Havah

Havah, The Story of Eve
by Tosca Lee


(note: this is a fictionalized version of the life of Eve. Obviously, there is very little information on her roughly 1,000 years of life on this planet. I'm writing this review in "story form," only because that's the mood I'm in at the moment. I do recommend the book, but I'm not going to pick apart something I think is so beautiful. If you don't like biblical fiction - which I usually don't - you might want to steer clear. But I was surprised at how much it made me think - and how beautifully it was written, definitely a cut above your average "Christian lit" genre. The book is not overtly "Christian." It doesn't knock you over the head with obvious "lessons" to learn. Go gently and read, and you'll find what you're intended to find, should you be interested... you may even find yourself in its pages. And I have to admit, I think that's the mark of a good book. One more thing of note: there are a couple of major themes woven through the book, and while I thought about choosing one or the other or pegging out both, I only ended up touching upon a few high points of each and not really fleshing it out like I could have. To do so would have interrupted the feel and made the writing more dogmatic. I chose to go another route, so feel free to go write a professional paper if you wish. I don't know if I've got it in my anymore, more's the pity... I'm going all fluff, apparently. Ah, well. It's a woman's perogative. :) )


"That day when he kissed me, I had two loves: one given to hold me, and One to woo my soul.
Surely I was the most beautiful creature on earth."


Havah is the story of the first woman -- but it is also the unfolding of the heart of Woman. We feel Havah's joy, we long for it - we recognize in her Paradise something we yearn for every day, every hour. We feel homesick again. In her fall we feel her desperation, her confusion, her determination. We pity her as she learns to live... like us. We see her stumbling attempts to love, and we recognize that, too. We are all of us shattered now, even our best attempts at goodness marred and warped; but unlike Havah, we have grown jaded with it, used to our fallenness... we rarely look for hope. We fail to breathe it in like our mother once did, as food and water, light and air. We fail to SEE, and if this book does nothing else, it removes some of those scales from Havah's daughter's eyes so that we can see more clearly the grace of God in which we live, move, and have our being.

"I used to fear death, but now I consider it a grace not to be trapped in this life or this body forever, with its wrinkles and ravages and this searing pain, with its aging and heartbreak. That is what it is: heartbreak. It is the last sadness, the last failure - no. The last joy - that bursts the vessel in the end."

The joy comes in the glimpses of hope given by the very world that frightens and breaks Adam and Havah's backs - our backs. The joy comes in the ability to see "The One That Is" even in the wind, to know finally that even if we have to learn to live with heartbreak, He is present and gracious. The fact that there is beauty and grace in a truly fallen world is nothing short of miraculous. The fact that God IS, and we ARE, and that He is nearer than our breath, this is miraculous. The fact that we can see one another's souls and see ourselves reflected in them to any degree is miraculous. The fact that our first parents heard the voice of God promising grace to them and to us, their children - this is life and breath and the essence of all hope. The world may be fallen, and we may be broken, but there is goodness, beauty, and truth still to be found in it... and with new eyes we can see it yet.


Onto a lush, perfect landscape, Havah hears a voice saying, "Wake." And she sees the blue sky above, and then the blue of Adam's eyes. He calls her "Isha," Woman, and their language is unspoken, their spirits in tune with all around them, and all the time they are learning together. Adam says to Havah's boundless curiosity, "To learn is joy, Isha." There is no hurry, no craving beyond her boundaries - Isha patiently learns, watching everything, absorbing knowledge, finding her place in Creation. She is content and well-loved - her Adam preaching the gospel of grace to her every day, their passion for each other, both physically and emotionally, teaching them both about The One That Is, finally feeling His good pleasure like sunshine on their faces. They were given gifts, then, to share in the Creativity of the One. There was an unquestioned, unmarred, secure sense of their identity and singularity in all the wide world: "... we knew we were special in all the earth, so that even the trees and mountains and heavens must watch with wistful sighs."

After the Fall comes the aftermath, still recognizable today, resulting not only in a broken world, but broken communion with God and each other:
"It was not the first time I had been angry with [Adam] for not knowing my mind," Isha confesses to her posterity. 'It is my wrong,' I said. 'It will wait.'
I wished I had not seen the relief so plain upon his face as he said, 'Come then, lie down.' I did, and he fell asleep at once...
I lay in his arms, feeling very much alone."


Adam's weariness and inability weigh him down and age him. His powerlessness to bring happiness to his wife, to instantly recognize her needs like he did in the Garden, effortlessly - these things cause him to turn inward, to be silent. Havah begins to assign motives, to wonder, to question his choices and his ability to reason wisely:
"Here at last was the source of my frustration that I, who constantly contemplated the past and the meaning of it and of our plight and all that had happened, and who mulled over the words of the One... did it all alone. Why should I burden myself always in looking for meaning as though I were the only thinking human on earth? When he went off by himself to find land or sheep or goat, what did he do with all that time? I saw no evidence of newfound wisdom or tortured seeking - how could he walk blindly into the life before us? Why did he avoid my gaze and my questions, taking to the field when it seemed I might want to lay all bare between us, though we must slave to do it with words unnatural and inadequate?"

Isolation. Loneliness. Need. Suspicion. All these creep in, even as their family grows and the years go by. Havah tells herself what she must to get through another day, another harvest, another 9 months of pregnancy, another year. She bounces between shooting words like arrows in attempts to pierce the armor of her husband - and then settling for peace when she cannot seem to achieve intimacy. Seasons come and go, and the children grow up alongside fear. In their silences, Havah and Adam allow their children to mature bearing nameless burdens, facing questions with no answers, struggling with multiple insecurities, grappling with shapeless fears. They love profoundly, but they have to learn how to do even that with great effort: "That night as we lay in our home, I wound my arm around the form of my husbnad. A part of me hated myself; I felt I paid dearly from the store of my dignity. But a part of me longed to be near him at any price."

It is a long lesson in this new, aging, decaying world that takes a lifetime to learn: love circles back on itself again and again - the effort is breathtakingingly painful, halting and limping, an experience of death-in-life. Not every pain is accounted for, not all wrongs righted, not every question answerable. But life goes on, with all its bitterness and sweetness, all its ugliness and beauty. It is a discovery to find that they are not dying forever, but moving towards something they only remember vaguely after 1,000 years on earth. And this is God-with-us, showing Himself through the beauty of the world, and the passions of our lives, and the brokenness of other souls that touch ours, as Havah discovers at the end of their long-lived lives: "...where I had once heard indifference, I now hear the breath of the One, that never stops, and never stills, but continues forever. I understand...
The One had not needed me to return Adam to that place. Having made His promise, He had carried it out in His own way, and He had not needed me to do it."

Havah witnessed the first deaths, she delivered the first babies, she wore authority like a mantle and even abused it in her new state of sinfulness. She wondered and wandered and she survived and she believed while she waited. She learned to grow comfortable with old age and all its blessings and its challenges:
"We had no need to work any longer, only to go to the council sometimes, but even that we had given over to Shet. What a man he had become, with 18 children of his own.

Well, that was his problem, and his blessing. As for me, I thought the world was noisy."

She gained wisdom, surely. Not easily, as it came in the Garden, but with effort, purpose, and sacrifice. She, of all people on earth, understood what sacrifice meant and she must have shook her head to look upon the generations that came after her in her old, old age:

"I believed by then [Adam and I] had come, separately, to the conclusion that we could only be with one another because, no matter what happened between us, we were the only ones who knew where we had come from and all that had happened before.

But these children knew nothing of that...
What did these ninnies know of anything, sitting here with their wide eyes, beaming at me as though the sun shone through the tops of their heads and out their rear ends?...

But I blessed them, thinking all the while of my own children - they were all my own children - hoping that they might seek more happiness in this life than a full belly and children underfoot. What a great surprise it would be to them when the day of redemption came."

What a great surprise it will be to us all. And when it comes, we will see what a woman's heart was truly meant to be, and how blessed we have been from the beginning of time by the tenacious faith of our first mother in her blessed Seed. Until then, may the One give us eyes to see and ears to hear the Gospel preaching "peace, peace to those who are far and those who are near," and "grace to you through Jesus Christ." May we hear it in the voices of our children and feel it in the tender hands of our husbands and know it when we bow our heads to receive the benediction of our Almighty, Most Merciful Father who created everything for His good pleasure. And - may we feel that good pleasure as we humbly, gratefully receive all His good gifts on this broken, fallen, beautiful planet.