Abel, Dying

Genesis 4:10

The Lord said, “…Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

I am dying.

Death comes. Unaware I walked, my brother at my back, walking towards the field, pain suddenly intruding, uncomprehending, for a moment stunned, fading, fallen, a strange pulsing in my ears, my eyes still open, regarding the sky, then a face, mirthless but smiling, hate-filled eyes, cold satisfaction mixed with confusion, withdrawn into himself, holding my gaze for a moment then looking away, the stone dropped.

Lord, keep my mind for you now, in this perishing, as my memories flow over and against each other collect my coherency, let me consider and think, that I may honor you even here in my death, for death is ours, death is mine and Cain’s and the world’s, an inheritance we all possess, and to die is my preparation.

Remember, O heart, in your pain, remember the lessons of death, that which death speaks to you, remember it and speak to God! O Lord, death upon me is terrifying!

O Lord, this life escapes from me, flowing out the blood which contains it, and in my dying there is helplessness, an ending, a seeming finality that I cannot stop, cannot control. Well did you curse men when you gave us death, that uncontrollable consumer, me the first of all men to experience it, for it chases us down and we cannot escape.

I remember the first time I saw it. Certainly death has been present in the earth since that day, since the day of cursing, but my parents sheltered me from it for many years, the days of my growth when in the artificiality of our household (artificial in the contrast with the wildness of what surrounded us) my parents shielded me from the chaos of the world. But they told me of it, the power of it, the inevitability of it, teaching me the lessons of the brokenness that would be mine. When my father judged the time was right I saw it, going with him to the flocks, walking with him through the hills as we guarded the ewes from that which stalked them.

Then one night, I heard the cry, strangely childlike, of the distress. My father, already awake, shook me, telling me to hurry, urging me to come with him, and we ran in the dark, guided only by our ears. When we found her, the lion still stood, a confrontation unexpected, at least by me, though my father must have known it. By the dimness of coming dawn, and the remaining brightness of the moon, the scene was gray, colorless, the blood from the ewe a darkness on unmarked white, the menace of the lion stilled for a moment, the cries ceasing, my father with his staff wary but fierce, my heart seized by a terrible fear.

So brief was this moment but its memory was still strong, for the emotion stamped it upon me, the surging of my fear, that sudden uncertainty (for fear comes only when the outcome is obscure) of safety, the lion before me a coiled danger, and I knew that I was fragile, flesh, vulnerable. O this was a newness! What did I know of mortality then, when I knew of no death, no end? But now I feared the ending of my life, my heart clung to it, for the soul knows nothing but itself, comprehends nothing but itself, and death that terrible nothing, that swallower, what is it to the ignorant man? It is fear, it is emptiness, it is an overcoming, it is terror. Non-being, a horror in its nothingness, confronts us in death, whatever scale it is on.

The lion, startled by our appearance, fled. My father bid me pick up the ewe, so I gathered the body into my arms, a motionless thing. I looked at my father and he was crying, his head bowed. What is this, I thought, what sadness, what mourning? My father’s face in the grayness of that morning was perhaps as memorable as anything else that passed, for on it was edged the deep sorrow of things lost, the death speaking to him with a clarity, that what was hinted at in my experience was to him a full story. For a long moment we remained there still, my arms cradling the deadness, my father walking in the past, remembering. Then he spoke.

He spoke of the words that had passed between him and God on that day many years ago, though not so many years really, as we reckon it now, though father said the days then were different, that they changed without changing, the way the grass grew without growing, and the animals existed together in unity (to him, these were all interconnected, though my mind struggled to see them this way). Lost in the memories, he spoke, though much of what he said was past comprehension, his words grasped and reached beyond me and into me, the world of old a mysterious place. But what emerged came out with a sufficient clarity, the tree sacramentally set forth for his obedience, the spoken word of God, this mysterious choiceness of our creation, that man in his image was choiced, and here the fruit, here the tempting, here the choice. Yes, God said, eat of it and die, and he ate.

O Lord, death is this world, death, and now I too die!

But, O Lord, (this word a beautiful word), but in the mystery of death, in the covenant you made with him, there was no provision for mercy, no extension outwards absolutely promised, no promise at all, though no guarantees in the other direction either. Why this persistence, why this broken world? That convenant spoke nothing of it, which is why my father fled from you, fled from the terror of your presence in the breaking of it, anticipating if anything that the word you spoke would come to pass. Lord, you spoke death for the breaking of it, and thus death must come, but Adam (man) yet lives, and continues, and perpetuates.

Thus in his weeping, even as he spoke of this decay, this world getting worse (did he see this new horror?), he spoke also of the promise, the promise to be waited for. This also was wrapped in shadow, in the dimness of past, but in itself clear enough to look ahead to, as all promises must be, containing that which the future holds out to us, and what can we live on if the future does not speak to us? I also am a man of the future, looking to what is ahead, that promise to be waited for, speaking of death also, containing death, shown in the robes my father was presented with, the robes that still cover over the nakedness of my parents, the robes of his shock when he saw death for the first time, death at the hands of God, this new thing, a ceasing. God did it, God spoke it, and in the promise also speaking, speaking his words as possessed not heard.

Yes, hear this world, the promise is wrapped up in death, the crushing of the head, the offspring of the woman. This world is not ours, O Cain, O Cain, why did you not tend the flocks with me, or take at least from me the gift with which to please the one under whose hand we are for these short moments endured? O Cain, you choosing your plants, your fruits, the labor of your hands, the sweat of your brow watering them, this labor a sign of the brokenness of the earth according to the word of our father, the Word once spoken, not a place to be controlled, no place to receive life from. O Cain, we cannot control this land, though in your pride you sought to, that sacrifice no sacrifice but the works offered, as if anything but his mercy would suffice, when he holds back from us the death that will come!

No, I die here Cain! I righteous in the approval of my sacrifice, learned from the one who was pleased in it, learned from the memory of my father’s robes, learned from the death all the world shudders under. You and I the same but called forth differently by this promise, you in the scowl of your works and pride, I in the brokenness of the seeing heart. I see death and mourn, but you triumph over it! Strange then that my sacrifice should be death and yours an attempt to control life. Yet in his speaking God chose mine, and you, bitter man, you broke with the power of your arm my life, and now I die.

Lord, this is the pathway of it, a sudden turn, that I, approved and loved, and he, rejected and unloved, should find ourselves here. I, tough loved, die, and he, unloved in his idolatry, is master. See this, and know that the jealous heart cries out, my blood a sign of it. For what do we make of a love that allows itself to be so trampled? Death is a mystery, but you in your dispelling power have set forth the light to guide us in it, and in this guided path I found my death! O Lord, this justice already threatened but the promise guaranteeing it, so my blood stands outside this promise, for the promise is surely a shielding promise, giving to my parents their covering when in the inadequacy of their leaves they were exposed. What shield was it to me here in this field when Cain’s hand destroyed me? Lord, I am the father of all who will trust in these promises, but what will my blood say to them? Let it cry out, then, let it cry out to you, that they may be comforted, that your promise may be a fit shield for those that like I seek in it the death shelter from the death that surrounds them, though they too die. In death, the promise shields from death, a dying man speaking justice, and a new hope for a new world, where justice lives and is, blood being my life, and the morning ever dawning.