Noah and the Flood

Before I begin the bulk of my response, I have a confession to make-- I was raised Protestant, and a very theologically lax Protestant church at that (I know, horror of horrors.) Generally, this doesn’t have an effect on my life. However, this does mean that a lot of the emphasis that is put on the Virgin Mary is difficult for me to quite grasp. Logically, I understand the reasoning, and I’d like to think for the most part the theology. Anything further than that, though, I’ve just never found resonant. 

    So, of course, when faced with depictions of the Burning Bush as the Virgin, I do find myself coming up quite blank. I think I understood the discussion in today’s class, but that knowledge seems to be failing to make that last jump within me to actually make it make sense. 

    Having said all that, though, I’d actually like to talk about a story and concept that I have more familiarity with, that being the Flood story. Of course, I’m not going to pretend that I have all that sophisticated a knowledge of that story, as I’ve encountered it almost wholly as  something told to children in Sunday School. I’ve certainly never heard a sermon about it, and I think the entirety of my interaction with it since adolescence has been in a comparative religion, ‘look at all of these different flood stories!’ context. As such, it was quite illuminating for me to see this story in what I will very hesitantly call a more mature context. 

    Basically, I have been taught this story as something that is really quite simple-- Noah is told to build a boat, he does so, he herds all the animals on, it rains, he sends out the birds, and then once they’re on dry land God sends the rainbow and makes a promise and everything has a happy ending. There’s more to the Biblical story than that, of course-- certainly my childhood education never got as far as Ham seeing his father’s nakedness (Genesis 9:22 (I am ignoring the odd spellings that Douay-Rheims uses in favor of ones I’m more familiar with))-- but what really interested me was the way in which this story is treated in the York plays. 

    One of the more interesting aspects, I thought, was the inclusion of inner conflict (the deluge that will engulf everything notwithstanding, of course.) Noah’s wife has what really seems like a fairly reasonable objection to getting on the boat. She will miss her “co-mothers and [her] cousins both” (York Mystery Plays, The Flood, pg. 26, line 143), she does not believe that they are doing the right thing (Ibid., pg. 24, line 66)-- these are all reasonable, human reactions. Just as reasonable, in my mind, is her reaction once she understands that all of her friends who were not on the ark are dead, as she says that “My friends that I from yode / are over flowed with flood.” (Ibid., pg. 27, line 151) I don’t think I’ve ever seen any version of this story until now which has had anyone on the ark actively mourn for what has been destroyed, and I think it’s a very important detail. You can say, of course, that those who were destroyed were wicked, and that Noah and his family shouldn’t mourn for them, but to say that is to, I think, ignore real human feeling. The wife’s friends may have not been deemed savable by God, but they were still her friends, and her sorrow at losing them is a real, understandable, human feeling. 

    

    That, I think, is the most important aspect of these plays. They provide an avenue in which additional material can be added to these well-worn Biblical stories, and in doing so they provide an opportunity to create relatable situations and characters. We can say whatever we want in class about the Biblical story, the Grand Unified Story, being the story of the lives of medieval Christians and thus being immediately relatable to them-- but that doesn’t mean that having characters in plays who speak to each other like you might to your wife, or who are played by your neighbors, doesn’t make them more relatable. Ultimately, much of what we’ve been focusing on in class revolves around the Incarnation making all aspects of God more perceptible, or perceptible at all, to humanity. Populating plays with real people, as opposed to distant archetypes, makes the divine still more easily seen. 

    At the very least, I think, seeing this story in a play format has made it more easily comprehensible to me. Learning this story as a child, there is of course a severe lack of what could perhaps be termed human interest. Noah and his unnamed family, in the telling that I remember hearing, feel no emotion but obedience towards God, and gratitude when He sends his rainbow. This might match the Biblical account, sure, but it also makes for a fairly uninteresting story when told to a precocious six-year-old for what is but one of many, many times. It’s a good story, and accomplishes the goal of my Sunday School, sure, but it also didn’t really interest me. I can say, however, that reading the York cycle treatment of the Flood, that I was, at least, interested. And this, coming from someone who has lost most interest in religion that they may have once had, is certainly a step forwards. Populating plays with human characters or writing them in the vernacular may not be necessary to understanding or feeling the Biblical stories, but it also can’t hurt. 

                                                                                                                                                     --OK

 (PS: I can tell that the formatting of this has been greatly ...exploded when porting it over to the blog. I've tried to fix it, but I can't really tell what's happening. Apologies—[FIXED! RLFB])