"Call me Ishmael"

"Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction." Genesis 16. 1 - 14

The first line in the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville is "Call me Ishmael," and it has come to be known as the classic way a novelist tells the reader the narrator is quintessentially unreliable. It is like saying, "oh just call me Joe." Without going into all the ways to recognize "Ishmael's" unreliability, we might ask ourselves what it would feel like to know that a story of this magnitude is told by someone we cannot trust. We also might wonder why Melville chose the name Ishmael for the unreliable narrator?

Considering the line above from the Genesis story of Hagar, Ishmael and Abram and Sarai's abuse of Hagar, one might wonder if Melville was making an ethnic slur in his use of the unreliability of someone named Ishmael. However this story from Genesis makes it very clear that God appointed Abram as the father of all nations and his offspring will be many like the stars in the sky. Muslims, Jews and Christians all look to Abraham as the patriarch of their faiths.

In the Genesis story, the angel of the Lord visits Hagar when she is on the run from her abusive mistress, telling her she too will have a multitude of offspring , but the angel foresees that Ishmael will be at odds with his kin, suggesting from the quintessential beginning of time that humankind will be in turmoil. If you dig deeply into Melville's religious background, it is clear that his Calvinist upbringing would have taught him that Ishmael was a wild man and an outcast as the author of Genesis says. One wonders if the use of "call me Ishmael" might have been a way for Melville to warn his readers about Muslims...just a thought.

So now that I have thoroughly tainted your perspective of Moby Dick, what does this have to do with our spiritual journey here and now? Perhaps going back to the Source and realizing that "in the beginning" God intended for us all to be one under the umbrella of Abraham, the father of many nations? Another thought for our spiritual journeys would be to know that even in the face of this abusive situation into which Ishmael was born, he and Abraham reconciled according to the tradition of Muhammed and Isaac (Abraham's son with Sarah) and Ishmael reconciled coming together to bury their father.

Take from it what you may, remember that for some reason this story was recorded in the canon of scripture. It makes clear that we were originally meant to be a single nation, brother and sister, friend not foe. But from the beginning of time, the human condition prevented that harmony. Today we suffer mightily because of the human condition, but we must remember that peace, shalom (peace in Hebrew) and salaam (peace in Arabic) are central tenets and core principles in the Abrahamic faiths. We must live into that truth and pray for peace that passes all understanding.

and maybe we should all reread Moby Dick!