How slow is my tedious groping through Genesis. Seemingly the most obvious words begin to loom like sleeping giants waiting to overwhelm my understanding. My problem as a Greek Orthodox is that I am to take literally the meaning of those words. Interpretation even for the church trained theologians is geared towards enlightenment and appreciation not a questioning or a looking for reality as in what we presume to be Roman Catholicism. However, although I am a Greek Orthodox raised in the faith by my mother, I am also a student and my teachers were for the most part Catholic.
The dichotomy of thought like a ripened fig must be digested to enjoy the sweetness and to crack the millions of seeds that each fig holds enveloped in sweet flesh. Verse 5 of Genesis says And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. To whom was he addressing the designation of words, Day and Night, to represent Light and Dark? Really is this God writing or is this the writer of Genesis wise beyond the millenium of years representing in concrete human terms, the reality of God who after all is not human for He is immortal. To leap into the question of mortality would not be Greek Orthodox.
From the designation of language for earth bound reality we also have the concept of a being, the writer, conscious of his changeability and therefore of his age in days. And the evening and the morning were the first day. In little baby steps of developing understanding in flesh, the writer leads us to comprehend how we are to determine our existence. Our existence is to be calculated in days. And each evening and the burst of morning will be the first day. Not from sunrise to sunset but from sunset to sunrise.
Otherwise we can be allowed to understand that if we do not awaken we are dead and so are our days.
