N A CORNER OF THE great Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy, hangs a painting long darkened by the effects of time. A young boy is smashed against a rock, his face and body screaming in fear. A man, much older than he, is struggling to hold him down, with the veins bulging in the boy's arms. The man wields a knife while an angel and a ram wait in the background.
It's a scene I've witnessed countless times in the Bible stories of my early childhood. And although the Bible story itself is dramatic, the accounts I heard were always told in a quiet manner, accompanied by solemn pictures of Abraham and Isaac at the altar. Even the Bible itself seems hesitant to describe fully the heart-wrenching angst involved in sacrificing one's beloved child. Thus I grew up with an Abraham of ultimate composure and a valiant Isaac who graciously bowed to death.
Yet in Italy, where artists have left their legacies of unshielded emotion and unsubdued nonfiction, the illustrations tell a different story. Abraham and Isaac are neither somber nor silent. They are weeping unabashedly, and they are afraid. They are human, enduring the greatest test of their lives.
It was at this very image of Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Isaac that I stood in both terror and reverence, silently rereading the story of reluctant courage and ultimate faith.
It's tragic that once we become familiarized with something, it ceases to be three-dimensional. Biographies become myths, and people become aggrandized characters. Growing up, I was inundated with Bible stories from home and church. And it was only a matter of time before their tales became a distant fiction of heroes that stood alongside my volumes of Disney fairy tales. It was only when I was forced to look beyond the repetition of the polished illustrations and the edited words that I was able to recognize the true spirit beneath the facade of legend.
In time, everything becomes a story. Even the people around us. They become characters we use to entertain and conveniently inspire. We have heard, seen, and touched them so often that we fail to notice anything beyond their familiar profiles. In time, those surrounding us become a caricature of what is easiest and most effective. Missing are the levels beyond the surface.
knew few details about my grandmother's life. I knew that she had been a single mother, raising my mother on her own, working in a candy store to support her only child. She prayed fervently each morning before getting up to mow the lawn or prune the trees. Since she never finished high school, I felt as if I couldn't talk to her about much more than mending clothes and cooking. There were interesting stories she mumbled once in a while, about wars and absent husbands, but her cultural stoicism and my disinterest kept me from knowing her any further.
Then on Thanksgiving 1998 I overheard her telling her sister about her attempted suicide. After her husband had abandoned her for another woman, she had lost all hope. Her education was scanty, and her financial options were grim. Wishing to leave a world that defined a woman's worth by the success of her marriage, she consumed a toxic substance and waited to die. But Providence intervened, and gave her only a weak stomach in exchange for her attempt.
That night my grandmother, whose story I had always dismissed as one-dimensional, took on a reality that I had never before understood. She was the woman wronged by her husband. She had strapped my mother to her back to crawl through tunnels and climb mountains in order to escape the Korean War. She had rescued my own family by moving in with us when my parents divorced. That evening I witnessed a rare episode when my grandmother cried-not for her troubles, but in gratitude for the blessings God has given to her.
he Bible is not a book about fantastic people conquering monumental trials and tribulations. It is a book about ordinary humans conquering monumental trials and tribulations. This is what makes the Bible amazing, the fact that it's a testament to true faith, not a mythology of demigods and demigoddesses.
In the same way that we must break away from this level of suspended belief when it comes to the Bible, we should also see each other with the same amount of clarity and truth. It's when we realize the human vulnerability within that our stories of survival and faith become more powerful.
Today I talk with my grandmother often, and about topics beyond gardening and cooking. She tells me about her life, and I'm learning of her faith. Although I have lived with her my entire life, I feel as if I am getting to know a new person-someone much weaker than I'd imagined, yet someone much stronger than I ever could have conceived.
In many ways I am rereading her story. And in some ways I am reinterpreting (you might even say reviving) Isaac.
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E. G. Yun is a pseudonym.
N A CORNER OF THE great Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy, hangs a painting long darkened by the effects of time. A young boy is smashed against a rock, his face and body screaming in fear. A man, much older than he, is struggling to hold him down, with the veins bulging in the boy's arms. The man wields a knife while an angel and a ram wait in the background.
It's tragic that once we become familiarized with something, it ceases to be three-dimensional. Biographies become myths, and people become aggrandized characters. Growing up, I was inundated with Bible stories from home and church. And it was only a matter of time before their tales became a distant fiction of heroes that stood alongside my volumes of Disney fairy tales. It was only when I was forced to look beyond the repetition of the polished illustrations and the edited words that I was able to recognize the true spirit beneath the facade of legend.
he Bible is not a book about fantastic people conquering monumental trials and tribulations. It is a book about ordinary humans conquering monumental trials and tribulations. This is what makes the Bible amazing, the fact that it's a testament to true faith, not a mythology of demigods and demigoddesses.
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