Genesis 11:1-9

My writer decided to put this story in what she calls “first person,” so it’s one of the people in the story telling it. She still tells the details I told her.

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You’ve probably never tried to build a tower up to the heavens, especially with no cranes, no bulldozers, no machinery of any kind. We had ropes and poles and our own brute strength. And we actually made quite a bit of progress. The tower rose higher and higher and higher. Now it’s kind of hard to determine where the heavens are, so it’s hard to know when you have built a tower up to the heavens. We never hit the dome.

You might ask why we wanted to build a tower to the heavens? I suppose we had lots of different reasons. I’m sure that some people thought they would find the Lord up there. But some of us had a very simple reason. We lived on the plain, on flat land, but in an area surrounded by really tall trees. If you went very far away from the city, it wasn’t hard to get lost. In the forest, you had to be very careful.

So the taller the tower, the better we could see it from afar and find our way home. We figured it would be especially useful at night if we kept a fire burning at the top.

Anyway, we were building this tower. That took a great deal of working together, of planning together, of talking with each other. It was a tremendous project. And we were very proud of what we were accomplishing. (Maybe that was the sin?)

However, according to the way you folks have the story in front of you, what we were doing angered or frustrated the — not the Creator, but the Destroyer, the one who destroyed the world with a flood. Our old men teach us that the Lord created everything—the light, the dome of the heavens, the dry ground, the sun and moon, the vegetation, the fish, birds, and animals, and even us—the thinking, sometimes reasoning people. The Lord the Creator.

Because not very far back in our storytellers’ tales, the Lord destroyed nearly everything from that creation, everything except our great-great-ever so great great grandfather and his family and two of all creatures. The Lord the Destroyer.

And what we were doing apparently attracted the Lord the Destroyer.

But the Lord had promised our ancestor not to destroy the world again by flood. This time the tool of destruction was our common language.

Oh, and something else our old men told us, that we each had a butterfly. It must have been true because our city was … I won’t say “infested” with them, but there were many, many of them. Each family seemed to have their own kind of butterfly.

Back to my story, to accomplish some great project, people have to communicate with each other. If you build a tower, you need the right size of stones, poles of a specific length, a ramp to push the stones up to the next place. Someone has to tell someone else the appropriate sizes and numbers. Someone has to figure out how to put everything in place. And someone has to organize the labor force. You have to communicate what you need.

Apparently, the Lord thought we were doing this for the wrong reasons, so our language was confounded. One night we went to bed thinking about what we were going to accomplish the next day, and the next morning everything was gibberish. My family and I understood each other. Other families could talk with each other and make sense within their family, but not from one neighboring family to another.

When the suppliers showed up with the day’s materials, they couldn’t understand each other. And the ones who should have received the materials couldn’t understand the suppliers or each other. The foreman could only scratch his head, because nobody made sense. And the engineers spent a lot of time waving their arms and pointing before they realized the futility of it all. Nothing happened that day on the tower.

Instead, people began moving out of town, family by family, sometimes one family at a time, sometimes families closely related would find they could make out what the other was saying, and they left together. Finally we were only a handful of families left: my family and my brothers’ families.

“Should we leave, too?” asked my wife.

I raised my shoulders and held out my hands. “Where would we go?”

“Where have the others gone?” my oldest son asked, tilting his head.

“If we stay, what do we do?” That was my question. “We can’t work on the tower any more.”

“We can still plant a little piece of land,” my son suggested.

In the end we decided to stay, so that was our new beginning. My brothers’ families stayed, too. After a while we could understand each other better. We planted and weeded and harvested within sight of the tall, unfinished tower. Eventually I quit thinking about the tower, even though I walked in its shadow every morning.

What I did think about was the “Why?” of it. Why had the Lord been angry with us? Why was it wrong to build the tower? What did that tell me about the Creator who had also destroyed the world with a flood? Why did the Lord confuse our languages? Was the Lord also the Confuser?

And to be honest, I was confused. We had followed all the rules that had come down to us from the time after the flood. Lots of rules, and sometimes it was hard. Some of the rules may have made sense right after the flood, but they didn’t seem to fit our times, but we kept them anyway. We did the best we could. We tried, we really tried. And nothing in the rules passed down to us said anything about a tower.

In the evenings several of us would sit outside in the moonlight. Of course, The butterflies were there too. Why? I don’t know. After a little while, the conversation always shifted around to the tower. Occasionally I would have a thought that had never occurred to me before, usually when we were talking about the tower.

Somewhere in the conversation, someone would mention somebody’s name—always someone who was no longer with us. We never pointed fingers at each other. And what followed was always some shortcoming, usually related to the tower.

Many times, the accusation had something to do with reworking creation, with changing what the Lord had created to make life easier for us down here. Often the accusation implied some kind of desire to play creator, to imply that the Lord had not created a perfect world and that we could do better.

But to be honest, I didn’t remember hearing those things from the people I had worked with. Maybe I just worked with the wrong people (or the right ones, depending on what you mean by “right” or “wrong”). Anyway, it was always pure speculation because we really didn’t know.

And after they all left, I would go back into my house, followed by my butterfly, and ponder. So what if a handful of people really had wanted to reach up to the heavens to get to the Lord? What would they do when they got there?

What about the rest of us who were simply trying to make our world more secure, to keep people from getting lost? What percentage of people wanting the wrong thing would cause all the rest of us to suffer as well?

Was there another reason? What would it be? Who was the Lord? How did the Lord think? Was the Lord jealous of what we were accomplishing? Why would the Lord be jealous, having created the whole world? How did a tower compare to that?

Sometimes while I was asking myself those questions, an answer would come to me. I never knew from where, and I didn’t know which answers I could trust.

You’ve probably noticed I spent a lot of time worrying about the Why. And I realized that my real question was “Why did we have to be different?” I had spent so much time thinking the Lord was angry at us that I missed what it might have been.

Because one evening after our talk, I noticed several butterflies, all looking at me, like they were trying to tell me something. And I thought, “Well, that’s a dumb idea. What would a butterfly be able to tell me?”

But they hung around with me wherever I went, always in front of me, but facing me. Somehow they seemed to be trying to communicate with me, to tell me something. I realized they were the same ones hanging around us since the Separation.

So I began to pay attention to them. They were all different—different colors, different sizes, different designs on their wings. And each one was beautiful in its own way. Did that mean something?

I went home, puzzling.

Now my wife, she didn’t think the way I did. She wasn’t worried about the Why. She just took life the way it came.

So I asked her, “Did you notice the butterflies?”

She nodded. “Aren’t they pretty?”

“But they’re all different.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?”

I didn’t think so. Back when we were building the tower, when we all worked together, it was like we were all alike, with one purpose, one goal. Nobody came up with a different idea. We didn’t ever try anything new. Maybe … no, quit worrying about the Why. Instead, think about how things have changed.

What if the butterflies were all the same? Would we notice them?

Now, when my friends and I talk in the evenings, we come up with different ideas. And some of them make sense. We’re making changes in the way we do things. And our lives are better. Would we have done that if the Lord hadn’t given us different languages?

Is differences a gift from the Lord, like the butterflies?