Present Faith, Meet Future Therapy: Abraham, Isaac, God, & Emily Dickinson

Ya Gotta Have Faith: Gimme that old time religion when the word of your god was enough to send you scurrying for your whetstone and bellowing for your kids. Note the look of religious ecstasy on Isaac's face as his father erases the distinction between faith and child abuse. Note that regarded as history, this is a story of lunacy that would legally bind us to call Child Protective Services. Treated as literature, it has a clear and coherent point to it.I assign my students a comparison paper in which they attempt to tease out how poets and authors make use of the Book of Genesis.

First read Genesis 22:1-19.  Then, Emily Dickinson (and if you don't like poetry, just hang with it for a minute...):

Abraham to kill him
Was distinctly told -
Isaac was an Urchin - 
Abraham was old -

Not a hesitation -
Abraham complied -
Flattered by Obeisance
Tyranny demurred -

Isaac - to his children
Lived to tell the tale -
Moral - with a Mastiff
Manners may prevail.

(Interpretive notes: "Urchin" here should be taken as "an unfortunate child," and "mastiff" as a very strong, fierce dog.  "Obeisance" would be a gesture of subservience, and "demurred" would mean "changed its mind" or "relented."  Finally, "manners" should probably be taken to mean "carefully regulated behavior.")

The story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son in scripture is the culmination of a sort of cyclical structure to his story: he trusts (and leaves Ur), and doubts (and passes off his wife as his sister), and trusts (and receives the Covenant), and doubts (and passes off his wife as his sister)... And then we get to the "final" test, in Genesis 22. 

This much has been affirmed in Christianity for generations.

In Dickinsons' New England, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac was the paradigm of Christian faith: you were to lay all on the altar. 

Very likely all of us would agree with that.

But very likely most of us would be lying through our teeth.

Of course we know in Genesis that it's all a test: the first words tell us this, and this is called (in literature) "dramatic irony," and it means that the readers know what the characters don't know. Another way of saying it is that we "cheat" emotionally when we read Genesis 22: we have God's perspective on the story before it even starts.

But Emily Dickinson was far too intelligent and truthful a person to simply say, "Oh, yes, that's what sacrifice is like for me." She had serious questions about this whole paradigm of faith. She wondered, What qualities emerge from this story when we look at it not as the paradigm of faith but as a paradigm of (for example) doubt?

In other words, what does this whole thing look like from Isaac's perspective?

This poem is her conclusion.

Abraham to kill him -- was distinctly told. Not "sacrifice," but "kill."  And how important is this?  Well, it's the nature of your god, if you're a "biblical Christian" (whatever that means, if anything).  The emotional cheat, the dramatic irony ("This is only a test") here gives us a sigh of relief: "God never meant it."  Why's that matter?  Because it would be unjust, right?  

But Abraham consents.  God puts him, in this text, in the position of losing his own soul to please his god.

He agrees without a moment's hesitation. Ordinarily, when we read it in Genesis, we admire the faith of Abraham... We know it's a test, and he passes. But when we turn the perspective from "sacrifice" to "kill" the readiness of Abraham seems almost perverse. 
Emily Dickinson: Five time runner-up in the Miss Amherst Massachusetts Pageant, but much more than that. To those who read her, she is the lover of the soul, and truth, and a brutally strong honesty. A more beautiful mind you will not discover under the moon.
This isn't a slam against the scriptures, which simply tell the tale (see Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling): it's raising the question, What is it actually like to undergo such "sacrifice"? What is the emotional truth of it? What is the feeling about God that is raised by this? Isaac becomes her imaginative surrogate, the one who carries away from the event of sacrifice a disappointment with God and Abraham for their strange relationship that is so theologically right but so emotionally deficient.

Abraham's obedience flatters God, who is a "tyrant" in the exact sense, one who has all the high cards. God "demurs," or suspends the killing. What is an implacable God like? A vicious dog that comes with its toothy demands. What can prevail upon such a one? According to Isaac's recollection (for he "lives to tell the tale"), the only hope you have when confronted with the demand of God for blood is to bend to the demand. Perhaps only so can you hold to what is most precious.

Some of my students have a really hard time grappling with Dickinson.  One of my Christian friends asks (reasonably enough):

[I]f they have a personal relationship with Christ, do you really expect them to have sympathy for a poet who characterizes God the Father as a tyrant and a mean dog?

Yes, I do. I think that if they cannot sympathize with this poet, they cannot love a world that is afraid of sacrifice. If they have forgotten (or never known) what it is to fear sacrifice, they have either been taught a very damaging emotional dishonesty or they have acquired a pretentious self-righteousness that Jesus condemned at every turn, demanding sacrifice from others while justifying their own safety.

Try it out on your kids: discover what they love most, a stuffed animal or a pet, or a toy, or book or whatever. Tell them God wants them to give it up and watch the agony.

Seem arbitrary?

Present faith, meet future therapy. (Detail from Caravaggio's "Sacrifice of Isaac.")Good: then you know how Emily Dickinson saw the religion of her time, and how I see a lot of the evangelicalism of my own. God wants me to give it up? Well, maybe he does: he often does. But Dickinson tells us what it's like to be Isaac and to wonder what sort of God demands this, a feeling that we must account for if we are to have any kind of deep faith.  She strips off the dramatic irony ("After this Yahweh tested Abraham...") and leaves the tale unvarnished in its brutality, showing us what it looks like in real time and real space where religious people demand that we imitate it.

Christians should be doing better. They should be doing a LOT better. Christian-educated sophomores in college should NOT be conspicuous for shying away at the hurdles, but for taking them with better-than-average clearance and grace.

If my 19 year old pagan-Wiccan student can cheerfully and accurately explain to me how the writer of Psalms feels about Yahweh or what the writer of Genesis thinks of Abraham's unique place in history or what Paul thinks the gospel is, then my Christians should be able to recognize and describe adequately an emotional crisis of faith. If they care to critque it, it MUST be from a perspective of perfect (or at least thorough) understanding.

From where I sit, with an admittedly narrow line of sight (and an admittedly burned out emotional generator after too many hours of grading), Christian education is starting to look like an unqualified disaster when it aims to provide "answers" to challenges of faith rather than an honest understanding of those challenges.

And it's disturbing me more and more every day that Christians are teaching their kids that Dickinson's perspective is just "not true."

It is true.

Profoundly true.  

As true as the truth that Abraham was faithful and God rewarded him.  

Maybe more true: at least Dickinson's view can submit itself to history, to the world in which we judge with something that we can call "justice" without hanging our head in the morning.

Comments

[Kim]

Good post. I never miss an opportunity to share the poetry of Scott Cairns, agreeing with Annie Dillard that he's one of the best poets alive.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

Who among us could bear the memory of
Abraham’s knife as it entered the heart of his
son? Few enough, presumably. For why else has
that incommensurate tableau been misre-
peated so thoroughly?

In the stillness of that hour, the Lord pressed
his servant inexplicably far and despite the
gentled features of a great many fables there-
after—the angel’s intercession, the convenient
goat, et cetera—the knife did find its cramping
sheath there in the boys bared breast, and
blood covered both the boy and the father who
embraced him even then, and blood colored
the rock altar, roughed the more underfoot.

In pity, then, the Lord briefly withheld time’s
aberrant fall, retracted the merest portion of
its descent, sparked a subsequent visitation of
the scene. This time, he stayed the hand, the
knife, the rush of blood and of horror, but only
in time.

Just outside time’s arch embarrassment—in
the spinning swoon of the I Am—the boy is
bloodied still upon the rock, the man fallen
upon him, left with nothing but his extreme,
his absolute, his dire obedience.