Darkly Devotions

 

Lyric prose meditations that play with elements from evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, reiki, Tarot and “weird voodoo shit.

~by Cindy Clem

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Opening exercise: Be like the squirrel, girl, be like the squirrel. Give it a whirl.[1]

Today’s passages:

1.  “And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.” Genesis 5:24
2. “The Three Dharma Seals (Dharma mudra) are impermanence (anitya), nonself (anatman), and nirvana.” Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
3. “For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God.” God

And Enoch[2] walked with God

If this were the New Testament, we might take this figuratively: Enoch, having asked Jesus into his heart, carried God consciously with him—to work, to bed, on walks. But this is the Old Testament, where God can’t be inside you, where he has not yet multiplied to Trinity and nestled himself into our beings[3]. So could God walk? Did he don trousers and accompany Enoch on long, meandering, meditative rambles? In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Yet the sound of God walking is not feet crumpling grass but voice (“So [Adam] said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid…”). I’m getting too literal. “Walked with” in Genesis 5:24 probably means “talked to, as if to himself” or “really liked,” even though there is no given precedent at this point for God relating to people in other than an authoritarian, micromanaging way. Or maybe it means that Enoch was the human that, finally, after many rough drafts, was exactly what God had meant to create all along: good company.

and he was not  

Not what? Not dead? Not alive? Erased from human history? Enoch was a young thing, only 365 years old, in a time when humans lived into their 800 and 900s. Enoch’s son, Methusaleh, lived to age 969.

If the verse ended there, we might conclude that Enoch had achieved great insight into nonself, the second Dharma Seal. Anatman. Enoch: A Not Man, who walked.

Anatman is achieved through the practice of and meditation on impermanence. Did Enoch have such insight that he negated himself out of a human form into nirvana, that state of no-birth and no-death? Perhaps he was on his way there, but then the verse continues.

For God took him.

“Because they tend to fall into broader classifications such as robbery, it’s hard to get a grip on how prevalent [adult kidnappings] are. ‘My general sense is that these things are not unheard of, but they happen maybe once or twice a year in a given jurisdiction,’ said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing in Madison, Wis. ‘It’s a pretty rare kind of crime.’”[4]

I knew a man once who insisted that women he dated were materialistic for wanting to be with him in person. Spiritual union should suffice. I thought this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and apparently, God agrees. God wants a body.

What happens when your God, a jealous God, kidnaps you from your personal path to nirvana to keep Him company? Was Enoch aware of himself as Enoch, wherever God took him? Was he happy? Did his sons and daughters write a memoir called Vanished: The Incredible True Tale of a Father Who Literally Walked Into the Sunset. LITerally? Is life with God the same as nirvana?[5]

Let’s not be too hard on God. It’s only Genesis. He’s learning. He is not yet the loving cosmos with which we can now learn to meld, our human-and-divine consciousness smeared across deep space like nebulae. God, in his becoming, wanted to be a person, to become intimately part of the story and characters he had imagined into being, to make it work exactly how he planned it. There was no enlightenment yet: just God (King) and human (Subject). Perhaps Enoch sparked the divine imagination that would, a thousand or years down the road, understand that we can only have someone by letting go.

Closing prayer: Make me a squirrel, Lord. Let me walk in trees. Send me A Nut Man, please.