looking in the mirror, i see myself

looking deeper, i see the light of Christ

deeper, i see the compassion of God

more deeply yet, i see the self

completed and whole

 

 

 

In the beginning Being is always good, which is to say whole, holy, complete.  For Jews and Christians, at the centre of all existence is this truth: Life is Good. Sometimes we might be confused by this truth, because so much of what we have inherited about the faith says that life is, in fact, intrincically and irredeeemably "bad" without sacrficial redeption through Jesus the Christian Messiah. Indeed, some schools of Christian thinking maintain a doctrine that separates the saved — those who have accepted Jesus and, in some formulations, have led blameless lives — and the damned, who are everybody else. This dualistic thinking — good and bad, saved and damned — has a well-developed mythology for the emotionally vulnerable of the intellectually frozen, but little impact for mature thinkers. Nor is it satisfying for those who cannot accept the mythology and have no faith that the church has anything else to offer. Some of these latter folks — at least a generation away from any formal religious formation — do not even know how to being to think about goodness or what it means to be alive.

 

By  goodness, I am suggesting that which is capable of being fulfilled, or being completed. Though it may appear partial, it has within itself the seeds of completion and maturity. Moreover that which is good is productive of an intentional and contained abundance. 

 

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Genesis 1:31

 

So goodness occurs when there is enough rain to grow in an agricultural area, but not so much rain that there is flooding. Goodness is having enough to eat so that there is some to share but not so much that others are starving. Goodness is knowing when to say enough and when to say “I need”  and when to ask “do you need/” Goodness has a logical and observable discipline to it. If we poison our food supply, we will suffer. Goodness says, “Let the earth and the water be healthy and clean.”

 

Jesus says to his disciples, “Only God is good.” And thus, the holiness of God is good; it is how we name the Divine in our lives. We say, “That is good” and we taste that which is holy. Original goodness is both the raw mould and the work in progress as it moves from the partial to the complete. Goodness is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending of what exists; holiness is wholeness, completion, teleios in Greek, that which rests within the Alpha and the Omega yet surpasses the boundaries of creation and resolution. Goodness is the spark of holiness within the creation, the great variety of experience that reveals the holiness that imprints and surrounds the creation. 

 

In what other ways can we capture this idea of goodness? If we use the metaphor of God as the Divine parent, progenitor of all that is, then everything has within it, encoded in its DNA, that quality that is good, absolutely and indissolubly. Goodness is that quality which we recognize as the unique and pure nature of anything. Whatever is it that we are remarking upon except the intrinsic beauty, grace and truth we see in some thing or some being? It is not that the thing or being has some exterior grade, but that we resonate to some indefinable but recognizable quality that has the power to move us, to charm us, to make us feel, to cause us to wonder or to react in awe. It is not simply beauty, truth or grace by themselves, but the totality and unity to which we are responding. Nor do I mean perfection by the idea of goodness, but rather that indefinable, elemental quality that allows us to glimpse that which is complete or has an undiluted essence about it. That quality which says either, “I am just at the beginning,” “I am at my ending,” or “I am the  the fullness that you might call God.”

 

Frederick Buechner, in his book, The Longing for Home, speaks about a vision of wholeness that we each carry as a sign of the image of God within us. He tells of a visit that he and his family made to Sea World in Florida. There they watched the killer whale show:

 

“What with the dazzle of sky and sun, the beautiful young people on the platform, the soft southern air…. It was as if the whole creation—men and women and beasts and sun and water and earth and sky and, for all I know, God himself—was caught up in one great, jubilant dance of unimaginable beauty…. This is the joy that is so apt to be missing…the joy of not just imagining to believe at least part of the time that life is holy but of actually running into that holiness head-on…. I think maybe it is holiness that we long for more than we long for anything else.”

(P.126, 129-30)

 

For those of us who believe that life is a mystery imbued with the Divine, this quality reflects holiness and it can appear in the least likely places—a killer whale performance in Florida, the twinkle in a beggar’s eye, the awesome display of the universe in the Northern Lights, the deadly beauty of a virus under the microscope, a bed of trout lilies found by chance in the woods, the dramatic ravages of the 1999 icestorm in Quebec. And it is present in all the more usual places: great music, art, literature, small children and wise seniors. We who talk about the incarnation of holiness can say only  that God is fully present in the minutiae of the creation yet also exists independently of us. Yet it would seem that God has limited the Divine freedom and is now tied to the creation. God is invested in developing this relationship with all that is becoming. For Christians, the concept of Jesus’ incarnation in the world signifies that God links and limits the Divine self within the Beloved who is the incarnation of both God’s love and the best of humanity.

When we speak like this, we are suggesting that within matter itself, are the forms and potential of Divine expression and existence. And that makes many of us uncomfortable: to consider the world of matter and the world of Spirit as equally acceptable ways to describe the presence of the Divine and to suggest that matter is not second-rate but a question of perspective when we think about holiness and God. Most of us have moved away from the idea of matter as corrupt, as a sign of our fallen nature, and have moved to recognize matter as at least neutral. But what if we said that matter is intrinsically good; that although matter can be temporarily distorted or adapted, ultimately, its own unique goodness will prevail; that whatever is becoming, will become what it ought to be, regardless of any side-paths or alternate routes it takes or is forced to take in its becoming. And what it is becoming will recognise itself from the beginning to the ending of its journey. It will not be identical to its origins because it will “remember” the journey. But it will be the fuller version of itself, the harvesting of Wisdom, experience and promise.

 

One of the characteristics of the first creation story in Genesis is that it is about the birth of goodness into matter. In this story, matter is not neutral, nor is it corrupt; it is divine, made from the divine substance and nurtured the way a bird nurtures its young, brooding over creation, or the way air is breathed into a lifeless body to cause it to quicken. 

 

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

 

The account says that God made something from nothing. If the only thing existing was the Creator, then the creator used the divine-self to create. The creation is imprinted with holiness right from the beginning; right from the beginning, the Creator hums and pats and caresses the creation with approval and delight.

  When the Creator regards the world, the Creator is regarding the divineself in its potential and in its completion. As we consider the quality that we describes as goodness we understand it is not merely a state of being, but a verb, an action of holiness. The Creator works and then the Creator appreciates, two activities that tells us about the action of goodness in our lives. If everything is good, then the creator’s actions are likewise good. Therefore, we can say that both work and sabbath (rest) are blessed expressions of God’s goodness.

Creation, in its stately, movement steps through eternity with a sabbath rhythm, first the work, then the rest, then the work. The void, the matter, the void. The potential, the actual, the potential. Matter is good, potential is good. The work is good and the resting is good. Neutrinos race away from the sun, then collapse into the explosion of a new creation. In one moment we “make” and in the next moment we appreciate that which we have made. We are and we are not; then we are. The implications of this are far reaching in terms of how we regard our lives and the reason for our existence. 

If we never stop, then we will never regard what we are making in either an evaluative or an appreciative way. And if we are afraid to stop, then what are we saying about how we are using the gift of life that we have received? To stop and appreciate the work is at least as important as the work itself because it is in the reflection on what we have accomplished that we are able to see the value, the “goodness” of what we have done. It is in the sabbath moments that we recognize our link to Holiness and the inestimable value of each life, each artifact of the Maker of all. It is in the resting that we ask ourselves if we are working in harmony and collaboration with holiness, or if what we are making is a pointless distortion that hides rather than reveals Holiness. 

Who would choose to make that which is not good? 

To indict and isolate oneself in this way is the tragedy of those whose work offers no meaning and no connection to the original act of God’s will. It is lifeless and lacking the breath of holiness, the Ruah of God, the wind sweeping over the waters. To continue such activity is to bankrupt the soul of its original goodness and energy; to distance oneself from the Source of life. It is the death of spirit in this life. 

Unfortunately, it is rarely the work of individuals. We are caught in systems that need to be rethought and reconfigured within the parameters of a life-oriented plan in which the well-being of all individuals is the highest priority. While work that is not life-oriented does destroy people and societies in time, I am not convinced that it ultimately has any ontological effect. To make sense of what has happened to us, we may want to reflect on our use of life and our appreciation or abuse of the created order for ourselves and for our children. To be hopeful is to have long vision. It is a sadness that we cannot realize the peaceable kingdom within our lives. For most of the world, life is about struggle and suffering and early death. In the immediate future, it would be difficult to believe that goodness could be formed from the perversity of much human behaviour. It is far more tempting to relinquish hope for a weary cynicism. To perceive that goodness requires either great spirit or the discipline to find an oasis of peace and freedom, to intentionally base our lives on the premise of abundance for all. The work of the third millennium is to create a new set of conditions, values and expectations for the world and for human life. Each society and culture will need to work through the lenses of their own belief systems.

These premises of faith and acts of intellectual discipline are another way to describe how we impose meaning on the world as we experience it. The way we impose order and organization on the world has something to do with how we understand the point of being alive. In a linear world, we think of order as moving from one stage to another, moving from conception to birth to death, or from idea to design to prototype to completion to obsolescence. It is a fairly tidy idea and it allows humans a sense of control that excludes randomness except as accidental. Assembly line thinking comforts us the most of anything. In this model, obedience and following directions are the best way; the opportunity to daydream, to reflect, to step outside the boundaries is dangerous and impractical. 

In this system, we are able easily to assign meaning and purpose to whatever happens because order suggests predictability, not surprise. It also allows us to exclude that which does not fit the system into a tidy category that we name evil. By this understanding, evil is anything that will not fit the conveyor belt; evil is that which seems ‘other’ to us, or ‘abnormal’. We struggle to understand it. We think of cancer as abnormal and as evil when in fact, it is simply a natural product whose primary offence is to threatens our lives. Indeed, anything that threatens what we perceive to be the natural order —on the assembly line— is deemed to be evil. 

Evil can be assigned to any breach of conformity, whether or not that breach is truly harmful or is in fact a breath of fresh creativity. Rather, I would suggest that true evil requires conformity in a way that is foreign to goodness. And not only conformity but fatigue and overwork or oppression. Evil is the distortion of how we understand our own beauty and the divine within. Evil is the result of doubting that we are made for joy and for goodness. Evil is the by-product of disrespect for the holiness within and it destroys everyone and everything it touches. Elie Weisel once said, “ We have seen the metamorphosis of history, and now it is our duty to bear witness. When one people is destined to die, all others are implicated. When one ethnic group is humiliated, humanity is threatened. Hitler’s plans to annihilate the Jewish people and to decimate the Slavic nations bore the germ of universal death. Jews were killed, but humankind was assassinated.” (p. 160, From the Kingdom of Memory) Evil requires uniforms for the oppressor and uniforms, or nakedness, for the abused. Evil dehumanizes everyone into roles and functions, as Weisel said at the Barbie trial, “Declared to be less than a man, and therefore deserving neither compassion nor pity, the Jew was born only to die—just as the killer was born only to kill.…Except for Hoss…no killer has repented. Their logic? There had to be executioners to eliminate a million and a half Jewish children; killers were needed to annihilate four and a half million Jewish adults.” (p.185)

In the early church, evil was thought to be a prowling predator or an inevitable flaw in “fallen” human nature. Evil was either a demonic force outside of us or an inner malady. We have a great deal of difficulty accepting that evil is always a choice and that choice is developed in a society. I am suggesting that evil is a distortion in how we view life and the world, each other and God. It has great power because it has the same beginnings as goodness, but it is like trying to see oneself in moving water or a broken mirror. It is like trying to thread a needle without my bifocals —impossible and frustrating. The cold comfort about the artifacts of evil, is that, while devastating in the present and for the nearer future, they are nonetheless doomed to dissolution. What is redeemed after great suffering is goodness, holiness, the clear vision to which we always return as the compass returns to its northerly point. So true evil is ultimately futile, but with devastating power in the present to rob us of our holiness, our equilibrium, to make us doubt our true nature as children of the Divine.

Socially, we have created a caricature of goodness. It has come to mean following the rules, avoiding change, behaving in “natural ways”, obeying the script, being nice. But what if none of this has anything to do with goodness at all? What if authentic goodness, is about becoming, evolving, changing, breaking things and making them new, breaking ourselves so that we can be new, dying so that we may live, suffering so that we may grow? What if randomness is part of the nature of the Divine and what if we are most like the Creator when we allow for the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty in our lives? (the idea that the exact position and speed of a particle is impossible to absolutely determine and the smaller the particle, the less predictable it is.) What if resigning ourselves to participation in assembly line thinking is evil? A reversal of what constitutes social good, a redefinition of sensible thinking, would free us from many of our social failures. The teaching of Jesus was so radically opposed to “sensible” thinking that the gospel writers recorded some of these sayings, possibly in their own surprise and confusion about what he could have meant by them,

 

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. (Matthew 20:1-10)

 

or;

 

“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.

(Mark 9:35-37)

 

These are examples of a way of life that values humans as living beings rather than as commodities to be bought, sold and manipulated for short term satisfactions. Goodness is revealed in the clarity and simplicity of these responses. Allow people what they need rather than what they deserve; practice humility and cherish it in others. To see the world in this manner is to stand with the Creator at the beginning and the end, to know that it is all very good and to love the creation with a fierce and protective passion. It is to stand with Christ at the cross for love and for loss, for hope and in solidarity; it is to say that this creation is good enough to die for, that humanity is loved enough to die with. To share this perspective opens the possibility as ourselves as creators also, ourselves as those who make that which is good. It is to remind ourselves that all matter is good and it is being transformed by us and by God.

I like to think about creation as clay, as paint, as Word developing form, only to elude definition just as it solidifies. In this sense, the evolution of matter is not decay but chaos becoming order we recognize, becoming chaos we fear, becoming order we do not recognize. A definition of chaos that I like to use is to think of chaos as unconstructed matter, awaiting the intervention of form. Then form must be thought of as transitional, awaiting re-creation. 

 

This teacher tells us we must ride the unknown. She has made many pots. She says we cannot rely on a formula. She has made pot after pot over many years and she says she still rides the unknown….She says every rule we have memorized…every law must yield to experience. She says we must learn from each act, and no act is ever the same.…The possibilities, we see, never end. And when we take the vessel out of the fire, our teacher tells us, we will always be surprised.

“The Possible”, Susan Griffin

 

Once a person has lived long enough, this becomes a truth both in the microcosm of the person and in the macrocosm of the universe. We all move through different phases of our lives, from ovum and zygote to maturity and finally death, but in between, there are many stages in which we are reinvented either by external change in our lives or we choose to recreate ourselves to satisfy the yearning for transformation. 

One way to think about history is to see it as the record of people being refashioned and choosing ways to be and to become. The most encouraging thing about the stories of the Hebrew people is their immediacy and reality. There are few totally evil people and there certainly are no people without tragic flaws. They are like us and so we can identify with their struggles, losses and triumphs. These narratives mark an evolution of consciousness which could be called “humanity grows up”. 

 

The very first story in the Hebrew/Christian Bible is the story of beginnings, but what beginnings? We hear that when the earth is formed, it is GOOD. When people are formed, they are GOOD. Then a new narrator enters the story. 

 

In the day that God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up…God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…

God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Then God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” …And the rib that God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

They heard the sound of God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of God among the trees of the garden. 9 But God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” 

…The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And God made garments of skins for the man † and for his wife, and clothed them.

Then God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” therefore the God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Genesis 2:4;3:1-

 

This narrator is concerned about why if God is good and the creation is good, there is so much suffering in the world, why humanity created in the image of God feels estranged from the holiness of God. Excellent questions, questions to be considered but not answered perhaps . In any case, the answer for millennia has been that humanity “fell” from grace because we disobeyed a fairly simple directive. The story is of course layered and shadowed with many possibilities. One less attractive view of the Divine is that it says to itself, “We better not let the humans get away with this or they will become gods like us and we could be overthrown.” This interpretation offers a picture of a poor planner for a deity, an insecure god who can be easily overthrown by a brand new creation. Of course, then it is only a matter of time before we humans will attempt exactly that.

One story that does not appear in the book of Genesis, but has a long history, suggests that there is a pre-creation “court” over which God presides and that the war in heaven is transferred to our world before we exist. One stream of this mythology was a polemic against enemies within Judaism rather than “the nations” or in Jesus’ day, the Romans. Elaine Pagels writes: “Even the images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority–images of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil–paradoxically express the intimacy of Mark’s relationship with the Jewish community as a whole, for, as we shall see, the figure of Satan, as it emerged over the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing Israel from without, but the source and representation of conflict within the community.” (p.34 The Origin of Satan) In extracanonical versions, humanity is locked in a cosmic battle between the forces of goodness and evil, in which Genesis tells the story ofthe first battleground on earth. Both the Gnostics and the Manichees favoured these approaches. The Dead Sea Scrolls also speak of the battle for heaven and earth. “On the day the Kittians fall, there shall be mighty combat and carnage in the presence of the God of Israel, for this is the day he appointed of old for the final battle against the Sons of Darkness.” (P.301)

Another way to think about this is that humanity is offered choices and opportunity for self-definition. In this framework, God becomes the guide rather than the ruler of cosmic destiny; God allows the creation to open and develop with nudges —some more forceful than others— but with the principle of randomness and uncertainty part of both divine and human reality. I think that regardless of the original intentions of the author(s) of Genesis, this interpretation offers us room to explore ideas of how an intrinsically good creation might develop in a dynamic universe which if planned at all, is sketched only in rough outline.

I choose to read the story with this assumption: Nothing but God’s creation inhabited the garden. I allow for the principle of randomness and freedom to be characteristics of goodness/holiness. That means we must consider the serpent and that creature’s role. The serpent in the garden carries all the ambivalence of that ancient symbol of healing and of testing, of challenge and of new beginnings. To consider other instances where serpents have power, we could remember the serpent Moses holds up in the wilderness. 

 

Then God sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against God and against you; pray to God to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And God said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. (Numbers 21:6-90

 

Serpents represented wisdom, healing and eternal life as well as death in the ancient world. The remnant from Greece we see in the caduceus, the staff of Hermes or Mercury, the symbol on contemporary doctors’ diplomas. It was also a common belief that the snake was virtually immortal and would go on to another life after it had shed its skin. The seraphim were represented as fiery serpents, messengers and reflections of the divine fire. The serpent then carried a weight of intention and meaning. Not simply a seducer, but rather the one who tests, God’s prosecutor and healer, a principle of possibility and uncertainty in the midst and as part of the goodness.

In the Christian era, we can look at the gospel story in which Jesus is compared not to Moses, but to the serpent. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:14) Jesus then carries the incarnation of the Creator (goodness) and the mission of the serpent to test and to heal. Gnostics would recognize this line of imagery, but they would often see it as condemnation of the God who set limits on human freedom; nor would they have conceded that the serpent is as much a part of a good and loving God as the rest of creation. ”This [sic] radical teacher dared to tell the story of Paradise from the serpent’s point of view, and depicted the serpent as a teacher of divine wisdom who desperately tried to get Adam and Eve to open their eyes to their creator’s true and despicable nature. (Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, p.69) 

To return to Moses’ serpent, what I think is interesting is to consider what has to happen before the people in the Hebrew story can use the serpent. They have to be bitten, they have to repent and they have to turn to God, in the action of Moses, for deliverance. A useful comparison can be made with the story of Jesus washing Peter. Peter initially demurs, then relents. Again Peter promises fidelity, but then denies his relationship with Jesus. Peter has to be “bitten” before he can get on with understanding his relationship with Jesus and his mission. 

In the Genesis story, the serpent invites the people to open their eyes, to share in the self-knowledge and awareness that could be their inheritance as creatures of the Holy One. And so they bite and are bitten —the fortunate fall— and become like God, knowing good and evil, knowing suffering and shame, the pain of birth and the fear of death. Traditionally this story is seen as the curse of humanity, but it is not written anywhere that people would not suffer and die otherwise; only that they were not to be aware. The first people suddenly recognize themselves as separate, as different and they are afraid. And so they cover themselves with leaves as if they were still part of the environment, as if they were not separate ­although they always were, even if they were unaware. 

The curse which people bring upon themselves is to evolve to being more than domestic breeding animals, to trade in a sense of blissful ignorance for awareness and individuality. With this evolution comes a share in the responsibilities of being like a god, having power over the environment we inhabit, the animals which we dominate, the other people with whom we share the earth, the way we interpret the purpose of our existence, our capacity for awe and wonder and love and cruelty. And who suffers the most for this choice? We often think of the people, but they only experience what awareness causes them to interpret as pain and labour. The one who invites us to grow up (the serpent) and the earth upon which we walk receive the full burden of our choice, but is this a description of what ensues or a curse?

 

“Because you have done this,

cursed are you among all animals

and among all wild creatures;

upon your belly you shall go,

and dust you shall eat

all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman,

and between your offspring and hers;

he will strike your head,

and you will strike his heel.”

And to the man he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,

and have eaten of the tree

about which I commanded you,

‘You shall not eat of it,’

cursed is the ground because of you;

in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; (Genesis 3:14-17)

 

Is awareness good news? Not for the creation or the serpent and not if you never have wanted to leave the nest. It has been my observation, that the birds who want to stay in the nest, want to do so only on their own terms. They want to change the nest rather than make their own nests. So they have to go because the truth is that we all grow and change whether we want to or not. And the nest changes, too. The nest can never support too many adult birds. It becomes inadequate and crumbles until a new nest has to be made for new life. There was a rather amusing commercial on television about parents hiding some food product from a returning child so that he would not return to the nest. Hardly a fiery sword but effective nonetheless. 

The second creation story tells of humanity becoming conscious, self-activating, autonomous to some extent. It is the story of the day we left home because we wanted to change the rules in the nest. The question is not whether we can get back in the nest, but whether or not we will accept the responsibility of being like the gods, the responsibility of living interdependently with our environment, the possibility of understanding suffering not as punishment but as the reality of being self-aware and self-activating. Humanity seems stuck in a permanent pouting adolescence in which we will neither accept responsibility nor give thanks that we have been invited into the awesome reality that is the Divine.

St. Paul writes about the human conundrum of willing the good but doing “evil”:

 

For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.(Rom.7:14-20) 

 

 Anyone who has struggled with addiction to anything from chocolate to heroin will acknowledge that will power alone cannot save a person from a compulsion. Grace comes from change, from self-knowledge, from a sense of one’s participation in the larger society, from the prospect of a greater pleasure than the transient gratification of the addiction. For some, this greater pleasure is the love of God and trust in divine mercy. For Paul, it is faith in the efficacy of the Christ.

Paul’s dichotomy of body and spirit is the inadvertent beginning of some confused pathways down which Christianity has wandered. In fact, the evolution of personal consciousness is the only true conversion that will work and sometimes it is not the flesh that is the problem at all, but our ideas about why we are alive, our ideas about how we are connected one to another. Jesus himself does not recommend a “spiritualized” ethic, but a an engaged and engaging way of life that says that personal and corporate sin have to be faced down and conquered by love, not by any other discipline, not by any weapon. It is love that most scares the disciples and makes them particularly anxious about Jesus’ teachings. Love compared to legalisms, love compared to aggression, love compared to social order, love compared to revenge.

Paul remains fixed in God’s mercy as a way to deliverance but from what for Paul? From this earthly life, from the inadequacies of human will power, or from the torment of self-knowledge without forgiveness? I suspect that it is the element of forgiveness and divine compassion that most compels Paul as a Christian. Paul comes to consciousness about his cruelty, his prejudice, his own sell-out to Roman authority and this “bite” leads to his conversion. The bravery, solidarity in community and love for others demonstrated especially by the Christian victims of Roman authority, lead to the conversions of many.

The analogy Paul sets up between Jesus and adamah, the first human, fits this formula but offers us some serious problems in the light of our earlier discussion. 

 

Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:45-49)

 

If adamah before the encounter with the snake is without sin, then it would seem that the ideal human has a lack of self-consciousness, a lack of awareness rather than a deepened awareness–which is how we understand what it means for Jesus to be without sin, All the time of self-consciousness then would be reckoned to be the time of sin, or alienation, which is insulting to the people of the world between the “two adams”, if not to the Creator. The Reverend Louise Tappa, a Baptist minister from the Cameroons once asked the question about the pre-Christian era: “While God was with the people Israel, was God not also with the other people of Africa? Did God not speak also to them in their own languages and cultures? And were our stories not as sacred as the story of the Hebrew people?” Unless we have a hierarchy of blessedness, then we have to accept that God was with all the people everywhere, but was heard and received in a diverse understanding and through diverse experiences. Perhaps it is not so much that we are living in the time of sin, but in the time of learning how to take the next step in social and personal consciousness.

Then we may want to think that the snake episode of Judeao-Christian origins is in fact a divine intervention to test the potential of humanity for participation in the reality that is the divine. The figures of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus offer access to a variety of ways to self-understanding, of participating in the knowledge of good and evil that are more life-giving and less tormenting for human life. At heart, the rabbis reminded the Jewish people that Torah is about loving one’s neighbour and honouring and loving God by the ways in which we appreciate the gift of life. This is quite simply, Jesus’ teaching before the church added new layers to it. 

Perhaps another way of considering adamah and Jesus might be to say that in them, we can see that even in the time of trial, there is goodness and new life, that our limitations as humans can also provide us with new ways to live, new insight into the ways in which we are and are not participants in the divine. The first human experiences the terror of leaving the nest, the fear of abandonment by the parent, the thrill of a new beginning, the need to form community and make a new home. But the Holy One cares for and prepares these first people; they are given clothes and they remain in relationship. Nor do they die immediately; they multiply in fact. Jesus walks into human life and faces the terror of abandonment, the risk of wisdom, the pain of loving. In Jesus what is framed is not a history of sin, but a story of growth and change and hope.

Sin then becomes every time of turning from awareness of self, of others, to an illusion of our “nest” time when we could hide from our true natures. In reality, this is blended moment by moment as we choose and reject different ways of being alive, different self definitions. It is a bit like an old union song, “Whose side are you on?” And it ought to haunt us when we forget that in every decision, we are making this choice. The Gnostics thought that we could escape our human limitations by special knowledge and introduction to a particular construction of mystery, but in fact it is the ordinariness of life that holds the secret. It is in solidarity with all of the creation that we discover the truth of our human nature. Part of that truth lies in humility as we acknowledge that we are still in process, that to move along further, we will have to bring an end to war and find ways to live carefully with our environment.

Is growing up good? Well, it depends on the history into which we have been born and the ways in which we learn to grapple with our own place in the world. For each person and each society, a level of reflection is required to decide how we will change and what we will change. In our time, we are encouraged to see the decision making as too complex for the average human. Although we complain, we are happy to have the powers and principalities in the driver’s seat. I hope that makes everyone profoundly uncomfortable. Anyone who has read Aldous Huxley has had adequate warning about the horror of relinquishing responsibility to faceless power. When asked about a coin, Jesus replied somewhat archly that one should give Caesar his own. What belongs to Caesar anyway? Is the world understood to be a divine creation? Whose plan has ascendancy, whose reality needs to be lifted up, which pragmatism offers life and growth and which offers death? Once we are able to recognize the boundary between Caesar and holiness, then we will begin the next stage of human development.

The questions from the garden are not frivolous questions. They are not about sexuality or obedience, but about power and responsibility., They are about accepting a choice and a destiny that is unplanned, a destiny that is created as we go along the path of history. If Jesus is the incarnation of God, then that incarnation resides partially in each one of us to be used for good or ill, for healing or for punishment. Most particularly, it is of concern to Christians as it resides in the church. What people see when they hear about Jesus are the organizations of the church, so we had better consider carefully what picture of Jesus we are offering the world. One of the principles if Buddhism is to do no harm, but Christians are required not only to do no harm but to fix what we have broken, to account for what we have let slip, to grow where we have ravaged and to be transparent in our actions. It frightens me to consider the task with which we have been charged, but I do not want to be frightened to death nor do I want to frighten the world to death. We say casually in the church that Jesus died that we might live, so what does that say about our lives? What is the task of discipleship? Pick up you cross, give a drink to these little ones, bless those who curse you, leave your gift and at the altar and go to your enemy, and so on. It is not ambiguous, just demanding.

Heraclitus said that you can never step in the same river twice and that is obviously true as anyone who has ever attempted to return to the nest knows, To understand that the flow is changing, the water is changing, we are changing and the whole of creation is imbued with the radiance of the divine is to decide that we are either polluters and pillagers or pilgrims and healers. The water will ultimately spiral to its true nature —with or despite us—but how and who will we be in the water? I think we have followed Jesus, at least partly, because we wanted to hear, “This day you are my Beloved. I am well pleased in you.”

In all things, goodness.

 

Source of our beginning and refuge of our ending, open us to us the pathway of discovery. 

Grant us eyes to see your goodness reflected in the whole of creation. 

Open our hearts to love your world and to journey with you in confidence

and in the sure and certain hope that we are yours forever. 

We ask this in the power of love that is the Risen Christ. 

Amen.