The Land

Genesis 36:12

The land I once gave

to Abraham and Isaac I now give to you;

And your descendents after you

will I give this land.

 

[Due to an Internet connection problem, I was unable to retrieve a randomly chosen piece of Scripture through Bibledice.com.  So, I had my mother open the Bible to a random place and chose the first line that my eyes fell upon.  Well, actually… The first line that my eyes fell upon was about Jonathan amassing an army and, well, I cheated because I didn’t like that one.  My mother opened the Bible to another place and this was the line my eyes fell upon, which, I have to say, is not much better.  Oh well, that’s the nature of the game!]

 

The promised land is a place to live in peace and prosperity.  All humans long for such a place.  Communities band together to form a governing body in order to create a land free from violence and thievery, free from hunger, poverty and rampant illness.  In the millennia long history of humankind, however, has such a place ever existed?

 

An historical expert could, I suppose, make arguments for this tribe or that nation through different periods of time in different corners of the earth as being idyllic, a Shangri-La of antiquity – but even they would know that it wasn’t perfect.  And it certainly didn’t last.  A biblical scholar could explain what was great about life in the promised land given to Abraham and Isaac – and then go on to explain how difficult life was there and how its inhabitants fell short of the ideal.  Some people may say that the United States of America is a nation that comes closest to upholding the ideals of humankind and safeguarding the rights of all to live in peace and prosperity.  But, as we all know, no one is free from illness here, people live in the streets, children go hungry, and crime is not even close to being wiped out, rather, we hear news of theft, violence, or mayhem every day.  So… Should we just forget about the whole notion of a promised land?

 

No.  For one thing, if we attempt the best, then we will achieve the good.  For in the very striving to improve, we attain one of the greatest values of the promised land: caring.  To give up on making life better for ourselves and our neighbors is to succumb to apathy.  And apathy is a gray and miserable place where the only kind of happiness is felt in short bursts, like needle punctures that drain away life and rot out vitality until true joy cannot penetrate numb and withered bodies.  We don’t want to live there.  But if we try for the promised land, if we keep that hope alive, it is because we care about goodness and healthy sustenance for all – and then we are more fully alive and nourished by compassion and faith.  Love is the only thing that can bring us to any kind of a paradise.  Peace is not something that can be forced.  A heavily armed peacekeeper is always ironic to me.  And the sharing of plenty can’t be doled out in lines, forcefully subtracting from some and adding to others so that numbers are even.  Could we maybe say… If you have the absence of war and the absence of malnutrition, but you have not love….  The truth is that only through love – which is always a free gift – can there be true peace and true plenty.  And as we humans are flawed creatures, indeed, in constant need of restoration, we must first seek love that is free and eternal – not our own drawn out blueprints of the Ideal State, but the Kingdom of God that we can only enter through a state of Grace.

 

The other thought that this Scripture passage leads me to is glimpsed in a poem by Ben Johnson.  The thought is that the promised land – which, yes, is a state of being more than anything else – can perhaps best be reflected in a small grouping of people: a family.  Home is where the heart is.  Too often, our hearts are left to toss in desolate wastelands – no wonder, then, that there is so much misery and aggression.  But, when the heart finds refuge in a safe and loving place, when we are truly homed in the giving and receiving of love with our dear ones, then we are living in a promised land.  You see, it is about love.  And what begins with the heart in the home can spread outward to the hearts of others.  But, if it doesn’t begin at home, with the heart, with true love, then we cannot see it in our communities, in our nations, in our world.  The promised land cannot be imposed as something foreign into the human hearts.  We must learn, we must begin, in our most intimate relationships.  Though it is so small compared to the greater population, home is everything.

“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make Man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night—
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.”

Christina Chase