Updike John: Of the Farm

The next verse reads, And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. Two things strike us as curious. One, God—naively, it would seem—created the animals, before Eve, as help mates, as companions to Adam in his loneliness! Two, Adam’s first piece of work, the first piece of work the Bible describes for us, is to name these animals! Are these facts so curious? Are not the dumb creatures of the earth in very truth our companions? Does not some glint of God’s original intention shine out from the eyes of the dog, the horse, the heifer even as she is slaughtered? Has not Man, in creating civilization, looked to the animals not only as beasts of burden and sustenance but for inspiration, as in the flight of the birds and the majesty of lions? Has not, in honesty, an eternal pact been honored and kept? And is it so strange that Adam’s first piece of work was to name his mute helpers? Is not language an act of husbandry, a fencing-in of fields? All of us here are farmers or the sons and daughters of farmers, so we know how the lowly earthworm aerates the soil. Likewise, language aerates the barren density of brute matter with the penetrations of the mind, of the spirit.

I whispered to my mother, “I wasn’t the son of a farmer.”

“Shh. You’re my son too.”

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and be took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. As some of you doubtlessly know, this passage was cited to justify the first use of ether in operations, when it was feared that anesthesia might be unchristian. But let us direct our attention to three other features of Eve’s creation. She was taken out of Adam. She was made after Adam. And she was made while Adam slept. What do these assertions tell us about men and women today? First, is not Woman’s problem that she was taken out of Man, and is therefore a subspecies, less than equal to Man, a part of the world? The term Mankind includes Womankind and on the chess board the Queen, though supremely powerful, is numbered among the “men.” Webster defines woman as “an adult female person, as distinguished from a man or a child.” The impression lingers that, so distinguished, she lies somewhere between, as the philosopher Schopenhauer observed.

The Henry brothers looked at each other and there was polite laughter from the front pews.

Second, she was made after Man. Think of God as a workman who learns as he goes. Man is the rougher and stronger artifact; Woman the finer and more efficient. She was fashioned, observe, soon after God had “formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air” and his hand, still turning to those same rhythms, imparted to Woman a creaturely shapeliness. A rib is rounded. Man, with Woman’s creation, became confused as to where to turn. With one half of his being he turns toward her, his rib, as if into himself, into the visceral warmth wherein his tensions find re solution in dis solution. With his other half of his being he gazes outward, toward God, along the straight line of infinity. He seeks to solve the riddle of his death. Eve does not. In a sense she does not know death. Her very name, Hava , means “living.” Her motherhood answers concretely what men would answer abstractly. But we as Christians all know that there is no abstract answer, that there is no answer whatsoever apart from the concrete reality of Christ.

His sharp face grew paler, leaning into the light of the lectern.

And third, Woman was made while Adam slept. Her beauty will ever have in men’s eyes a dreamlike quality. Each day we men awake like Adam puzzled to find ourselves duplicated—no, not duplicated, for the expectant softness and graceful patience of the other stand in strange contrast to us. In reaching out to her, Adam commits an act of faith.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Men. The original language of Genesis has grammatical gender. Man, ish , calls Woman isba —signifies her, that is, as an aspect of himself. A necessary aspect. Karl Barth, the great theologian of the Reformed Church, our partner in the Reformation, says this of Woman: “Successfully or otherwise, she is in her whole existence an appeal to the kindness of Man.” An appeal to the kindness of Man. “For kindness,” he goes on to say, “belongs originally to his particular responsibility as a man.” Belongs originally : since the beginning, since God breathed life into the nostrils of the dust and “man became a living soul.”

So Woman, if I have not misunderstood these verses, was put on earth to help Man do his work, which is God’s work. She is less than Man, and superior to him. In designating her with his own generic name, Adam commits an act of faith: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” In so declaring, he acknowledges within himself a responsibility to be kind. He ties himself ethically to the earth. Kindness differs from righteousness as the grasses from the stars. Both are infinite. Without conscious confession of God, there can be no righteousness. But kindness needs no belief. It is implicit in the nature of Creation, in the very curves and amplitude of God’s perfect fashioning. Let us pray.

At the door, taking the minister’s limp and chill little hand, I told him, avoiding his black bold eyes—very local eyes—that his sermon had been excellent.

Behind me in the line, my mother in turn told him, in the level low tone with which she expresses reservations, “It’s so unusual to hear a young sermon.”

In the car, I asked her, “Why did the sermon seem young?”

“Oh I don’t know,” she said. “I get so tired of men talking about women. Women just aren’t that interesting to me.”

“I thought he was bright.”

“Oh, he’ll go places. This parish won’t hold him much longer. He’ll be a bishop by forty if his eyes don’t rove.”

I laughed. “Do his eyes rove?”

“There’s been talk. We have some very pretty women in the choir now.” The sermon nagged her, for after a silence she said, “No, Joey, it seems to me whenever a man begins to talk that way, he’s trying to excuse himself from some woman’s pain.”

Her tone surprised me, it arose so purely from within. My mother’s inner weather had an egocentric independence of me that I disliked. I changed the subject. “Do the Henrys know about my divorce?” We had talked with them briefly after church, in the shadowless mid-morning heat, standing on the reddish stones and packed dirt of the parking area. They were cordial and courteous to me, and I asked after Jessica, whose smooth limbs and wide-set gray eyes I had once admired so keenly my country bed had complained. Russell and Willis and Tom all called my mother by her first name, Mary, which took us, standing before this old-time church with the keystone dated 1882 and a milk-glass fanlight above the front portal, back into a time when I did not exist. They had been school children together. I felt it had tired my mother, slipping back into such an older self.

“Oh sure,” she answered. “There was a good deal of interest around here. We’re keeping an eye on you.” Her voice sounded tight and seemed held far forward in her body.

“I’m sorry. Was everybody shocked?”

“It takes a lot to shock us now. Last winter the mayor of Alton was indicted for taking kickbacks from the naughty places up by the fairgrounds.”