Abraham Fell on His Face Twice and the Second Time He Laughed

Abraham was ninety-nine, standing in open day with his shadow short under him, when the voice came. Then he was not standing. His knees went. His hands went out. His face fell into the dust (Genesis 17:3).

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He did not choose the ground. The ground took him.

Walk Before Me

Before the promise there had been a command, and the command had been short. "Walk before me," God had said, "and be unstained." A man with nothing clinging to him. Abraham had lived seventy-five years in Ur and Haran before he ever set out toward Canaan, and nobody lives that long without collecting things through his eyes and his ears and his mouth.

That is what the fall shook loose. Everything the senses had dragged into him went to the bottom, the way silt drops when a jar stops being carried. The senses are where the passions start. They are the door, and every appetite that ever ruined a man came in through it. When Abraham's face hit the dirt, the door was on the floor and the man was lying on top of it.

He stayed there with grit against his cheek and both palms flat, and for once nothing in him was reaching for anything. The offences of the outward sense had somewhere to go. They went down. The man on top of them was free, in that hour, for the work he had been told to walk.

He Could Not Look

There was also the plain matter of what stood over him.

The living God had appeared, and had appeared without a dream or a night vision to soften the arrival. Abraham's eyes could not hold it. Fear moved through him faster than thought, and his body did the only reasonable thing a body can do in front of something it will not survive looking at. It got low. It stayed low.

Worship and terror came out of him as one gesture. He could not have said where either began. Sand blew past his mouth on a little wind. He kept his face where it was.

Adoration, in that dust, was not a posture he selected from a list. It was what was left when looking failed.

Made Things Fall

Lying there, he knew what he was lying under. God does not vary. God does not lean, or tire, or drift a hand's width from one hour to the next. Everything that has ever been made does exactly that. Stone crumbles toward the ground. Water runs downhill. A man rises in the morning and by evening has slipped somewhere he never meant to go, and rises again, and slips again.

Made things fall. They fall toward the place that belongs to them, which is the earth.

So the old man on his face was not performing humility. He was doing what a made thing does in front of the one thing that never does it. His body had gone where its own nature sent it, and its nature sent it down. Creatures rise and get corrected and rise again. The intellect in him, if it confessed anything in the grit, confessed that only God stays standing.

The Second Fall and the Laugh

Later in the same encounter God spoke about Sarah. She would have a son. Kings would come out of her. She was eighty-nine years old and had been barren for every one of those years.

Abraham went down a second time. Twice in one afternoon the ground had him, and this time, with his face already in the dirt, he laughed (Genesis 17:17).

"Shall a child be born to a man a hundred years old," he said inside himself, "and shall Sarah, ninety years old, bear?"

It has the shape of a man calling the promise absurd. It was the opposite. The laugh came out of him because the thing was already settled and he knew it. He had just seen the one who exists without variation, and had seen in the same breath what he himself was, a creature always stooping, always going back down. Once a man knows which of the two is making the promise, hope stops being work. It turns into something closer to relief, and relief in an old man with his face in the sand comes out as laughter.

He was not doubting Sarah's womb. He was already tasting the year. The laugh was hope in a body that had stopped needing to be persuaded.

Dust in the Beard

When he got up there was dust in his beard and dust in the lines of both hands, and a son was one year away.

The first fall had emptied him. The second had filled him. Between them God had asked for an unstained walk and then named a child through a woman whose body had been a closed door as long as Abraham had known her. The door in him had hit the floor. The door in her was about to open. He walked away from the patch of dirt with both facts on him, grit and a future, and he did not wipe the laugh off as if it had been a mistake.

A man who has seen what never falls can afford to laugh when he is told that a barren year is over. The laugh stayed in the dust. The dust stayed on his mouth. The year began.