Some weeks the idea for a column comes easily, it falls right into my lap. This week was such a week.
I cannot take credit for the following. I didn’t write it. The author is unknown. I believe it has been tweaked and changed along the way, but the idea held within still rings true. As my grandmother used to like to say, “Take this and chew on it for while.”
At the end of His sixth day, the creator of our universe made Adam and Eve and He made them like Himself — full of goodness and love. He put them in a beautiful garden, but Adam and Eve began to have their own ideas and they turned away from God. They tossed away His goodness and His love and turned the garden into weeds, thorn trees and bramble bushes.
One day, an angel passed over the garden and saw God’s goodness lying forgotten in the dust of what the garden had become. The angel scooped it up and rushed to heaven where the Council of Angels met to determine where to hide God’s goodness. They wanted to ensure that future children of the earth could not find what their forebears had so carelessly tossed away.
One angel said, “Let us bury it in the Earth,” but the wisest of angels said, “The children of the Earth will tunnel and sift the planet and they will count its very atoms.” Another said, “Hide His goodness in the sea.” Again, the wisest said, “The children of the Earth will cross the farthest ocean and go down to the depths of the sea. They will even make a map of the ocean floor.” A third said, “In the stars!” The wisest pondered this for some time and finally said, “The children will learn to search the heavens, make a ladder to the stars and even lay tracks on other planets.”
The council was in despair. From the center of the Earth, to the depths of the seas, to the heights of the planets, all secrets would be open to the minds of humans.
Finally, the littlest angel of them all said, “Let us hide divinity within humanity, in its own nature, its heart, its very being. The children of the Earth will never think to look for it there.”
So they did, and we all have been looking and searching ever since! Amen.
A Yankee with a Southern soul, Gillian Pollock is a wife, mother of two ever-challenging children and director of Christian Formation at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Washington.