It would be born without conflict, and it would be a gentle, wise and strong
awareness of how to make one’s way in the world and how to be productive and
useful. A peaceful birth, the beginning of our actual experience of goodness.
Why ca n’t it happen that way? Because this world has chosen evil over
countless centuries, and every child is born into a very confusing environment.
Not only that, but she gets from her heredity a tendency to see everything in
terms of herself. It’s not her fault, but it’s there. So the rational mind can’t be
born in a peaceful way, gently descending into the mind. The young person
couldn’t accept that.
So the Lord found another way to lead us to true rationality. There was
Hagar, the Egyptian. She stands for something all children have – an affection
for knowledge. Every child loves to learn some things, and loves to gain from
his own experience. His learning and experience comes from outside, and he
feels it as his own. It makes him feel capable, strong, clever.
What the Lord does is He causes the goodness of our soul – our spiritual
Abram – to bond with this lower affection of knowledge. Out of that a child
starts to develop the ability to reason. The infant growing in Hagar’s womb
represents our initial ability to reason, to work things out for ourselves, to
approach rationality. It starts in teenage life but it is with us for most of our life
on earth. (In fact, most of this story is about our adult states.)
But when Hagar saw she had conceived she despised Sarai. Now this tells
us about a problem we have all experienced. Take teenagers. They start to
develop the ability to reason. It is a wonderful new power in their minds. They
can work things out for themselves. No longer are parents and teachers the
only source of truth, they can decide for themselves.
How do they first use this new-found power? Very often they don’t
precisely despise the truths that their parents have taught them, but they don’t
think they’re nearly as important any more. In fact, they use their reason in an
aggressive way. Suddenly Mom isn’t a source of wisdom; she’s wrong. They can
see her faults, and probably are not very slow to point them out. Dad is oldfashioned, doesn’t understand how things are today. She wants to learn from
friends and to work out herself what to believe and what to do.
It’s a pretty common experience. Was it Mark Twain who first said, “When
I was 17, my Dad didn’t know anything. When I was 23 I was amazed at how
much the old man had learned in six years.”
So Hagar’s contempt for Sarai, her feeling that she was superior, represents
this rebellious spirit. What scares parents at times is that their children seem
to be questioning some deep values. The Lord explains the spiritual cause for
this. This first power of reason is born of the affection for knowledge. And the
things we learn and experience are shot through with illusions and apparent
facts. It wasn’t so long ago that people believed the world was flat and the
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