More Light

For six years, The Light of the World, a daytime soaper based on the Bible, did a decorous one-a-day, Monday through Friday, for General Mills. Last March, with flour short, General Mills turned off The Light. Result: all over the U.S. church groups, which had used the show in Bible study, squawked loud & long. This week, with flour again in stock, General Mills once more beamed The Light to devoted listeners.

The show had the best of intentions: "To bring listeners the wisdom and beauty of the Bible in dramatic, exciting form." But Chapter I of Katharine Seymour's eleven episodes about Adam & Eve was more soap opera than Scripture. Excerpts: "As the years passed, Adam & Eve [played by Phil Clarke, 43, and Eleanor Phelps, 30-odd, in their best Sunday voices], haunted always by memories of the paradise they had lost, struggled to build a new life for themselves and their children. ... It is an afternoon in early summer. . . . Eve, preparing the evening meal . . . looks up eagerly as her husband enters.

" 'Adam! You're home early.' " Adam is worried about weather, crops, and his son Cain, who is a wild spirit. Eve comforts him: "God has been kinder to us than we deserved.' "' Than we deserved ! It was your -- "'Yes, I know. ... You remind me of it often enough. It's my fault that we're here now instead of in the Garden of Eden. But... we have each other, Adam.' " 'Yes, that's true. But I wish you wouldn't talk so much when I come home tired.' " 'You used to like to hear me talk Don't you love me any more?' "

The script glosses over The Fall, ends with a regulation cliff-hang: Will Adam tell Cain & Abel why their parents were kicked out of the Garden of Eden? And if he does, what will the unmanageable Cain do?

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