In chapter one of Genesis, the author tells the story of how our world began-heaven and earth, light and darkness, grass and herb, sea creature, winged creatures, beasts of the earth, and lastly humankind. "And God saw that it was good," says the author. In fact, seven times the phrase "it was good" appears in the opening section of the Bible. What is God seeing and feeling when he says this? That was the question we wrestled with last week in our Woodstock Buddhist Bible Study group: What does God mean by "good"? "How we define good as human beings is our perceptual frame for reality," observes Clark. "But that frame is necessarily quite small in comparison to all that is, and so there's the need here, at the very beginning of the Bible, to break it open and get as big a picture of reality as we can."
"And God Saw That It Was Good"
When we think about what's good for human beings (or what we think is good for us), it's clear nowadays that it's not necessarily what is good for the environment. For that matter, even within humanity, what is good for one class of human beings may be very bad for another. And so the question is always, "good for whom?" But none of that applies to God. When God says what is good at the beginning of Genesis, it has a different meaning. The whole thing is good. No one is left out, and nothing is left over. Everything belongs. "It's shocking, and very hard to practice," says Clark, "because it's constantly breaking open all of our frames for reality-but maybe that's the point."
Yet again, we had to remind ourselves who wrote the Bible, and why. Humanity's "longest letter to itself," says Clark, "is always reaching, always searching, always seeking to express something eternal and true. Sometimes it gets in its own way in the process of doing this, but often it doesn't, and we end up with a passage like these opening words of Genesis." When we read it this way, the Bible really is our "manual of liberation."
