MY MOTHER AND I ARE DRIVING five hundred miles to see a replica of a mystery. We’re heading to Williamstown, Kentucky, to Ark Encounter, a theme park that contains a model of Noah’s ark from Genesis built to biblical standards, a massive zipline, a museum, and a zoo. It is the week of the Fourth of July, ninety-seven degrees, and there’s a heavy storm moving inland from the East Coast. My mother is increasingly antsy as the rain picks up, and she expresses this by reiterating her distrust of the fanaticism that has brought us on this ridiculous trip and the forty-eight-dollar entrance fee we will each pay tomorrow at the park.
There is not much I can say to reassure her, as it is really my own fanaticism—not the sliver of Christian fundamentalism that produced Ark Encounter—that is responsible for our trip. To endure the final hours of the drive, I try pretending her questions about my obsession with Noah and his ark are rhetorical and remind her that I gave her explicit instructions not to join me.
I’ve been reading the story of Noah, his ark, and God’s flood for years—decades, really. I’ve drawn no especially satisfying conclusions. The story rests on so many borders: land and sea, saved and unsaved, right and wrong—and it’s never clear to me which side God is on.
I was four years old the first time I heard the Genesis flood narrative. A Sunday-school teacher read me a story about paired-up animals and a mighty storm. From her colorful children’s Bible, she introduced me to a hypnotic phrase: Water covered everything.
The phrase, which isn’t in Genesis, not in those exact words, inhabited a space inside me for many years, coming to the surface at bath time, on beach vacations, during swimming lessons and rainstorms. I didn’t know how to articulate my fledgling obsession then, so instead I said to anyone who would take the time, “Read it again.”
I read the story for twenty more years. Picture books with smiling, tame animals and hyperpigmented rainbows in elementary school. Commentaries in high school. Ethical analyses in college. And every other ancient flood narrative I could get my hands on in divinity school. I read the Sumerian account, then Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, and all the rest, tales that proclaimed divine will with such certainty and horror that I wasn’t sure I wanted to believe in God anymore.
Now, for the last year, there has been the fixated, near daily reading of the story of Noah and his flood. I wish I could say this reading was scholarly or color-coded, but I’ve read without much finesse. I’ve read it indignantly and pressed my pen so forcefully into the thin, waxy paper that it tears. Sometimes I’ve read in the bathtub to feel closer to the water, and my wet hair smudges the ink. Sometimes I’ve read it and tried to imagine that it’s all I know about God, and then I don’t read it again for many days. I want to know: How could God have done this?
I know the basics of the story: I know that God saw the wickedness of humanity, the fault lines of their hearts, all the places their bodies and brains and emotions and desires could crack or slip or shatter. I know that our inclination to break and be broken was seen by God, and that what God saw broke him too. I know that God filled himself up with regret and grief until God blotted us up or wiped us away, depending on the translation, though both seem almost tender to me, maternal even. When I picture God blotting, God wiping, I picture my mother cleaning up spills on our black countertops with thick paper towels or washing my face after dinner each night when I was small.
All were blotted except for Noah, a man righteous before the Lord—unbroken or, maybe, God thought, unbreakable.
“Build an ark,” God said. “Save a little for me to remember you all by. Keep it all warm and dry and partnered. Don’t let anything get too lonely, too heartbroken, again.”
So, Noah did exactly as the Lord commanded before God turned water—innocent and life-saving—into something sinister. Cleansing the earth might have been God’s intention, but it’s not strictly cleansing. The text wants God murderous: The verb that reveals God’s intention toward the world at that moment, while sometimes read as “blot” or “wipe away,” can more simply be translated as “destroy,” “obliterate,” “exterminate.”
Initially I invited my mother to join my trip because we both enjoy long drives. I knew she would pack elaborate snacks—her car-friendly charcuterie boards are famous in her circle of friends—and make me laugh with her wry, ironic humor. Since we live in different states and don’t see each other often, the idea of quality time seemed pleasant.
Although my mother and I regard each other with affection and even tenderness, there is a fundamental way we cannot intuit each other. We know almost every fact there is to know about each other, but her passivity makes her seem two-dimensional and unreachable to me; and my erratic and spiraling thought patterns are unpredictable and obscure to her. I struggle to endure her level ballast of emotion, and she struggles to track me, as if I am an unruly weather pattern or an animal loose on a ship.
For these reasons, I uninvited her after I invited her. I rescinded my offer and rejected her company, knowing that I am prone to silence and distant moods when I indulge my obsessions. I thought she would not understand or appreciate this particular fixation, and I wanted to spare us both the disappointment of her misunderstanding.
But four days before I planned to make the drive, I awoke to a text message from my mother saying, Good morning. I decided that I will go with you to Kentucky. I’ll see you Tuesday.
I called her immediately, saying that I didn’t think it was a good idea, that I wanted to spend the whole time reading and writing about what I saw, that I’d worry about the extent to which I was either neglecting her or failing to accomplish a task.
But with warmth that took me aback, she said, “This won’t be the first obsession of yours I’ve dealt with.”
I wanted to warn her that this might be more intense than my middle-school affinity for medical dramas or my dedication to the violin in high school, but I didn’t. Instead, I accepted her intrusion and silently wondered whether our trip would end badly, with her unable to understand why Noah’s ark matters to me, or with me lashing out at her confusion. When I lash out or when we fight—which we don’t do often—it severs something small and certain between us.
The most recent of these fights happened a year ago, a lurking and mutating event that, in the end, revealed the ugly depth of our likeness. I was visiting my childhood home, sitting on a barstool at the kitchen peninsula while she leaned against the stove across from me, her arms around her chest. I was asking her to leave my father again, as I have done roughly twice a year for thirteen years. Usually, she would say something redundant and meaningless like, “It is what it is,” and, usually, I would drop it.
But on that day, standing three feet from me in the kitchen where she never taught me to cook, she looked me dead in the eye, or deadly, in my eyes, or in my eyes, like death, and said, “Do you know what it’s like to love someone so much that it feels like a privilege to clean his kitchen?”
I wanted to say, Jesus, Mom. I wanted to say, No, I cannot imagine. That is a self-abnegating metric, Mother. Love and clean kitchens are not the same thing. Love might be service, but it is not a privilege to clean the kitchen of someone who didn’t think to make dinner for you in the first place.
Instead, I sighed and said, “Yes, I know what that’s like.”
I had no clean bill of relational health that would permit me to call her crazy or pathetic. I knew exactly the kind of relationship that could drive you to perform desperate acts of domestic intimacy. I knew the perverse pleasure of submission that managed to linger long after a lover lost interest. I had stood in the kitchen of the one I loved many years before, cleaning fanatically and eagerly, emitting the desire to be noticed like a foul odor, scrubbing and rinsing and thinking love could be earned through shining wet plastic plates on a drying rack, through tiny acts that meant so little because they were for the wrong person, acts that begged something: Notice my altruism, given to you! My fingers, pruning in your name!
I knew exactly what my mother meant. She looked so surprised I thought she might cry.
“Who are you talking about?” she asked me.
I picked at my cuticles. I had never spoken of my love life with my mother.
Her face, her beautiful face, was expressionless, and I wondered if she was taking in this new recognition of herself in me. She retreated to her bedroom. I couldn’t read her look. Disgust, maybe? Disappointment? I had inherited something she wasn’t proud of, revealed my permeability like a weakness, as if we had not already known that my body was the stuff of hers. What happens, I wondered, when you make a child in your image and don’t like what you see?
On the eve of the flood, I wonder if God watched us—looked closely at those made in his image, in his likeness. I wonder if there was fondness in his heart, or terror. I wonder if God recognized something true of himself in us, something he didn’t like, some proleptically corporeal part of himself. I wonder if that’s what Genesis means when it speaks of humanity’s wickedness. I wonder if God couldn’t stand it, seeing how much we looked like him: beautiful, homicidal.
Those are the thoughts I wake to on the morning of July 4. My mother and I are up early to buy rain ponchos from the dollar store and are then among the first in line at Ark Encounter. We pay our fifty bucks each, get a brochure, and wait on a bus that will drive us to the ark. While I read the brochure, my mother asks, “Do you really think everyone who works here doesn’t believe in evolution?”
“I’m not sure,” I say honestly. “Why?”
“The website said employees have to sign a statement renouncing it.”
For an instant I am overcome with love at the thought of my mother looking up Ark Encounter’s website, preparing for this trip. I feel almost syrupy with it. This feeling is interrupted when we round a corner and I catch my first glimpse of the ark through the rain. I had read that it is the largest freestanding timber structure in the world, but the structure that confronts me, majestic and looming—like it is proud of itself, trying to be exactly what God intended—is so massive that I audibly gasp.
When I get off the bus, I get a good look at it. Its sudden mass consumes my whole field of vision. Its belly is round and taut and large. The curve of the helm is controlled and edgeless. I’ve lost count of the books I’ve read about arks and the hours I’ve spent thinking about them, but to my surprise, I’m still in awe. Seeing that which I’ve only pieced together in my mind from ancient texts or received as a caricature in a children’s Bible daunts me, and I stare like the tourist I am.
I pull up the hood of my poncho and follow my mother through the idyllic and charming footprint on which the ark sits. The white sidewalks are lined with black-eyed Susan, heather, and newly planted trees. Darkly stained and shellacked benches are placed every fifty feet or so. I can see the zipline course crisscrossing behind the hull. I can smell what is surely the zoo behind the stern.
The sidewalk narrows to a serpentine path that leads to the ark’s entrance, a small portal in the bow. I ask my mother to slow her pace so I can get a good look at the six nine-foot stone pillars jutting up from the flowerbeds. Covering the pillars are pseudo-hieroglyphics telling the story of the first five chapters of Genesis, of creation and mankind’s fall into sin. First Adam rises from the dust, looking like an Olympian god. Then: a serpent, tongue outstretched. Eve, pregnant and wailing, the pillar of wickedness, and finally a stony Noah, looking toward the sun, receiving instruction for the ark. He looks trusting, like a fool.
The thematically irregular hieroglyphics leave out that Noah never made sense of what happened to him. They leave out his becoming an alcoholic, his trying to understand for the rest of his long, long life: What did God do? And why did God do it? And what did we do to deserve what he did?
Of course, these are not new questions. Every ancient culture asked them. Every ancient flood story has its distinct features—which god made what decision, what motivated them to act, the hero’s response—but the stories all bear a familial resemblance in the same way I bear a familial resemblance to my mother. They all assert something in common about our humanity and its relation to the divine, truths I’ve tried to soak up: Life is not so precious. We are all expendable, and gods have a terrific capacity to disown. The world will not last more than a paragraph.
I adjust my backpack straps and squint against the clouds, albedic and sagging. I wonder if I love God less for what he’s done, or if what he’s accomplished in this ark is so beyond me that my love endures a bit of ancient, malfeasant rain. I take one more look before I walk into the ark’s belly. I see a damp, old world. I see this world and my mother.
My mother disowned me once, very briefly and without much conviction. (Although, duration is hardly a good measure of effect—forty days and forty nights was sufficient once before.)
I was in my last semester of college, deciding which graduate school to attend. Though my mother had not been thrilled when I told her I would not be applying to law school, which was her dream for me, I had not predicted that calling her to say I had paid the deposit for a divinity school would cause her to weep, hang up, and never call back.
We had been in the habit of speaking most days. We liked to check in, exchange gossip on occasion. I loved hearing my mother’s voice, no matter what she was saying. And when she took her voice away, I felt dizzy, which I mean literally. So dizzy that my roommate suggested I go to student health, where the psychiatrist said I’d need to go straight to the hospital if I was having auditory hallucinations.
“You’re misunderstanding me,” I told her. “I’m having the opposite of auditory hallucinations.” I paused and held my breath. “I miss my mother’s voice.” Saying it felt pathetic.
“Did your mother die recently? We have grief counselors.”
“No, she didn’t die.” She had become other to me, and she felt far away, but she did not feel dead.
The doctor looked up from my chart and considered me. I thought, This is it. She thinks I’m crazy. I probably am crazy. I’m going mad.
Finally, she said, “I can write you a prescription for Zoloft.”
I slid the prescription into my bag and never had it filled.
For those weeks I grieved my mother so intensely that I stopped taking notes by hand in classes because my handwriting looked so much like hers. I grieved the image of her I held, the character of her. She seemed to have deviated so far from who I knew her to be—loving, interested.
My friends thought her reaction was disproportionate to the decision I had made. I didn’t disagree, though I spent weeks analyzing her, trying to figure out her motive or her reasoning, and I came up short every time, unable to satisfactorily access her intention. Nothing I could invent tidily interpreted what I believed to be a foul breach of contract on my mother’s part.
And maybe I’ll never know. I’ve never asked.
When we enter the ark, we are walking into a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, light and dark.
I have my own theories about how the battle is fought: Part of me is sure the light came like saltwater taffy, that the molten sugar of it was drawn out of the darkness in long, languid pulls by the steady forearms of God. The other part of me is sure the light must have shattered something, broken the darkness, or broken something in the darkness.
Of course, the ship is not interested in what I think. There are no theories here, only certainty. The effect of all that certainty—the belief that everything the Bible says is literally true, that there is no space between words and meaning—is a lot of dinosaurs.
The first image that greets us in the entry hall of the ship is a mural of Adam and Eve standing before a waterfall, alacritous flora and fauna, a butterfly, seven birds, two parasaurolophuses, and five brachiosaurs. They all stand under a banner: Imagine a Perfect World.
When I step onto the first floor of the boat, a wide expanse of decking lined with animal cages greets me, and tucked inconspicuously into a collection of corner cages are the dinosaurs. A sign informs me that there were up to eighty-five kinds of dinosaurs on board. Because there are dinosaur footprints that still exist today, enshrined in fossilized mud, certain sects of Christianity believe that some dinosaurs must have lived after the flood. The replicas in the cages appear to be in the stegosaur family—stocky, brown lizards with upright plates along their spines as sleek as shale. Even as infants, which would have been the more spatially economic choice for Noah, they are huge, armored beasts.
I ask my mother what she thinks of this, the dinosaurs, all of it, as I gesture helplessly to the dinosaur pens and three-story structure we have boarded. Years after she wrote me off, placed me in some incomprehensible, reptilian part of her brain that couldn’t form speech, she is here with me in a place that embodies so much of what she doubts about religion—fanaticism, pseudoscience, capitalist endeavors—and I’m nervous to hear her thoughts.
She rests her hand on my lower back and leans in close to my ear. “This is fucking insane,” she whispers, grinning. “What do you think of this?”
I am thinking about how tender I feel toward the dinosaur exhibit. Love of dinosaurs aside, I recognize the brash awkwardness of the things the museum is attempting to reconcile, all that this boat is trying to hold. I might believe that this story is a myth, a myth that instructs me into a deeper and more complicated account of God’s character, but I am not so different from the people who created this theme park. They are trying to negotiate God’s awful decision alongside the adjectives I know to also be true of him—merciful, loving, good. They too love God so much and are so afraid of his capacity to disown.
“They’re very sure of themselves,” I say, heading toward the theology exhibit on the third floor.
Of course, the exhibit is not titled “The Theology Exhibit,” but it is the only gallery I can find that has anything to do with God’s character directly. The gallery features five small placards that culminate in twelve-foot double doors set with elaborate iron hinges that curve and spiral into the wood. The doors, curiously unfunctional and purely decorative, are meant to represent Jesus’s offering of eternal salvation—an ark himself, the sign says.
“Was God just to judge the world?” the ship asks me.
A moment later it answers. “Death is a merciful punishment,” the ship says, and I am envious of its conviction.
I look then at my mother, who is reading a few steps behind me. I have an urge to touch her face.
“The fact that God allows us to live at all demonstrates His abundant mercy,” another sign proudly declares. I feel my mother’s elbow at mine, the heat and reassurance of her body and her blood. She is here with me, on the exact site that reflects and enacts parental—maternal—judgment, trying. She is trying to comprehend the thing that consumes me, as I am trying to comprehend her, as I am trying to comprehend God.
I look at her and wonder if it would have been less painful, in the long run, to have done away with all of it—to have killed everyone and everything, to have left no Noah, no bird, no dinosaur behind. Why did God want us to have this memory of him? I look at her and wonder what she felt when she cast me aside. I look at her and wonder what God felt too.
We approach the last placard of the exhibit, my mother and me, the two of us in a pair before God.
“Can you imagine,” my mother reads aloud, her voice lovely, “what it would be like to live forever in a fallen world?”
Rhody Walker-Lenow is a doctoral student in homiletics at Duke Divinity School. She is currently working on a collection of essays on the Genesis flood narrative for Eerdmans. She lives on the western shore of Maryland with her husband and son.
Photo by J. Schiemann on Unsplash
