Not My Words: And God Said, Let There Be Marshes

Palmetto Island, Florida

I grew up in Florida surrounded by swamps, marshes, and estuaries. However much time I spend in the mountains, these grey areas between land and sea are home to me. Maybe it is because of this that I was so struck by Austen Hartke's reflection on the biblical creation poem in Genesis. The following words are his, discovered in a recent book club read. I leave them here, without comment, for you to ponder in your heart.  

"For a kid who liked order and organization, the story of creation in Genesis 1 was just about perfect. There was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. This kind of structure was something that I appreciated up until my teen years, when I began to get a better sense of the way life sometimes fell outside black-and-white boundaries. Biologically, I learned that the world isn't separated distinctly into land or sea; there are also marshes, estuaries, and coral reefs...These binaries are not meant to speak to all of reality -- they invite us into thinking about everything between and beyond... 

Instead of asking the text to define and label all that is, we can ask God to speak into the space between the words, between the biblical times and our time, and between categories we see as opposite." -- Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians (2018)

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