[John Riley]

In Genesis 22 it’s clear Issac didn’t have an opinion because he didn’t know what was happening. He even tells his dad here’s the fire and here’s the wood but where is the goat? It was never a challenge to him. Maybe he needed some therapy afterward but it doesn’t play a part in what happens.

The point of my comment, as in the previous one, where I clutched my pearls, is to point out what doesn’t work in the poem. I’ve done countless times before and have had it done for mine. When you take on a poem on such a huge topic, one with centuries of thought and speculation, it has to be very good and thematically tight. As everyone has said, this one isn’t there yet, regardless of intentions. That is the most helpful thing we can say

[David Callin]

These are deep, deep waters, Glenn. You've stirred them up, but they remain - to me - fairly murky. This is not your fault. It's just such a puzzling source.

Kudos for taking on the big subjects. It occurs to me to wonder what Milton made of the episode. I assume he must have covered it at some point. Perhaps I'll look into that.

Cheers

David

[Yves S L]

Hello Glenn,

Even if you were to accept Biblical descriptions as being full and useful descriptions of God, the basic and persistent theological error is that humans think they can know the mind of God, when even a dog does not know the mind of its owner.

Forgetting all that, though, the main problem is that this is not even a good sermon. What journey have you took the reader on? Ask the question, ask the question, ask the question, raise the stakes, raise the stakes, raise the stakes, and then what, repeat some stuff that other people have already said?

Yeah!

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, David—

Wilfred Owen wrote “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” about the binding of Isaac. He saw the story as an allegory of the slaughter of a generation of young men in WWI. In his version, Abraham ignores the angel and kills Isaac. Considering the current state of affairs in the Middle East and elsewhere, the story and Owens’ poem have contemporary resonance.

[David Callin]

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

Hi, David—

Wilfred Owen wrote “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” about the binding of Isaac. He saw the story as an allegory of the slaughter of a generation of young men in WWI. In his version, Abraham ignores the angel and kills Isaac. Considering the current state of affairs in the Middle East and elsewhere, the story and Owens’ poem have contemporary resonance.

I thought I'd read another treatment of this recently! Thanks Glenn. I'll have a look at that.

Cheers

David

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Yves—

I think it’s a mistake not to raise questions that don’t have easy answers. The alternatives are:
1. to bury one’s head in the sand and not contemplate difficult questions, or
2. to offer a glib oversimplification that can be printed on a bumper sticker and offered as truth.
I never promised a sermon. I’m a poet, not a theologian. But I would ask you to consider that if God doesn’t want us to try to know Him and have a relationship with Him, then what the hell is He good for? BTW, my dog knows my mind and heart better than many of my human friends.

[Yves S L]

Hello Glenn,

What is the creator/source of the universe good for? The question is anthropomorphic (assumes the mind of God is similar to what a human could grasp), and absurd (you have been given life) and self-centred (what is in it for me?).

You are missing the points. I said that it is not even a good sermon, because it does not even meet the standards of being put together rhetorically.
Rhetorically, it is unlikely that you are going to create an emotional heightening greater than what is inherent in the situation described in the story by merely repeating the question and emphasising certain details.

The questions are implicit in the tensions of the story itself: the story is itself a challenge. Your approach is a kind of poetic dead end, turning the poem into not particularly well constructed prose responding to to a well known passage in the Bible.

So the story about your dog is saying what? You think you can know the mind and heart of God? Well, if you keep that assumption, and you also assume the biblical descriptions of God are complete and accurate, and you also have a problem with what God is depicted to be doing , then you will simply have a contradiction that you can never resolve, creating turmoil.

Simple challenge: let us see if your dog build his own doghouse, before humans build their own universe. At the moment, humans are not capable of building harmonious and peaceful societies that last.

A poet can not give up the responsibility of grasping a topic, just for the purpose of doing emotional plays in iambic pentameter.

Yeah!

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Glenn,

The poem isn’t really working for me, I’m afraid. Not because I have any nitpicking about the accuracy of your reading of the sources, or the theological questions the poem may or may not throw up, but because you don’t do anything to make me care about the protagonists of the myth as emotionally rounded people. For me, as an atheist reader, the poem is describing events that almost certainly never actually happened, just as much as a poem about Persephone descending into Hades would be. But I would more than gladly be drawn into that hypothetical poem and engage with any thematic resonance it might have, just as I would with this one, if I cared about the situation because I was captured by the language. But this poem does little more than give a bare bones, prose-like retelling of the story, while throwing in lots of rhetorical questions. My reaction to the questions is simply to shrug. I don’t care about the questions because you haven’t made me care about the people or the scenario. The poem seems to take for granted that the reader will care, simply because it is dealing with such a well-known, foundational piece of scripture. It is letting the weight and portentousness of that familiar dramatic story do its work for it, without adding any…well, poetry of its own. Stringing it together with rhyme and metre isn’t enough.

[Roger Slater]

What Mark said. The poem seems to be based on the idea that the questions it asks are not perfectly obvious questions that everyone who has ever heard the biblical tale has invariably asked, without needing to be prompted by an insightful poet to wonder about. Do we need a poet to get us wondering how a supposedly good father could be so easily persuaded to kill his son? It's as if the poem is assuming that we never gave it a second thought until the poet, having thought about it more deeply and individually than the rest of us, pointed out the oddity of such a thing. It's like the poem is designed to get us thinking about something we've already thought about, and in that way it's talking down to us. If it were done with dazzling writing, or humor, or some sort of personal subtext that would explain why the poet is pondering these questions at this particular time, the obviousness of its questions would not be a problem, but for me it's a problem as it stands. And it doesn't help that you announce a "moral" at the end which isn't a moral at all, since it doesn't emerge from anything the poem says (God's son isn't mentioned in the poem, and prefiguring does not constitute a moral).

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Yves, Mark, and Roger—

It seems that there is something in the poem to which all three of you had a similar negative reaction. Yves, you seem to think I am belaboring the obvious or trying to claim profundity for something that is self-evident. Mark, you are put off by my inability to make the characters compelling and by what you hear as moralizing at the end. Roger, you are picking up a condescending tone of “talking down” to you. All three of you hear an obnoxious pretentiousness in the tone. I am trying to figure out if the source of this problem is in the subject material, the tone, or something else? In any case, it doesn’t appear to be fixable. All three of you registered strong dislike of the poem, but were unable to provide specific suggestions for improvement. I approached the subject matter trying to deconstruct what I naively assumed was the universally held view that Abraham was to be understood as a heroic model of virtue and faith. I thought that questioning that assumption was worth poetic consideration. Apparently not. Back to the drawing board.
BTW, Yves, I’m just wondering what tone of voice you want us to hear when we read your trademark “Yeah!” At the end of each post. Is it meant to be encouraging? Scorekeeping? Self-congratulatory?