It is not good
In the Biblical creation story, God repeatedly declares his creation "good." Over and over, at the end of each day's labor, God surveys what he's done and proclaims "It is good." We should take notice, then, of the first time he says "It is not good."
Was it after the Fall, when sin and death had entered the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve?
No.
The first time we hear those words, God says "It is not good that man should be alone." So he creates Eve.
God wants us to live in community, to not be alone. The community he created first was a marriage, but that's besides my point. I want to think about God's own community -- the tri-unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He himself is never alone, and he created us to not be alone either.
I recently finished reading the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I enjoyed it much more than any other book I'd read in a long, long time. In fact, after mulling it over for the past month, I'm now compelled to claim this as one of the top five best works of fiction I've ever read. Unique in that it lacks a truly coherent plot or unifying story, the novel instead brings together a near endless series of unrelated incidents and events (none of them ordinary and many of them quite whimsical and surreal) to pound home its central theme -- solitude leads to forgetfulness. This brilliant book follows seven generations of a family, living together through the rise and fall of a fictional town in the heart of Columbia. Despite their relative nearness to each other, sharing a home and a town, the main characters are a study in solitude, a solitude among people. The family, the town, and even their government, all fail to remember their history -- mostly because of their alienation.
I find it fascinating, then, that our communal God continually calls us to remember and the vehicle he does it with is the community of the Church. Whether it's "this do in remembrance of me," or "remember Lot's wife," or "remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord God redeemed you," or "remember the Sabbath day," or "remember my commandments, to do them," or "remember my covenant," the calls from God to us to remember fill page after page of the Bible. With God, it seems, it's all about remembering as a community. It's almost as if the remembering can't be done without the community of God's people, the communion of the saints. And, as God's eternal community with himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a communion of Love, it is as though remembrance itself is impossible without love. Whatever it is, it is an essential part of knowing God.
So Marquez's study in solitude (read: loneliness and alienation) and its correlating forgetfulness doesn't simply leave us with absurdist or existentialist post-modern nihilistic angst. While the story may do that for many, my experience of remembering in community lends the story all the more weight as a teacher. It shows what happens when we isolate ourselves from God and each other, when we fail to love, when we fail to remember. It shows the natural end of a selfish people, unable to reach beyond themselves to others, and certainly unable to reach beyond themselves to God.
Was it after the Fall, when sin and death had entered the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve?
No.
The first time we hear those words, God says "It is not good that man should be alone." So he creates Eve.
God wants us to live in community, to not be alone. The community he created first was a marriage, but that's besides my point. I want to think about God's own community -- the tri-unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He himself is never alone, and he created us to not be alone either.
I recently finished reading the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I enjoyed it much more than any other book I'd read in a long, long time. In fact, after mulling it over for the past month, I'm now compelled to claim this as one of the top five best works of fiction I've ever read. Unique in that it lacks a truly coherent plot or unifying story, the novel instead brings together a near endless series of unrelated incidents and events (none of them ordinary and many of them quite whimsical and surreal) to pound home its central theme -- solitude leads to forgetfulness. This brilliant book follows seven generations of a family, living together through the rise and fall of a fictional town in the heart of Columbia. Despite their relative nearness to each other, sharing a home and a town, the main characters are a study in solitude, a solitude among people. The family, the town, and even their government, all fail to remember their history -- mostly because of their alienation.
I find it fascinating, then, that our communal God continually calls us to remember and the vehicle he does it with is the community of the Church. Whether it's "this do in remembrance of me," or "remember Lot's wife," or "remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord God redeemed you," or "remember the Sabbath day," or "remember my commandments, to do them," or "remember my covenant," the calls from God to us to remember fill page after page of the Bible. With God, it seems, it's all about remembering as a community. It's almost as if the remembering can't be done without the community of God's people, the communion of the saints. And, as God's eternal community with himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a communion of Love, it is as though remembrance itself is impossible without love. Whatever it is, it is an essential part of knowing God.
So Marquez's study in solitude (read: loneliness and alienation) and its correlating forgetfulness doesn't simply leave us with absurdist or existentialist post-modern nihilistic angst. While the story may do that for many, my experience of remembering in community lends the story all the more weight as a teacher. It shows what happens when we isolate ourselves from God and each other, when we fail to love, when we fail to remember. It shows the natural end of a selfish people, unable to reach beyond themselves to others, and certainly unable to reach beyond themselves to God.