GroshLink

As my parents travel across the state to join us, I am reminded that I do not live alone. I am not of my own origin and I do not live in my own world . . . in contrast to those who would seek to spin their own worlds into existence, I have become convinced to embrace and be thankful for where and among whom I have been placed. Many intellectuals find a corner and consider the world on their own, good thought can come from silent, internal reflections (such as what I'm engaged in now), but we need to be imbedded and in dialogue with a godly community which encourages, guides, shapes, and sharpens us. Otherwise, danger ahead! It is not good for me/us to be alone and find our own path.

Can we go a step further? Might there be more here than analogy? Would the being-with of mankind be necessary for him to be able to respond to God as a quasi-son to his Father? This we have the right to suppose . . . It is not good for mankind to be alone on the earth, beacuse it would be fatal for him to be alone, without God, amongst the creatures. Immediately we can see the perversity of the androgyne myth; by conferring on the same individual the attributes of both sexes, it expresses the ideal of self-sufficient solitude, it rejects the duty towards one's neighbour that God has inscribed within in mankind, and thereby it rejects the duty towards the Creator that neighbour-love both reflects and honours.

Why, however, should there be the difference between the man and the woman, and not simply the distinction between one person and another? Sexuality is certainly not necessary to being-with. True enough, but it necessitates being-with. The fact that the first company given by God to man in order to break his solitude was of the other sex reminds us that God does not insitute an abstract otherness. He gives a 'neighbour' and not merely an 'other.' He gives a concretely qualified presence, in the order he has decreed and not in abstraction. And the 'neighbourship' which is defined within God's order by sexual differentiation is of a most radical nature; every human individual, being either masculine or feminine, must abandon the illusion of being alone. The constitution of each of us is a summons to community. Genesis throws light on this privileged relationship.

Taken from p.97 of In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis by Henri Blocher.