Some days I can’t remember: am I Abel or Cain?

And on this festival day, I am feeling once again my status as the Chief of Sinners, slipping out of the house with unwashed hair in a faded, above-the-knee, sleeveless, beach sundress.

I am not the kind of man who routinely stands hip-deep in anything, but the kids are still asleep, and I need to pray somewhere—God knows—so here I stand. The water is frigid and it soothes my feet, sore from stumbling over stones to rescue my lure. All I’ve caught in this damned river are rocks.

At the time of our children’s young-earth themed Vacation Bible School, I was in the midst of writing a poetry collection on Paul and his letters. While I’m no theologian, I can discern one theme that permeates the epistles like nothing else: unity.

Two summers ago, my husband Jeremy and I decided to cancel our family’s cross-country road trip just days before departure. Our bank account had taken a beating with some unexpected bills. We suddenly found ourselves looking for staycation activities for our children, who were devastated to miss out on hiking the national parks and splashing in the ocean with their California cousins.

In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a desolate waste. Chaos. Smoking rubble. Like after a war. Our beginning, we Bible readers should understand, was post-apocalyptic.

What struck me about the Ham kerfuffle is how this arises from the same place that his strict stance on young earth creationism does. At its core, this is not about the science; it is about hermeneutics.

In Judith Kitchen’s essay “Direction,” she writes of traveling with a friend in Greece and being asked to step out of her cab on a dark road by a driver she doesn’t trust. She and her friend refuse to get out, not by saying no, but by huddling in the back seat and crying thalassa, thalassa. Ocean, ocean.

Much is said these days about the importance of the imagination for virtually every human activity, from mowing a lawn to composing songs. And when it comes to the creationist-evolutionist disputes, it won’t be long before one side accuses the other of lacking imagination. Usually it’s the evolutionist who blames the Bible-reading creationist for a plodding literalism. And this is just where the arts are needed, so it is said, because they help us take myth, symbolism, and fictional narrative seriously—just what we need if we’re going to read Genesis properly.

As I drove home from the Methow Valley a week ago, I listened to Krista Tippett interview Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. Around me the mountains of the Cascades softened as they declined into the Columbia River Valley, a part of the scablands of eastern Washington scoured by the Missoula flood during the Pleistocene Epoch.