An Interesting Angle

I recently received a response from a good friend who had just read my blog about how the first chapter of Genesis was the foundational story that created the week. (Unappreciated Origins; Where did the week come from?) He called it an “interesting angle.”  He quickly went on to lay out reasons that I am missing the real joy of God as creator by not seeing in Genesis 1 the factual description of how God had created everything in 6 days some 6000 years ago. Moreover, I’m missing that everything that we see in geology is the result of a universal flood some 4000 years ago.

Now, the world is blessed by people who have many different points of view. It should be regarded as wonderful, not dismissive, that someone has their own “interesting angle” on something. The people in Franconia Notch in New Hampshire found an interesting angle from which to view the cliffs overlooking their village. That spot became famous as the place to stand and gaze up at the glaciated, rocky cliffs above and see “The Old Man of the Mountain.” From any other angle those rocks looked like, well, just a bunch of rocks. The presence of that interesting angle of view changed the whole culture for that town. And the world was notified, and appropriately horrified, by the collapse of those rocks on May 3, 2003. The Old Man is gone, collapsed into a heap of rubble in the valley. But I count is as a blessing, that before that tragic day, I was able to stand on that spot and see that Abe Lincoln-like man peering across the valley.

Or another example. There are literally billions – ok – trillions of stars in the sky. But there is only one that has served to change the shape of civilization on earth to a large extent. And I am not talking about our blessed sun. Of course, it makes civilization possible! But the second-place star that I am thinking about has its noble distinction only because of our “interesting angle” of view of it in the heavens. The North Star is just a common, ordinary star in every other fashion. But, the fact that it lies on the axis of the rotation of the earth has made it a reliable beacon for navigation for thousands of years. I’ve covered that intriguing topic in my blog, Christ at the Apex, so I won’t go into explaining its significance farther here.

But the point in this essay is explaining that interesting angles matter. If I had failed to walk 100 yards farther down the trail to gaze at the cliffs above Franconia Notch, I never would have been at the right angle to see that stately man of the mountain. If the sailor had fixed his sexton on some star other than the North Star, his ship may have ended up in Reykjavík rather than London.

So, to dismiss the observation that the week had its origins in the creation story as just an “interesting angle,” seems somewhat small minded. The week, with the Sabbath at its apex, is the unifying narrative of the whole Hebrew Bible. Violating the staid traditions of that Sabbath, after all,  it is one of the things that got Jesus in such hot water in Jerusalem. And going beyond just the Jewish nation, it has been an agreed upon time-marker for almost all nations since antiquity. It has civilized mankind in ways that we can’t totally appreciate by giving us a time of rest and contemplation upon our creator rather than a full-time existence with every day being a workday.  

I do have my own “interesting angle” on God. My God is that one Being that:

Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the skies of parchment made

Were every stalk on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Though stretched from sky to sky*

Bets are that every one of those scribes is going to be writing their praise of God from their own “interesting angle” and it will result in the most splendid of tapestries.

* Verse 3 of The Love of God- Frederick M. Lehman - poem by Meir Ben Issac Nehorai

Frederick Lehman tells us that verse 3 “had been found penciled on the wall of a patient’s room in an insane asylum after he had been carried to his grave.” While it is only supposition that he was the one who adapted the Jewish author’s poem to leave us these well-known lines, if the account is true it shows in any case that he highly esteemed the message.

Perhaps of interest for farther reading:

https://www.icr.org/article/157/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-cant-we-get-rid-of-the-7day-week