The Leviathan and the Behemoth

As a child I thought there was just one creation story, and it worked like a familiar fairy tale:
“In the beginning, God...” must be the bible’s way of saying “Once upon a time....”
“God saw that it was good....” must be the bible’s way of saying “And they lived happily ever after.”
I loved fairy tales; I felt right at home.

And in between, there was a place for everything –
and everything was in its place.

There was a dome under the heavens, certain things that belonged there, and certain times that governed their belonging. The Sun belonged to that dome during day; the moon and stars belonged to that dome during night. And day or night, in the dome of the heavens belonged “every winged bird of every kind.”

There was dry land – and all the plants and animals that belonged to dry land.
There were seas – and all the fish and sea monsters belonged there.
A place for everything – and everything in its place.

This is what our mother told us about our toys. So it must be right.

How shocked I was to discover years later that there were two creation stories, the second right on the heels of the first, with a different ordering of things. The second creation story begins with the creation of man – and I do mean “man” – and ends with the creation of “woman,” “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh....”

The creation of “man” and “woman” bookend the creation of everything else, all of which happens in a Garden. So far so good, but nothing ends “happily ever after,” because there is a snake, who apparently hasn’t been made to crawl on its belly yet, but seduces the couple with the promise of knowledge of good and evil.

Things go downhill after that. I’m glad I didn’t run into that story until after I’d had the experiences both of seduction and of endings that were not quite “happily ever after.”

Still, I loved the image of a snake that hasn’t yet had to crawl upon its belly. If there’s room in a story for Satan before the Fall, walking around with a marble-handled walking stick, things can’t be all that bad.

Then, decades later, I ran head on into a third story of creation, which I had never recognized as a story of creation, because Satan is upright again, walking and talking. I had never recognized this as a story of creation, because it doesn’t begin with like a fairy tale, “Once upon a time....” It doesn’t even begin like a biblical fairy tale: “In the beginning....” Rather, Job begins with fire falling from heaven and consuming, with enemy tribes pouring over the horizon with bad intent, with boils and loathsome sores, with shunning neighbors and betraying friends.

The book of Job doesn’t usually surface in Sunday School education, and it’s probably a good thing. Sunday School purees the first two stories of creation together and serves them up like pabulum, the dull but steady diet of a world that is ordered and orderly, governed and governable, a creation that plays by the rules – and think it knows the rules to play by.

The book of Job presents the Other Side of creation, a creation that isn’t quite so tame.

The Satan – and in the book of Job Satan has some definition: a definite article in front of his name – Satan comes to God from walking to and fro on the earth, and up and down in it. And God, out of nowhere, poses a question: “Have you considered my servant Job?” The Satan counters with a question: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Things go downhill from there.

Stripped of his children (they were killed by the enemy tribes), of his servants and livestock (they were consumed by the fire falling from heaven), and suspected by even his friends of some secret sin, Job questions God: “Why me?” And God responds with the other side of the creation story:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements– surely you know!” (38:4-5)

The divine interrogation goes on, gaining strength, and it seems like Job is going to get mowed down by the Creation Machine, the last insult for someone who’s done no wrong.

But indeed, where is Job without his children, his servants, his property, and his health? Where is Job without his honor, his standing in the community? Job the Good Guy, who used to be able to do so much for so many people, is rendered useless, a broken toy. He who was once at the center has now been pushed out to a wild, untamed, ungoverned and ungovernable place: the edge of the city, the edges of civilization.

It’s fractured fairy tale at best, but here’s the wonderment -- there is, it seems, a lot of company out there. When you start to look at the list of things the Creation Machine has spewn out, you realize that a lot of them inhabit the fringes of an orderly life

There are wild animals, in particular, the wild ass, to whom God has given
“...the steppe for its home,
the salt land for its dwelling place.
It scorns the tumult of the city;
it does not hear the shouts of the driver.” (39:6-7)

You can tell by the description that God loves this wild thing; God loves its very wildness.


Then there’s the ostrich, which has wings, but does not fly. Its feathers serve
no purpose but beauty. It doesn’t even know how to take care of its young,

“because God has made it forget wisdom,
and given it no share in understanding.” (39:17)

This bird is useless, even as a parent.

And yet:
“...when it spreads its plumes aloft,
it laughs at the horse and its rider.” (39:18)

Indeed, an ostrich on the ground, flapping and flapping its plumes to get aloft, makes even the tamest horse rear. God’s just kind of tickled by that.

The last two creatures mentioned in this alternative story of creation are the Behemoth and the Leviathan. The Behemoth, probably a hippopotamus, violates all kinds of boundaries, living both on land an in water. Now think about it: you’d get a parking ticket for that kind of behavior from the first story of creation, which has carefully segregated animals that live on land from animals that live in air from animals that live in water. The Behemoth, it seems, breaks all the rules. The Behemoth eats whatever it wants, wherever it finds it, again against the rules of the first stories of creation. Humans beware – but to God, this creature is utterly magnificent.

The Leviathan is the Behemoth of the oceans:
“There is terror all around its teeth...
its sneezes flash forth light,
and its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.” (41:13-14, 18)

The Leviathan is the most monstrous of the sea monsters ....but wouldn’t you love to see those eyes. Like the Behemoth, the Leviathan is wild, chaotic, utterly ungovernable, completely useless to what we think is the human project.

But these creatures, all outside the cities, romping on the edges of the mountains, the seas, the borders of civilization, these creatures are all emphatically part of the divine project. In all their wildness and their sheer uselessness to the human project, God delights in them. Indeed, God loves them because they are wild; God loves them because they are useless. They serve no purpose but beauty.

Job in his isolation, his uselessness, and his suffering is not abandoned – not at all! Job has just joined The Wild Things. Suffering initiated Job into this wild and crazy tribe of trespassers, tricksters, and border-crossers. Because Job is part of this crowd, God delights in him too. Maybe, in him – especially. More important, God is there, beside Job, in sheer divine delight.

Well: you can see why the book of Job is swept under the carpet in most Sunday and synagogue school curricula – I mean, who would pick up their toys?! But by the time you get to adulthood and accumulated your share of broken toys, had some experience of death or suffering, plans not working out, relationships breaking, after you’ve traveled to another country and seen an infant die of bad water or a child with a cleft palate, you need a God who loves the “edges” – and lives there in solidarity.

Religion and Power: An Unholy Alliance

The Czech Republic ranks as the most secular country in the whole of Europe. It's easy to understand why. Its history demonstrates the unholy alliance between religion and power. For this part of the world in particular, religion rouses the memory of occupation.

The conquered veer away from the faith of the conqueror, and too many conquerors rolled through Bohemia. Bismarck observed: "Whoever controls Bohemia controls Europe." Many tried. The Bohemian nobility struggled against both the power and the religious sensibilities of Catholic representatives of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs. Twice, in 1419 and 1618, they met with Catholic legates from to discuss more equitable power-sharing. Twice, each side found the other intractable. The nobles protested in the only way left to them: they threw the ambassadors out the window, resulting in the fabled defenestrations of Prague.

Twice, the impact was disastrous. The first defenestration marked the beginnings of the Hussite Wars, named after a teacher at the prestigious Charles University theologian, restive against the growing wealth, power, and clerical privilege of the Roman Catholic Church. Martin may have regarded Jan Huss (d. 1415) as the "first reformer," but the Bohemian people revered him as a hero of Czech nationalism. He preserved the Czech language against the church's Latin and the imperial German. He elevated the status of the laity, demanding they receive both bread and wine of the sacred Eucharistic meal, where the Roman church reserved wine for the priests. He steadfastly protested ecclesiastical abuse: the sale of indulgences, the practice of secret clerical marriage, the growing wealth and power of the church as a whole. For his efforts, he was invited to a council of the Roman Church in Constance for theological discussion. Upon arrival, however, he was arrested, imprisoned, and burned at the stake as a heretic.

In the Old Town Square of Prague, a statue of Huss faces, not the church, but the Old Town Hall. Huss embodies Czech nationalism, not Czech religion.

The second defenestration marked the beginnings of the Thirty Years' War. After the decisive defeat of the Bohemian estates at the Battle of White Mountain, Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II had 27 Protestant leaders executed on the Old Town Square in 1621. There was a parallel imperial initiative on the religious front. The Habsburgs sent in the Jesuits to re-Catholicize Bohemia. They worked architecturally, installing huge, clunky Baroque altars in the delicate Gothic and Romanesque churches all over the city. It was a visual protest against the Reformation's emphasis on words, words that could be read in the people's language, words that could be spoken by everyone, Christ as the Word of God, not Ambassador of the Omnipotent God.

I finally found a Gothic church without a Baroque altar inside: it had been turned into an art gallery.

Maybe beauty is the only protest against power searching for sanction and against religion longing clout.

Krakow: A Lyrical City

“I don’t know what it means to call Krakow a ‘lyrical’ city,” a friend wrote on hearing my first impression of the city.

What does it mean to call a city “lyrical?”

More important, what does it mean to call this city “lyrical?”

The life of the city rotates around three circles. The first is a circle of royal power. Set on a hill and enclosed by red brick walls, the Wawel Castle and its surrounding structures were built over centuries in styles Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque. The stones tell the story of a succession of Polish kings and queens who ruled, died, and were buried here.

At the base of the Castle a circle of commerce spins in tight orbit. Like spokes on a wheel, all roads lead to the Grand Square, or Rynek Glowny, a hub of medieval trade routes that brought cloth and spices, salt and amber into the city center. Around 1300 a permanent roof was built over market stalls to become the Cloth Hall, arguably the world’s first shopping mall. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, effectively erasing the country from the map of Europe, Rynek Glowny became Adolf Hitlerplatz.

One road runs from the market square to a final circle: the circle that contained Krakow’s Jewish population, the Kazimierz. At the end of the 15th Century Jews were relocated to an area nestled in a curve of the Vistula River. A spirit of religious tolerance welcomed Jews from all over Europe to the Kazimierz. The population swelled; the arts flourished; banking brought wealth. In the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis emptied the circle, expelling Jews directly to nearby Auschwitz and Birkenau or temporarily resettling them in a ghetto on the other side of the river. The Nazis built the high walls around the ghetto to resemble tombstones.

Directions in Krakow never urge taking a “hard right” or a “hard left.” Instead, they advise bearing this way or that. But then, none of the streets in any of these circles meet at right angles: they bend into cathedrals or synagogues, market squares or the hard truth of the ghetto.

Today the city’s life revolves around three ancient circles of power and commerce and memory. In their daily rounds, these circles spin off songs of beauty and terror. If you listen closely amidst the rumble of trams and the squawking of tourists, you catch a few bars of haunting melody. It is always in a minor key. Beneath it all, the cantus firmus of an ancient chant, the Vistula flows steadily into the Baltic.

That’s what it means to call this city “lyrical.” Another friend got it immediately.
“Yes,” he responded.
“Wow….”

A first blessing....

The first day in another country overloads the senses. A jet-lagged body soaks in stimuli like a sponge: an omni-present odor of lemon grass in the hotel, people’s faces, puff jackets with hoods rimmed in fur, the raw edges of early spring, the cobbled streets, a profusion of Baroque, patterns of signage – and hopefully, the traffic patterns.

In Prague pedestrians have the right of way, but trams trump everything. “Pozor!” means look out – and should be taken seriously. Brown arrows with white letters point out historical monuments, but it takes a while to figure out which. At first pass, the Czech language looks like a jumble of consonants with lots of inflections and a predominance of v’s and j’s, z’s and c’s.

It’s a lot to take in. We walked enough to get down basic bearings. Then, jostled and over-stimulated, we repaired to the slower cadences of the St. Agnes Convent and Museum.

Royal blood coursed through the veins of Agnes of Bohemia (1211-1282), and her parents sought a marriage of advantage. Engaged first to Henry, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Agnes was packed off to imperial court, only to have that union thwarted by a local duke who wanted to wed his own daughter to the emperor’s son. Henry III of England emerged as a potential mate, but the emperor challenged the union. He wanted to wed Agnes himself.

At this point, Agnes intervened, choosing for herself a life of prayer. To safeguard the plan, she secured consent of the pope and land from her brother.

Along the Vltava River, her convent now houses a stunning collection of medieval religious panels and statuary, many devoted to Christ and his mother. In most of these, Christ is an infant, nestled in the arms of his mother and nursing at her breast. As Margaret Miles argues in A Complex Delight (University of California, 2008), early medieval religious art featured the infant Jesus, not the dying Christ. A nurturant mother, not a dying man, captured the medieval imagination.

Over and over again, in icons and statuary and paintings, we gazed on a child, latched onto the breast of his mother, nursing so eagerly we could almost hear him sucking. And on the face of the mother, a smile of infinite peace.

That smile blocked out the blast of the trams, the bustling of the streets, the riot of Baroque.

I held that smile with me for the rest of the visit: it was our first blessing.

When is a square not really a square....

Wencelaus Square is not really a square, but a long rectangle. At one end is the National Museum, a proud monument to Czech culture. At the other end is Na Prikope, a long sloping street. Once the former moat for the old city of Prague, the street encircles the old city with a string of temples to the gods of commerce, international corporations like Nike, Apple, H&M, Boss, Express.

This square which is not really a square is long enough for Soviet tanks to roll down in impressive array, as they did in 1968. This square which is not really a square is wide enough for the flames of Jan Palach’s self-immolation protesting the Soviet occupation to be seen at Na Prikope, the other end of the square. This square which is not really a square is vast enough to gather people, for whatever purpose they need to gather. In 1968 they demonstrated, ushering in the Prague Spring; in 1969 they watched silently, as a Prague winter descended; in 1989 they celebrated wildly, as Vaclav Havel, playwright not Soviet puppet, assumed the presidency. In 2015 they simply march from store to store, bags ever thicker with purchase.

A friend remarked: “The Communists were in power; they were all out for themselves. Now, the capitalists are in power; they too are all out for themselves. Nothing’s changed.”

But something has changed: capitalism will be harder to challenge. People wear the enemy on their feet; they march in shoes branded with swooshes. People write their screeds on computers bearing apples, the original fruit of temptation. Once a country filled with craftspeople, these former-craftspeople now work in a burgeoning “service economy,” importing their leather from Italy, their woolens from Bulgaria, and their woodcarving from Russia. Soon the Czech will import their glassware and crystal from -- Bangladesh?

A statue of King Wencelaus mutely surveys this latest occupation. Behind him is the Baroque façade of the National Museum, symbol of a culture that remains a political force more potent than weapons. After all, Jan Hus resisted Rome with the power of his preaching. Franz Kafka mocked in his fiction the very state he served as a functionary. Vaclav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, was a playwright. Preacher and playwrights, artists and writers: traditionally they’ve served as the shock troops of Bohemia.

Were Wencelaus to lead them, how would he wage his campaign? Interviewing activist-writer-intellectual Ivan Klima after Havel re-established Czech independence in 1989, Philip Roth observed the change between Soviet occupation and this new independence: “For you, nothing was allowed, but everything mattered. Now you’re more like us: everything is allowed, nothing matters.” (Ivan Klima, The Spirit of Prague, Granta Books: 1994).

Intentions: Steady Aim

A friend asked before I left: "Do you have any intentions for your trip?" I looked up blankly from our pizza. "That's OK: you don't really have to tell me."

I couldn't have; I didn't yet have words. But I knew I had intentions, and I knew the words would come.

Augustine wrote: "Solvitur ambulando -- it is solved by walking." No one can find out where, but if he didn't say it, he should have. The same insight could have come from someone else: Kierkegaard pacing the streets of Copenhagen. Kant crossing the bridges of Koenigsburg. Walter Benjamin savoring the streets of Paris as a flaneur. William Wordsworth braving the weather and the peaks of The Lake District. Post-modern hiker and peripapetic philosopher walks through the centuries with each of them in her history of walking, "Wanderlust" (Penguin, 2000).

I'd get some language for my intentions along the way.

An archer bends the bow back to propel an arrow forward; she exerts force in one direction to make something move in the opposite direction. Pilgrimage has a similar physics. Pilgrims walk toward something, but to get there they have to leave something else -- and some ones else -- behind.

I knew I was walking away from some things and toward others. Getting on the plane for Madrid, my biggest intention was to find out which was which.

My body told me. Whatever I carried in my pack registered on the soles of my feet. I paid attention to everything in my pack, re-packing to shift weight, downsizing to leave behind things that got in the way. In similar fashion, whatever I carried I carried in my heart registered in my consciousness. The long stretches across the Cantabrian Mountains, where there was nothing to do but think -- and keep climbing. I paid attention to everything that rented space in my head, discarding what I didn't need and what I did, shifting weight to allow things their proper importance. Sole-care became soul-care. That's part of the point of pilgrimage.

"Teach us to care
And not to care.
Teach us to sit still."

Pilgrimage is a good instructor, teaching the pilgrim to care and not to care -- or at least to be aware of what the cares are. In the same feat of contrary motion that the archer summons, walking allows the pilgrim to sit still.

Where Pilgrimage Begins: With a Place -- or a Person?

The question always comes: Where did you begin the pilgrimage? There are lots of answers, none of them easy.

Mostly, people want a place, something they can locate on a map. This most recent pilgrimage began in Oviedo, the seat of Alfonso the Chaste's (d. 842) ninth century kingdom of Asturias on the northern coast of Spain. Word came to him that the bones of St. James had been discovered in Galicia, and he resolved to pay homage. His entourage headed west, traversing the ruggedly beautiful Cantabrian Mountains. He carved out the first of the pilgrimage trails to Santiago, the Camino Primitivo. We followed roughly that route, leaving Oviedo on July 6th and arriving in Santiago on July 20th. Where did you begin? One answer: the pilgrimage started in Oviedo. But that's not quite true.

I could also give my street address in Minneapolis, where I locked the door, shouldered my backpack, and hiked to the light rail for a trip to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Stepping across the threshold ended the long period of preparation: breaking in boots and shoes, getting used to carrying weight, packing, re-packing, endless winnowing gear down to the absolute essentials. Turning the key in the lock meant preparation was over; pilgrimage commenced. Where did you begin? Another answer: the pilgrimage started in Minneapolis.

I could also give the name of our pension in Oviedo, Hostal Alvarez, because we spent a few days touring the old city, sampling the local hard ciders at quaint siderias, dining with friends, and seeing the sights. I wasn't geared up then, but decked out in the red dress that said: "I'm a tourist" and the shoes that moved with ease from nice restaurants to hostel showers. When I snapped that dress into its zipper-locked plastic bag and put on my boots, I transformed from tourist to pilgrim. Where did you begin? Another answer: The pilgrimage started at the Hostal Alvarez in Oviedo.

Medieval pilgrims on the Camino Primitivo began here, prostrated in front of this status of Jesus in Oviedo's Church of San Salvador in Oviedo. As other routes to Santiago de Compostela developed across the Iberian Peninsula, continental Europe, even the British Isles and Scandinavia, this statue came to have unique significance. An aphorism captured it all:

The pilgrim who visits Santiago and not El Salvador,
pays homage to the servant -- but not the master.

Pilgrims would often make the difficult detour to Oviedo to prostrate themselves in front of this status in Oviedo. Where did you begin? For these hearty pilgrims, it started with a person.