ALIVE: Chapter Four - Little Gods v. Nature

Chapter 4 - Little Gods in Nature

 Reproduction is key to life. One plus one becomes three. Grieving childless Adam bestowed upon receptive Eve another of his seeds and out popped Seth, who knew no brothers for a long time.

Year after year Eve hoped that her invisible beloved son, Able in Hades would visit her like invisible God had so often, but the empty silence lingered like an unwelcome guest. Only her memories of the carefree child who played with his frolicking lambs in the sunshine kept the memory of Abel alive in her heart. Baby Seth kept Eve busy with his childish antics, and soon she heard herself laugh again. It had been a very long time since laughter had welled up within her.

To bury the tragedy deeper in time, Adam and Eve made more children together. When other sons and daughters were born to Adam and Eve, they told their new crop of children about the murder of Abel and that killing one's brother was the worst thing a child of God could do to his or her own soul. The wiser family never visited Cain in Nod. Adam tilled Able's blood deeper into the earth every spring; eventually the soil produced a fragrant patch of thyme. Eve saw that as a message of love and compassion from dear Abel. No one disagreed with her.  

Eve taught her children that God made her to be like Him, and that she could call for Him out loud; He would hear her and sometimes speak. Adam told their children that God was his father and their grandfather. God spoke less. Seth and his brothers and sisters sensed that they were being protected by an invisible, but all-powerful God, who was their grandfather, and whom they didn't comprehend. No one else was murdered. Neither did anyone give offerings to God again, not fruit and vegetables, and not lambs. God didn’t ask, and the parents didn’t offer either. It would be too risky. Instead, they worked to grow food and ate it, and slept when the sun went down, and woke up at sunrise in a steady cycle of time we call Life.

The second family of Adam and Eve was a peaceful family. They were creative, generous and very intelligent. Adam and his sons made tools to help them with their farming and to help them make shelters that separated them from the animals and that gave them shade in places where trees did not grow. He taught his children what he named everything. Eve and her daughters composed songs and made clothing out of lamb’s fur and cotton balls. They were happy and showed it by singing and dancing together.

After thousands of suns and moons appeared and disappeared the children grew tall and strong in mature bodies that resembled their parents. More children were born from those young adults and no one ever died, until one day Adam, when he was 930 years old, laid down in the field to rest and never again moved or breathed.

Eve spotted Adam's body while on a walk to gather flowers. She took a good long look at him and shook him to wake up. Adam didn't move. He appeared to be dead like Abel, only without the blood all over him. Eve was astonished and screamed. Then she cried. She wondered if Adam had gone to find Abel. She called out to God to ask where Adam had gone. No reply.

In her grief, Eve remembered the day when Adam told her not to eat from the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. He warned her then that she would die. But she didn't know what death meant, and she still didn't understand death. That was over 900 years ago. Eve had not, since the murder of Abel, seen another dead person. Adam was the first natural death that she had witnessed and she didn't expect it. Eve didn't know how this happened and where Adam went. She moaned; she wept; she cried. She cried out to God to come and talk to her and tell her what happened to Adam. Adam's skin turned blue and stiff. God didn’t come back to comfort her. Why not?

Seth heard his mother screaming and crying and rushed over to her. He saw his stiff father and looked away. Instead, he tried to console his mother, but he was afraid too. His brothers and sisters ran up to Seth and Eve to ask what had happened. Then they looked down at Adam's lifeless body and gasped. Each of them gasped, one after the other gasped in a symphony of horror at the stiff body of their father. Why couldn’t he talk or laugh? They heard about Abel’s death, but they never saw him being dead.  Flowers fade and die, mice die, lambs die, but people? People are never supposed to die.

Eve remembered that Adam and Cain planted Abel in the earth and so she told her sons to go over to Abel's marked grave and dig another beside it so Adam could lay deep in the earth beside his son. After they buried Adam, Eve hiked up her favorite small mountain where she often went to think about her life, or her children, and about the days when they lived in Eden. When she arrived at the summit, she found her favorite rock and sat upon it and wept alone some more. She called out again, begging God to come to visit her. It had been so long since He spoke to her. She wondered if death meant not being able to talk to God or hear Him speak to her. At that moment, in her anguish, Eve regretted listening to the serpent more than ever. She hated it!

Soon, the familiar cool breeze swept across Eve's tear-stained face. "My daughter," said God. Eve perked up. She heard His familiar voice say, “Don't despair. You will soon be with Adam. I never wanted you to know death, how I wanted to shield you from the corrosive power of sin."

"I wanted to be wise like You, my Lord." she replied defensively. "Please take me to Adam now. I want to be with him." She was comforted by talking with the Lord and hoped He would not leave her again.

"First you must return to your children and make sure that they know who I AM. Just as you and Adam were made in My image so were your children and grandchildren be until the end of time. Let them know that human life only flows from Me. Will you do this? Then you may rejoin Adam and Abel beneath the earth and in Hades."

"Lord, I don't know what it means to be made in your image? I can't see You, I can only feel Your presence. What does Your image look like?"

The Lord God had compassion on Eve in her ignorance, and answered, "Eve, look around you at all that I have created and by my Creation you can tell Me who I am."

Eve looked up at the horizon, at the moon rising, and to her left and right as far as she could see, then she looked at the valley below and saw cattle grazing. She saw chimpanzees swinging from limb to limb in the nearby woods. She saw orchards of fig and olive trees. Then she looked down at the lavender, pink and white wildflowers of different shapes and sizes blanketing the earth and little chameleons scurrying busily between them. Soaking in the grandeur of all the life forms, and of sculptured rocks and refreshing water, she finally looked toward God's voice and said, "You are amazing! Did you really create all of this before You created my Adam and me?"

She felt God smile. Then she added, "I see that You are brilliant and sensitive, creative and artistic."

God replied, "As are you and your children, My dear one. Tell them to use the gifts that I have given to humankind wisely. It is a big responsibility to be endowed with so much. Remember, whatever you do, your children into the generations will have to live with it, for the better or for the worse. More than what you see, my child, I have placed My Kingdom in your heart. Live there in peace and honor Me, and we can be together forever. You can only die once, but you can be born three times!"

Three times? Eve didn’t ask about that strange answer. Instead, she said, "What is there left to create my Lord? You have given us everything!"

Eve heard a little chuckle from God.

"I have only given you the foundation, the building blocks; tell your children to go and build your human world on this earth, made by your own intelligent and creative minds, and more importantly, fill your world with love, tolerance and forgiveness, with goodness and honesty, then I will come to visit and be proud of you. Don’t allow that serpent and its kind destroy your world. Remember that you are stronger and smarter than it. Above all, teach your children to trust Me, and be patient."

Just as suddenly as He arrived at her calling, Eve felt the spirit of the Lord vanish. She wondered where He went.

Strengthened and composed, Eve descended the mountain to carry out her mission. She called her children together and told them that she too would soon die as their father had, and she told them everything that God wanted them to know. She hoped that they would remember and be as kind and compassionate to each other as God and Adam had been to her.

Eve felt ambivalent about dying. She wanted desperately to be with Adam and Abel no matter where they were, but she didn't want to leave her children, and her garden. She was frightened to live under the earth where the sun did not shine and there was no air to breathe. She couldn’t imagine what Hades would be like without her body that was buried in the ground.

***

Over in Nod, Cain and his hairy wife gave birth to Enoch and several other children. The children of Cain were as handsome and bright as Cain. They were not hairy and dull-witted like their mother. Farley grew proud of the looks of her unique husband and their children. She no longer thought hairless Cain was ugly. Their children were more industrious and creative than any other children in the land of Nod. Farley was proud of that.

After many years of living in Nod and being ridiculed for his smooth skin, Cain took his large family and left to build a city of his own. He named it Enoch after his first-born son. They built a wall around the city. Outside the city of homes, were the pastures, caves, and stalls to contain the animals that worked so hard in the fields.

Cain and Farley took all their food stores and cattle to Enoch. There, Cain taught his children to invoke the name of the Lord God. He had to explain to his children why he lived so far away from his own parents. Cain confessed his jealousy and ego and how that hurt him, his parents, and God very much. And he also proudly told them that God, his invisible grandfather, created the earth with all its beauty and variety.  Cain remembered how kind God was to give him the mark of protection. Indeed, many times since he left home Cain felt the power of that mark keeping him from being killed.

Cain’s story also explained to them why they were not hairy and why they were so much smarter and different than everyone else in Nod.   

When his children became adults, Cain decided to take many of his sons and daughters to the land of his birth to choose wives and husbands from the children of his parents so his grandchildren would be smooth-skinned and industrious too.

After several days’ journey they arrived at the village of Cain’s birth. He recognized no one there. His children were shocked to see men and women that looked like them without hairy bodies. Cain asked for the head of the family and was soon introduced to his brother Seth.

When the brothers stood face-to-Face, they were at first silent, soaking in the shock of being together. They studied each other’s features, and made expressions of friendliness to each other, mostly for the sake of their children. Seth tried hard to not remember that Cain killed his other brother.

Seth’s family had been very curious about their Uncle Cain. They heard about the murder, which was why he lived so far from them, but they found him to be kind and jovial. They thought he must have changed in the last hundreds of years.

When Cain asked about his parents, Seth told Cain that neither Adam nor Eve were alive, and that they had been planted in the earth next to his brother Abel. Cain was angry and asked who killed them? He did not that a smooth skinned person would die for any reason but to be killed, although hairy people in Nod died, either by being killed or in accidents, or just stopped.  Seth assured him that their parents naturally grew tired and slept and then they were no more. They explained to Cain that Eve had told her sons to plant Adam in the earth, and then to plant herself beside him. Cain wept. It was like a second death to have left his mother and father, and then to have them leave him.

As time went by the sons of Cain returned to Enoch with the daughters of Seth and other cousins.  Cain and the granddaughters of Eve told Farley what the Lord God said about being made in the image of the Creator of the earth and all that is on it, and all that swims in the seas of it, and all that flies over it. Cain recalled a very faint memory of his father telling him the same thing when he was a child and he was happy that the family’s history spread through the generations.