I heard a story last week that actually brought tears to my eyes, it was so beautiful.

It was Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love (don’t you love her??).

She was talking about the entitlement we all need to claim in order to live creatively, beyond our personal fears of failure and whatever else holds us back.

The story she told reminded me of Noah and his lack of feeling of entitlement to use his voice and stand up for Humanity before God.

Noah was contrasted in last week’s blog with Abraham who does feel entitled to use his voice in a positive way—but not yet! First he does some really messed up things.

Because, you see, there’s privilege and entitlement that carries and uses power in one way, and a feeling of privilege and entitlement that you can choose to take, even if the world says it’s not yours.

In the end, either way, it depends on how you use it.

This week, Abraham, still Abram before God changes his name, uses his privilege and entitlement in a way most of us would not want to model.

Like, he asks his wife, Sarai, (she gets a name change too: Sarah) to lie and say she’s his sister, and to submit to being passed off as wife to the powerful Pharaoh (pre-slavery)—which she does (and we hear nothing of this experience from her point of view).

Abraham’s actions come from a place of fear, so we can be a little compassionate, but the fact that he even thinks this could be at all justifiable illustrates the power dynamic of society at the time (a power dynamic just beginning to change now after millennia, as we know).

And it shows a privilege and entitlement on his part as a male figure who is more concerned for his own life and wealth than his wife and what this might do to her.

And why shouldn’t he feel entitled? God has spoken to him directly, promising him the stars and the moon and a long line of progeny, power and weath. Like Noah, Abraham has been “chosen;” “Go forth from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.”

Sarai, in her own way, in her own social standing, also feels entitled—to hand her slave Hagar over to Abram as a wife and tell him to produce the heir that she can not give him. Later, when Ishmael is born, Sarai, out of jealousy, uses her privilege to send Hagar off to die with her baby Ishmael in the desert (they don’t die, but what happens is horrifying, except that God will make Ishmael the head of a new people, as you may know).

Again, there’s privilege and entitlement that uses power, and it depends on how you choose to use it, or whether you choose to take it even if you’ve been taught it’s not yours for the taking.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of an awful weather day in New York City years ago (way before the pandemic—like, “normal awful”), and she gets on a crowded bus where everybody’s having this shared human experience of discomfort and misery.

Suddenly the bus driver speaks through his microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen. I’m your bus driver. I want you to know that I can tell that you’ve all had a bad day. And I’m sorry this traffic is so bad. And I’m sorry the weather is so bad. And I can’t do anything about that. But I have an offering I want to make. Every one of you, when you walk off this bus, when you walk by me, I’m going to put out my hand and you’re going to place in my palm all your troubles and all your worries and when I get to the Hudson river, I’m going to throw all your pain out into the river.”

This broke the trance of the riders, everybody burst out laughing—and every single person took him up on his offer.

Gilbert says this man felt entitled: “He believed he had the right to interrupt the air with the vibration of his voice and his idea and invite people to open their hearts and make his bus ride, which he did every day, into something newly evolved.”

With this simple offering, this man transformed the people on the bus and himself. Who knows the effect it had on these people as they went about their lives after this?

This bus driver, with no apparent power, created a piece of magic out of the mundane. Because, “It doesn’t have to have majesty to have majesty.”

Abraham, though promised so much, and with all his access to majesty and wealth, has so little faith that any of God’s promises will actually come to fruition—or he wouldn’t have done all he did. If he had, he probably would have acted quite differently. The same is true for Sarah.

The “simple bus driver” in Gilbert’s story (not Gilbert’s words, I don’t think), with no apparent power, took the power of his imagination and his voice and changed one small corner of the universe.

We don’t know exactly how, but Abraham’s and Sarah’s different use of privilege and entitlement would have transformed their tiny corner of the universe and might have affected generations to come.

So many people feel so powerless over the overwhelming current events of the world, but we have a choice: to be like Abraham and submit to our fear and the power structures that exist, or to decide we are entitled to use our voices, in big ways that challenge existing power structures, and also in small ways that challenge power structures.

Perhaps, if we decide we are entitled, we can take God’s commandment to go forth to unknown lands and bring more majesty into the world.