trust. Maybe she senses the awakening of
a faith and a hope that she hasn’t known before, a glimpse of the deeper
purpose of her life that impels her irresistibly to say “I will” and so take up
her part in a great and holy destiny. The
role of wife and mother may be the only one available to her as a woman, but
the story of Rebekah makes her out to be a little more than a merely passive
object of the desires and agendas of men.
I think we are meant to admire her, and to see her as a worthy choice to
be the matriarch of the people of God.
The
ideal of femininity that Rebekah represents begins with her generous
hospitality to the stranger at the spring, and even to his animals, and goes on
to include her clear reckoning with the practicalities of her situation. She is a good judge of character, is
courageous and decisive in the moment of truth, and, if I’m reading the story
right, is sensitive to the designs of the spirit, and their claim on her
life. I think it is interesting that in
a later development of the biblical tradition, these same characteristics become
aspects of a universal religious ideal, called by the proper name of Wisdom. And the Hebrew sages personified Wisdom as a
woman. The word for “wisdom” in Hebrew, Chokmah, is a feminine noun, as is its
Greek counterpart, Sophia.
So,
for that matter, is the Sanskrit Prajña,
the Hindu and Buddhist goddess of Wisom.
These very different cultures agree that Wisdom’s generous hospitality, her
pragmatism about the social and biological necessities of life, her finely-honed
discernment of human nature and the opportunities afforded by a given
situation, her skill and versatility in action, all grounded that profound
spiritual receptivity that the Hebrew scriptures call “the fear of the Lord”—all
belong to the feminine aspect of consciousness, which is itself a manifestation
of God in the concrete, embodied, life of the world.
Last
week an old friend came to see me. She
wanted to hear what I might to say because she is worried about her son. I remember him as a young teenager, high-strung,
intensely serious, and apparently he’s much the same ten or twelve years later. My friend described hers son as a young man
who holds himself aloof from the conventional values and norms of society and
attempts to live by his own, impossibly lofty principles. He is a scholar of the Spirit, whose
interests range from comparative mythology and Jungian psychology, to esoteric
Christianity, Taoism, and South American indigenous shamanism. But he has no idea where to focus, or how to
make a living, or what his place is in the world, and he struggles with
depression, and wonders at times whether he even wants to live.
And
in her description I recognized a certain classic type. Usually young men, they are intellectually
and spiritually gifted and privileged enough to be able to pursue their
interests. In our time, sacred knowledge
from all over the world has uprooted from its traditional contexts and entered
the modern marketplace of the internet and the shopping mall. And if you are into that sort of thing, the
upper reaches, outer fringes, and inner secrets of human consciousness hold a
lot more interest than washing dishes, and changing diapers, and holding down a
job. A little knowledge is a dangerous
thing, and a superficial acquaintance with the spiritual world can create in
impressionable and idealistic minds the false notion that if we read the right
book, or find the right teacher, or do the right practice, we can move to that
spiritual world, and leave all this other stuff behind.
I
understand why that young man’s mother came to see me—there was a time in my
life when I wasn’t all that different from her son. But I’m well down the road to recovery now. And in my experience the best medicine for
this condition is wisdom. For me, it was
the wisdom earned by years of manual labor, and of sitting down on a meditation
cushion and trying to sit still; the kind learned by living in community, and
being close at hand with other people in their joys and agonies, and mine; of
seeing them grow into adulthood, or grow old, or get sick and die. The wisdom that cured me of my restless
thirst for spiritual knowledge came from falling in love, and having my heart
broken and seeing myself inflict pain on others, and learning by trial and error
over years and decades what love really is, and how it is done; it was the kind
of wisdom that comes from prayer, from reaching out to God with no other means than
my own ordinary body and mind, and the holy name of Jesus Christ, and finding
that somehow these are enough, because in that effort God was reaching out to
me.
Wisdom
accepts that being human means there are limits to what you can know and what
you can do. It means admitting that you
are a person like other persons, that you were born into a body, and a family, and
a history, and trusting that that’s how you come to be who you are and how you
know what part you are to play. And
that’s important, because Wisdom is a worker, engaged in creating the
world. In the Eleventh Chapter of
Matthew, Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the work of Sophia, with Wisdom. His actions, he says, are her deeds, and in
them She is vindicated. People don’t
understand why he befriends tax collectors and sinners and eats and drinks with
them, but that is because they don’t know wisdom. They don’t recognize that the Jesus presides
at Sophia’s table, extending her
hospitality, her invitation to all to join the dance of the new creation at the
feast of the Kingdom of God.
But
this is also the time and the place where Jesus makes the boldest claim that
you will find anywhere in the gospels, outside of John, about being the Son of God
the Father, the unique possessor of the highest spiritual knowledge. And this is no accident. Here Jesus presents himself as the supreme
authority, who gives to those he chooses his privileged knowledge of God the
Father, and at the same time as the one who offers humble service to the world,
in the name of Lady Wisdom. Here is the
perfect integration of the love of God with the love of neighbor, and it is on
this that Jesus bases his call to
discipleship. “Take my yoke upon you,”
he says, “and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart.” Being his disciple is work, the work of Wisdom’s
commitment to the practical realities of being human, and of loving one’s
neighbor. But this work is easy, because
Christ endows it with his love, the love that knows the full measure of the
love of God, who holds our souls in health and life, in whom is rest and
refreshment and the peace that passes all understanding.
