Year of the Flood: Novel by Margaret Atwood

dear Toby. You’re guarded by angels.”
    Curious angels, thought Toby. Not all of them angels of light. But she did sleep easier, on her mattress of rustling husks.

THE FEAST OF ADAM
AND ALL PRIMATES

THE FEAST OF ADAM AND ALL PRIMATES
YEAR TEN.
OF GOD’S METHODOLOGY IN CREATING MAN.
SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.
    Dear Fellow Gardeners in the Earth that is God’s Garden:
    How wonderful to see you all assembled here in our beautiful Edencliff Rooftop Garden! I have enjoyed viewing the excellent Tree of Creatures created by our Children from the plastic objects they’ve gleaned — such a fine illustration of evil materials being put to good uses! — and I look forward to our coming meal of Fellowship, featuring the turnips we stored from last year’s harvest in Rebecca’s delicious turnip pie, not to mention the Pickled Mushroom Medley, courtesy of Pilar, our Eve Six. We also celebrate the promotion of Toby to full teaching status. By her hard work and dedication, Toby has shown us that a person can overcome so many painful experiences and inner obstacles once they have seen the light of Truth. We are very proud of you, Toby.
    On the Feast of Adam and All Primates, we affirm our Primate ancestry — an affirmation that has brought down wrath upon us from those who arrogantly persist in evolutionary denial. But we affirm, also, the Divine agency that has caused us to be created in the way that we were, and this has enraged those scientific fools who say in their hearts, “There is no God.” These claim to prove the non-existence of God because they cannot put Him in a test tube and weigh and measure Him. But God is pure Spirit; so how can anyone reason that the failure to measure the Immeasurable proves its non-existence? God is indeed the No Thing, the Nothingness, that through which and by which all material things exist; for if there were not such a Nothingness, existence would be so crammed full of materiality that no one thing could be distinguished from another. The mere existence of separate material things is a proof of the Nothingness of God.
    Where were the scientific fools when God laid the foundations of the Earth by interposing his own Spirit between one blob of matter and another, thus giving rise to forms? Where were they when “the morning stars sang together”? But let us forgive them in our hearts, for it is not our task today to reprimand, but to contemplate our own earthly state in all humility.
    God could have made Man out of pure Word, but He did not use this method. He could also have formed him from the dust of the Earth, which in a sense He did, for what else can be signified by “dust” but atoms and molecules, the building blocks of all material entities? In addition to this, He created us through the long and complex process of Natural and Sexual Selection, which is none other than His ingenious device for instilling humility in Man. He made us “a little lower than the Angels,” but in other ways — and Science bears this out — we are closely related to our fellow Primates, a fact that the haughty ones of this world do not find pleasant to their self-esteem. Our appetites, our desires, our more uncontrollable emotions — all are Primate! Our Fall from the original Garden was a Fall from the innocent acting-out of such patterns and impulses to a conscious and shamed awareness of them; and from thence comes our sadness, our anxiety, our doubt, our rage against God.
    True, we — like the other Animals — were blessed, and ordered to increase and multiply, and to replenish the Earth. But by what humiliating and aggressive and painful means this replenishing frequently takes place! No wonder we are born to a sense of guilt and disgrace! Why did He not make us pure Spirit, like Himself? Why did he embed us in perishable matter, and a matter so unfortunately Monkey-like? So goes the ancient cry.
    What commandment did we disobey? The commandment to live the Animal life in all simplicity —