Devotional by Angela Smith
April 20, 1997
More than 30 years ago Maurice Sendak wrote his famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. When it was first published, adults of all kinds criticized it for being too frightening. But children loved it. Children are not fools. They know the world is a perilous place, that feelings are unpredictable, and life is scary. It's adults who try to deny reality -- not children. It's grownups who try to pretend we're in control of ourselves and the world.
I've always thought of the Bible as a wild place. It is lightening and thunder, danger and calamity. It has sex and violence, injustice and mayhem, magic and spirits, ghosts, lions, serpents and beasts. On its pages we find conflict, crisis, and controversy, corruption, and catastrophy -- the five Cs that make front page headlines and the 6 o'clock news. When we really read the Bible, we have to open up a wild part of ourselves and sometimes that can be frightening. But the wild place, the wilderness, is where God is. Whether it be the Bible, the desert, or the human soul, God is in the wild, uncontrollable, dangerous realms of existence.
Most Christians share the belief that the Bible contains the supreme revelation of God. Among fundamentalists, it is the complete and absolute truth. Fundamentalists memorize the passages of the Bible, but they have not read it. They revere the Bible but revering it is not reading it. Reading grabs your interest, makes you wonder. Reading the good book should be like reading any good book. Fundamentalists don't allow that. To wonder, to question, to doubt, is to deny the authority of the Bible. As Jerry Falwell once put it, anyone who denies the verbal inspiration, the absolute infallibility of this book is the spirit of the antichrist. That's not reading the Bible. That's worshiping the Bible.
When fundamentalists worship the Bible, they capture the Bible to tame it. By putting it on a pedestal, they do what men long did to women, try to take the wildness out of it. They clean it, sanitize it, make it correct and dignified. And when someone tries to restore the wildness, they become indignant.
At the other extreme, when skeptic dismiss the Bible, try to explain it away and otherwise avoid it, they too are taming the Bible. Like fundamentalists, they can't take the wildness in it. Mocking the miracles and dismissing the tall tales as evidence of folly, they are as frightened by the wildness as any fundamentalist. Neither fundamentalist nor sceptic have the courage to read.
For those who have the courage, the Bible is a revelation. It's a revelation of God and most definitely of the human struggle to find God. It may tell something of history, but it definitely recounts the story of the human soul. But only if you take it all. Take away the wildness, try to tame it or domesticate it, and the truth of it vanishes.
The power of the Bible is in the miracles, the fantasies, the contradictions, the barbarisms, the awesome and splendid spectacle. Whatever truth lies in it cannot be plucked out. All we can do is read it, really read it. Enter it, be caught up in it.
When was the last time you read the Bible? Really read it and felt its spine-tingling wildness? Think of the harrowing Bible, tales of Egypt plagued with frogs and flies, or Ezekiel watching bones rattle and clack into skeletal armies. Imagine the blood curdling moment when the walls of Jericho cracked and how Jonah must have felt spending three days and nights in the belly of a whale. Remember the ruthless Bible, the story of Jefthah's awful promise to sacrifice the first person he saw on returning from war and how it turned out to be his own daughter, his only child, hurrying to welcome him; King David who connived to put Uriah in harm's way so he could marry his wife Bathsheba; the Roman soldiers who spat on Jesus, put a crown of thorns on his head, crucified him and then cast lots for his clothes.
These are part of the elemental wildness, as sure as any psalm or sermon on the mount. Only to the extent that we like Sendak's wild child, can descend into the maelstrom of wildness can we really learn what the Bible has to teach.
Read the Bible, really read it and you will read the psyche of the western mind. Read it, and you will tremble at its legacy. Dare to read it and the power in it will touch you, touch your wildness, the place where you still rage and weep and lament and sing. And after the reading comes the real challenge: not to understand it or agree with it or disagree with it, but simply to listen to it. Resist worship and analysis. Don't tame or prettify it. Dare to listen to it. That's the hardest thing you can do, because it means you will have to go where the wild things are.