What Really Happened in Eden

What Really Happened in Eden

Our most modern sin is that we do not love the world enough. We have exiled the holy from this realm so we can turn its mountains into money. --- Erik Reece

Sometimes we get a long ways down a road and it suddenly hits us that all our assumptions about where we are going are totally cockeyed. Ass backwards. The landscape we see around us and the directions that guy at the last gas station gave us don’t match at all. He pointed this way & that. He spoke too quickly with an accent that was hard to follow. He said things would be getting better. But there were too many lefts and rights, and his eyes were as shifty as a politician-oil executive-arms dealer. And it’s getting dark. Very dark. We have to backtrack. Where did we go wrong? It’s a long trek all the way back, back through the technological revolution and the industrial revolution, the rise and fall of civilizations, iron age, stone age, back through the struggles for personal freedom and justice, all the wars, Beethoven, Adam Smith, Einstein and Galileo, towing the Erie Canal and trekking the Silk Road, feudalism and plagues, heroes and villains, prophets and soothsayers, ice ages and droughts, migrations, mastodons, and dispersions of tribes. All that history! It goes by in a blur.

That’s OK. Spending too much time with history only increases the burden that its bloody pageant was inevitable.

Let’s begin again with the myth in the Garden of Eden amongst the whispery trees and bee-happy flowers, singing birds and leaping fish, sweet fruits and berries, mammals and reptiles. What really happened where the four rivers --- Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates --- flowed, and Man and Woman were given everything they would need if only they would obey one commandment --- that they not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good an Evil? This is the same garden where the U.S. today has waged awful war & occupation. But let’s go without weapons, without the intent to kill and control, without propaganda and fear, without the crusading righteousness of the big lie, without the necessity of hypocrisy or the need to turn a profit, without our gas tank running low. Let’s go mythically, imaginatively.

What we find is a funny mixture of creation myth and reality, true story and deceit, metaphor that helps us see who we are, and metaphor that blinds. We find a story in which a god tells an immortal man and woman to live in harmony with a bountiful garden. They disobey that one commandment, ingest the knowledge of good an evil, and stripped of their innocence and immortality, are banished to fearful lives of wandering and death.

What’s wrong with this story? A good metaphor doesn’t have to make literal sense. It can ignore the constraints of time, but it has to adhere to a truth.

What is this truth? The garden is a gift. And the garden rules. Its only condition is that one has to live in harmony with it. This is the fundamental reality beyond which there are no other realities. For all intents and purposes the garden’s system is immortal (At least for the duration of its sun.) Call the fundamental principle God, call it Spirit, call it, as Dylan Thomas did, “the force that through the green fuse drives,” it doesn’t matter. The commandment is the same. Nature says there shall be no other god but me. Nature says, “Diss me, and I’ll get in your face.”

So, what really happened is this:

Man and Woman said, We want to be in control, use this garden in any ol’ way that tickles our fancy or slices our apple! Mine it. Develop it. Flip the Bud cans out the car window. Dams, plastic bags, trophy homes, SUVs. And, somebody, please poison those damn mosquitoes that had no business being her in the first place! See this apple? We can eat it, sell it, genetically engineer it, spray it with pesticides, juggle it five ways to Sunday. WeeeHaaa!

God says, I am Nature and the law of Nature, and your way invites death.

Man and woman say, “Take a hike, God.”

What really happened in the Garden of Eden is that Man thought he could banish God.
The story we tell is that God banished man. Not true. It was the other way round. Man posited, for his convenience, that the laws of nature and the resources of nature were not connected. He separated God and Nature in the same way that he separated himself from Nature. Man, in his hubris, thought he could banish the one and continue to live in the other. As though he could gag God, stuff him in the back of a cave, and Nature would then be man’s compliant, voiceless servant. His never ending source of profit.

Man became a ventriloquist speaking for God. The voice he invented was, of necessity, opportunistic. God said, Peace! God said, War! God said, Forgiveness. God said, Vengeance! God said, Equality. God said, Some are more equal that others. God said, I’m on your side … then, now I’m not! God said, Love the Earth. God said, I created the earth for your use and benefit so, cut down the forests, blow up the mountains, internalize profits, externalize costs, exterminate species, foul the rivers, pollute the air, poison the land, drag all the fish from the sea. God said, Exploitation is progress… And man speaking for God becomes ecstatic about smiting those who stand in the way of his profit.

It was not Adam and Eve’s physical nakedness that was the source of their shame. It was their naked greed. Gentlemen, they said, Start your bulldozers.

* * * *
Last week I traveled to Syracuse to give some talks at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public affairs at Syracuse University and at the ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse where I had a show of the portraits. I was very honored to meet with Oren Lyons who is the chief of the Onondaga Nation and who will soon be one of the portraits in this project. We talked about a notion that has long been central to the legal foundation of this country --- separation of church and state. What the early proponents of this separation were thinking was that religion should be a protected, private matter of choice. And, in a pluralistic society, the ideas of any one religion should not be allowed to take precedence over another, especially when they prescribe behaviors inconsistent with fundamental, secular freedoms and equalities. One’s religious faith may enhance one’s dedication to justice, but it can not be allowed to discriminate.

In other words, most of us are lead to believe that what the framers of our political society were trying to do was establish a Constitutional democracy and to avoid a theocracy --- by any dogma, sect or religion.

I was surprised, then, when Mr. Lyons said that Native-Americans knew the framers of the Constitution were making a terrible mistake when they separated church and state. He did not mean, though, that the U.S. should institute a Catholic, Hindu, Protestant, Islamic or Buddhist society. He meant that we should not have separated our laws, our economics, our systems of governance, education, transportation, business, food, and water from the reality of the earth and our natural spiritual relation to it. The warning of the Native-Americans was that when you try to separate your behavior from the reality of nature, you not only allow yourself to destroy nature, but also yourself. Opt off the Great Wheel, and it rolls right over you. It’s the same point I was making earlier about arrogant humans banishing God from nature. Our church is nature, and nature is our reality. Oren Lyons was saying people can choose religions affiliation, but our spiritual connection with the earth has chosen us. We can’t choose another denomination. Unless it’s a different planet. Honoring, says Mr. Lyons, through daily ceremony, our natural spiritual connection to the earth is not an act of faith, it’s a requirement of reality.

In the myth, Adam and Eve ate the apple, and were expelled from Eden and condemned to being mortal. The true significance of that moment was that humankind was demanding to be outside of and superior to the natural cycle of life. That cycle is, in effect, our immortality, all living things being recycled forever. So the myth should be interpreted that humans, in attempting to expel the Great Spirit, were expelled themselves, by their own choice, from the cycle of life --- the immortality of the garden. Humans insisted on using nature for profit but not being part of it. Native-Americans understood this. Too bad they weren’t asked to write a Preamble to the Constitution that explained how all human systems must be subservient to the reality of nature.

The good news is that the Spirit of Nature can always be invited back into the Garden. Nature is deeply wounded but not bitter. It loves life, not vengeance. If we honor our place in Nature, it will honor us.