Your son is marked with guilt out of himself — out of himself — almost more than he can bear. Don’t crush him with rejection. Don’t crush him Adam.
Mary and Eve by Sr. Grace Remington, OCSO, of the Cistercian Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey
Thankfully, the story of ourselves east of the Garden doesn’t end with what happened in Eden. How do we reconcile what happened so long ago, yet we carry that sorrow daily? How can we be met in our need? Continuing on in Steinbeck’s biblical story, we get to wrestle with the power of the choice.
The mere possibility that I have some say in the matter of life — how I continue in or depart from cycles of sin, is a gift of God’s grace. I am still learning the narrow path between the #1 parenting slogan ad nauseum: “Now, make a good choice Johnny,” and Jesus’ open arms of “let the little ones come to me.” One perspective puts all the Deity on us (with a hint of “or else”), and the other gives us the courage and freedom to choose by looking to Someone outside ourselves.
Jumping back in, we find Adam’s sons, Cal and Aron older and fighting for their father’s love and acceptance.
Aron said, ‘I don’t know why you go for to do it.’
‘How do you mean? Do what?’
‘All the tricky, sneaky things,’ said Aron.
‘What do you mean, sneaky?’
‘Well, about the rabbit, and sneaking here in the car. And you did something to Abra. I don’t know what, but it was you made her throw the box away.’
‘Ho,’ said Cal. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know!’ But he was uneasy.
Aron said slowly, ‘I wouldn’t want to know that. I’d like to know why you do it. You’re always at something. I just wonder why you do it. I wonder what’s it good for.’
A pain pierced Cal’s heart. His planning suddenly seemed mean and dirty to him. He knew that his brother had found him out. And he felt a longing for Aron to love him. He felt lost and hungry and he didn’t know what to do.
Earlier in the story, Aron calls Cal out for always wanting to fight. Cal of course rejects this idea and laughs it off as a joke. It seems that Aron came into the world accepting it as it is, and Cal entered in wanting to change it. After catching and killing a rabbit, Aron decides that they’ll both give it to their father Adam without telling him who caught it. A sort of anonymous gift for equality one could say. What Steinbeck gets right about the Cain and Abel story is that it was never the point to focus on who’s gift was better. To find some moral in God somehow liking lambs more than fruit would be trivial. What emerges from the story, as Paul Borgman writes in his book, Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard, is an “exploration of Cain’s response to rejection, and God’s response to the depressed Cain.” It never was about appeasing an angry God, but an incarnate God telling us we always have a choice.
“Nature finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is smiling around it. And love is smiling through all things.”
This echoes back to Cain. If we keep chasing acceptance and love with offering after offering, we will come to a dead end every time. If my children have to earn my love, we will be two passing ships in the night. Cain’s solution is to kill his brother. He views his brother as number one, so why not kill him so he can move up in status? This incessant need to be number one is voracious, the “beast” at Cain’s door as God said to Cain.
“Why this tantrum? Why the sulking? If you do well, won’t you be accepted? And if you don’t do well, sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s’ out to get you, you’ve got to master it.” (Gen. 4:6-7, The Message).
Which is to say, when we accept God’s love for us, we are OK. Period. But if we don’t, if we keep dwelling on the past and all of our grasping for acceptance, there is a horror inside us waiting to devour us.
Like Cain, Cal lies in bed with the horror of waking up to his own meanness and anger.
‘Dear Lord,’ he said, ‘let me be like Aron. Don’t make me mean. I don’t want to be. If you will let everybody like me, why, I’ll give you anything in the world, and if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for to get it. I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be lonely. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.’ Slow warm tears were running down his cheeks. His muscles were tight and he fought against making any crying sound or sniffle.
We don’t need to look past our own family history to know this pain. Mixtapes of our own parent’s voice run in our head, why did you do it? Why why why. That’s always the question. What if we were granted the knowledge to know why? What would we do with it? Do we have the eyesight to dole out justice equally, with no bias? Thankfully God’s arm reaches beyond our human manipulation.
***
I remember the first time God’s arm reached out to me. I was taking a Romans class at my college, and we came upon chapter six, you know the one — we are no longer slaves to sin. Why would we listen to sin crouching at our door when in Christ, it has died? Growing up, choice was always presented in a moral exchange kind of way, as if the moral struggle of life was mine to bear alone. Verses like Jeremiah 17:9 were lorded over me. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, who can understand it?” In the American Standard translation, we read Genesis 4:1-8 as an order for us to triumph over sin. In the King James Version, it is read as a promise that one day we will. But when read with the Hebrew word for “thou shalt rule over sin” and “do thou rule over sin,” timshel whispers to us from the ground, thou mayest. We may or we may not. A gracious God does not demand. Would he not give us the dignity to choose? Seen apart from God, our souls are “great and precious and lonely” as Lee said to Adam. But take our puzzling hearts and put them in the context of a gracious God, and our hope is in a patient Farmer who will let the weeds and wheat grow together, separating them in due time.
By the end of our story, we see Cal tormented by the possible truth that he had killed his brother. Knowing it would crush Aron, he told him of their absent prostitute mother and shattered his good little world. So Aron went off to fight in the war and inevitably died.
Knowing his father Adam has suffered a stroke, Cal needs his father to forgive him. He is an accused man. But he can’t bear to be in his father’s presence.
Lee gripped his wrist fiercely … ‘with goodness all around you — don’t you dare suggest a thing like that! Why is your sorrow more refined than my sorrow?’
‘It’s not sorrow. I told him what I did. I killed my brother. I’m a murderer. He knows it.’
‘Did he say it? Tell the truth — did he say it?’
‘He didn’t have to. It was in his eyes. He said it with his eyes. There’s nowhere I can go to get away — there’s no place.’
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
Again, to Abra, Aron’s girlfriend –
‘I wanted to run away from my father’s eyes. They’re right in front of me all the time. When I close my eyes I still see them. I’ll always see them. My father is going to die, but his eyes will still be looking at me, telling me I killed my brother … don’t you want to come with me?’
‘Not if you’re running away — no, I don’t.’
Cal said, ‘Then I don’t know what to do. What shall I do? Tell me what to do.’
‘Will you listen?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’re going back,’ she said.
‘Back? Where?’
‘To your father’s house,’ said Abra.
As Cal is accompanied back to the house by Abra, he is also met with deep wisdom and compassion in the presence of Lee. As Abra says, “Help him. You can accept things, Lee. Help him.” Lee’s stubborn ability to stay with and ask the hard questions of Cal in the presence of his father is a mercy. He is an advocate for both Adam and Cal. A peacemaker.
“‘Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us — would stop trying?”
Would God ever stop drawing us to Him? Drawing us to each other?
“‘I can’t take it in,’ Cal said. ‘Not now I can’t.'”
Even when we don’t do what’s right. Even in our short-sightedness and brash decisions and wrong choices, we are met with a God who says that’s OK, we’re gonna try again.
Sometimes in this life, we are given the gift of forgiveness from our loved ones. But more often than not, there is silence and distance and death. This is why Steinbeck’s novel is so poignant. We get to feel what it’s like to be in that room with Cal and his father. We get to be witnesses in the room. It can be a mercy that meets us for now before we are face to face with Christ. For those of us who’ve been crushed over and over by rejection, who just can’t seem to ever measure up, we ask who will see us in our guilt? Who will see us in our loneliness? There is One who was crushed for our sake, in the oil press of Gethsemane, drops of blood squeezed through the vice and poured out His side. For those of us looking in all the wrong places, making all the wrong choices, the voice of Love calls to us in the words of George Herbert’s poem, The Agony:
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice which, on the cross, a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like,
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.
Rise up beloved. Thou mayest.
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I can only be at peace by looking to Him. My self measurement never soothes. He heals, He comforts, He reconciles me. Repentance is not so much what I do with my sin, but recognizing I can do nothing about my sin. He did it all. Only the broken believing heart of a child can receive such deep grace.