Introduction, Part 1

"It was a dark and stormy night..."; "Once upon a time, in a far away place..."; "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number Four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were completely normal, thank you very much."  Hmm.  That's not quite right. "Once there were four children, whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy"; "In the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth..." - yes!  That's the one.  We'll start there.

In the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters - 

God said: Let there be light! And there was light. 

God saw the light: that it was good. 

God separated the light: Day! and the darkness he called: Night!

There was setting, there was dawning: one day.

And God separated the waters above from the waters below...

And the waters from the dry land...

And the day from night, light from light...

And God created all living things after their kind: the swarms of the waters, the fowl above the earth, herd-animals, crawling things, and the wildlife of the earth - after their kind.

And God created humankind in his image (after his kind?), in the image of God did he create it, male and female he created them, and they were to have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the heavens, animals, all the earth, and all crawling things that crawl about on the earth!

And all of these orderings, these separatings - these are the begettings of the heavens and the earth: their being created. And God saw that it was good, and then he ceased, on the seventh day, from all his work that he had made.  And God gave the seventh day his blessing, and he hallowed - made holy, separate-for-God - it.

Our story begins with distinctions and orderings.  It begins with separating, with setting boundaries and assigning places "after their kind."  And it begins with hallowing, that great setting-apart, separate-for-God-ing.  The beginning of our story is a vision of the cosmos in which space, time, and life-forms are ordered under the active care of a powerful but benevolent God, a God who would walk about in this garden he had made with those he had placed in it.

But then something went terribly wrong.  Something having to do with disorder and death and confusion, with loss of vision and ruptured relationships and - absence.  Gone is the garden, and gone is the God who walked in it.

Fast forward a book or two: the two have become many, the garden has become a desert, but the dis-ordered cosmos has begun again to take on a shadowy kind of order - maybe something like the mirages radiating off the heat of the desert sand - in the Tabernacle, the visible, ritual representation of the ordering of space, in the Festivals that order time, and in the priestly hierarchies, dietary rules, and sacrificial regulations that order life - that once again order Creation itself.  Do you know where we are yet?  "It is a world in which everything and everyone are to take their place under the perfect worship of a perfect God, banishing or avoiding death, defect, and disorder.  In the priestly view, the world is to be an echo of the divine order that is portrayed in the Creation story."

The Book of Separations.  The story of Concentric Circles, of Order vs. Disorder, of Life vs. Death.  The Book of Hallowing, of Making Holy, of Separating-for-God.  This is how the Israelites will know how to "choose life" (Dt 30.19) that will be "wisdom-for-you and understanding-for-you," so that they might be a great nation whose God is near to it, as YHWH our God (Dt 4.6-7) - as near as a morning walk in a garden.

This is the how-to on holiness and hospitality.  This is the vision of life in heaven-on-earth.  This is the answer to the absence.

But there's still just one small problem: it's in another language.