Readings (Year B):
Genesis 2:18 – 24
Psalms 128:1 – 2, 3, 4 – 5, 6
Hebrews 2:9 – 11
Mark 10:2 – 16 or 10:2 – 12
Reflection: Who do we say that we are?
Few stories have as much impact—for good or ill—as creation stories. Our understanding of where we come from has ripple effects on us for the rest of our lives, determining how we relate to ourselves, others, and all of creation.
When Christians look at the state of our world, it is easy to see how faulty interpretations of our creation story have led us to this gruesome path: human “dominion” over the natural world has led to exploitation, extraction, and crisis; male “primacy” among genders has led to prejudice, bigotry, and violence. We inherited from Eden a world of hierarchies, with humans—particularly human men—at the very top, in the image of God. What that says about us, and about God, has enabled some of our very worst behavior. We are paying the price of a story poorly understood.
But there are other creation stories that illustrate a different relationship with our common home. In her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer relays the creation story shared by many Indigenous communities of the Great Lakes: the story of Skywoman, who falls from the heavens and is rescued by the animals inhabiting the world below. The relationship between them is immediately reciprocal: the animals help the woman find a safe place to live, which becomes known as Turtle Island; she in turn cultivates the plants she has brought that provide food, medicine, and beauty for all. Kimmerer shares that in her tradition, humans are the youngest and least experienced siblings in the family of species; therefore, humans owe great respect to their non-human neighbors and look to them for guidance about how to live in harmony with a generous world.
This creation story, as Kimmerer points out, espouses a tremendously different worldview: communion, not dominion; reciprocity, not conquest. The woman is not formed out of man’s rib—she comes to earth first. The animals are not unsuitable companions, but respected teachers. No one gets banished from the garden. It makes sense, then, that so many Indigenous communities maintain a profoundly intimate and sacred relationship with the land and the beings who dwell there, in contrast to the colonizer’s destructive race to hoard resources in a hostile, exiled world.
How do we read Genesis, and not fall into the traps of bad interpretation that have led us here? If we believe God is love, what is the most loving way to understand our Creator, all of Creation, and ourselves in this story?
What if we take man out of the absolute center of it and let him rejoin his siblings—birds, beasts, fish, plants, and yes, woman—in the circle of creation emanating from the real star of the show: our wildly creative God? What if we viewed the “dominion” God supposedly gives humanity over the natural world as a form of responsibility rather than domination? What if the act of shaping woman out of the very same animated clay that formed man was a gesture of total unity and equity rather than some statement on who should lord over whom? What if God’s gift of allowing man to name creation was not a conferral of power but an invitation to stewardship, to truly live in God’s image as a gentle caretaker who seeks to relate rather than an ambitious overlord who seeks to rule?
Our creation stories create us. Who do we say that we are? Who do we want to be?
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