The Garden of Eden
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I was nine or ten when my mother gave me permission to plant and tend my first garden. She was a gardener too. In addition to ten children, my mother raised several lavish beds of exquisite purple and gold irises. I’ve associated irises with her ever since, and so they’ve always been my favorite flower.
My garden wasn’t a flower garden, though. I was given a rectangular patch of ground out behind the garage, and in it I planted my two favorite vegetables—corn and peas. The children in my family didn’t have much use for vegetables as a rule. But we all liked corn and at least some of us liked peas. I liked them both, and so that’s what I chose to try to grow.
That gardening project (and subsequent gardens too) provided as much of a miracle as I had ever experienced, or would experience until the birth of my children years later. You plant seeds in the dirt. Through the summer you make sure that they have plenty of water and that they aren’t choked out by too many weeds. You watch the seeds sprout into little plants that grow and grow. And then you witness the very beginning formation of the fruit. In time, spikes on the corn plant develop into the fullness of ears, and the little pods on the sprawling vines swell as a row of peas takes full shape inside them. And when the time is right…you get to eat them! It’s truly astonishing for a nine-year-old—or for someone of any age.
It’s small wonder that the writers of the Book of Genesis chose a garden as the setting where our story, our common human story, begins. I always thought I was particularly lucky to have a garden early on in my personal narrative. And at least in this Western Civilization, we all have this story of an exquisite, metaphorical, mythical garden as our shared beginning. The flourishing Garden of Eden, complete with its rivers and jungles and forests and orchards. Complete with its lush flora and teeming fauna. Complete with its myriad creatures. The key word in all of these descriptive phrases is complete. In this ancient creation story of our culture, the world and all of its almost innumerable parts were complete, were one—one with God.
I have to believe that the metaphorical God of Genesis was as blown away watching his garden develop as I was watching my peas and corn come along, except maybe a bazillion times more so. Can you imagine what it might have been like to give witness to and midwife the first orchid, the first watermelon, the first three-toed sloth, the first…everything?
As I picture it in the Book of Genesis, God isn’t necessarily a singular being. I prefer to think of creation happening in this story through the agency of a whole group of super beings. What would these gods have said to each other as they stood and watched the very first sky-blue robin’s egg crack open and give way to the peculiar little creature that emerged from inside? “Holy moly!” Or some expletive.
And then, what might they have said when they created the first human being, and then the second? I have to imagine they were rather pleased with themselves, at least at first. I suspect our group of metaphorical gods must have been quite delighted with themselves and their creation altogether. I wonder how long it might have taken, though, for them to tire of all that perfect completion. Perhaps it was a few days; maybe an eon. I wonder how long it might have taken them to cook up the idea of the two trees in the center of the garden—the tree of life and the tree that contained the knowledge of good and evil. Now that was a stroke of divine genius!
The presentation might have unfolded in a scene like this…. The chief god is riding along on the breeze during one of his early evening visits with the first couple. I picture him moving along, humming a little celestial air, “La dee dah, dee dah dah…Oh, by the way, Adam and Eve, don’t eat any of the fruit from that tree over there. Those apples… they contain more knowledge than either of you are capable of dealing with. You can’t handle truth like that.” And of course you know what has to happen next, whether or not you’ve ever heard the story before.
Sure enough, along comes the snake, and Eve is totally enthralled. Some historians believe that the snake represents the more earthy, the more nature-oriented (dare I say matriarchal) religions that preceded our Judeo-Christian strain. The new gods bait the trap; the old snake makes it irresistible. Humanity takes the bite that launches us, forever after, into a state of self-awareness and disunion from the wholeness of that garden, of that original completion.
The garden is the metaphorical uterus of the universe out of which we are expelled. We are no longer ignorant of our existence, no longer fed without our own personal effort, no longer sheltered without the sweat of our brow. Having emerged from the garden, we are no longer capable of being in effortless harmony with All-That-Is.
I suspect that in the story, the gods had to feign anger at Adam and Eve for having broken the one taboo that would have prevented them from becoming fully human. But I suspect that the whole gang of gods must have secretly cheered as the prospect of the unpredictable found its way into their design. Creativity now gained expression beyond the gods’ own efforts. Creativity was now also in the minds and hearts and hands of mortals. The gods must have been quite pleased that their plan to get the kids to move out of the garden was so successful. Easy enough for the gods.
Having sprung from that metaphorical womb of the garden was quite a different story for humanity, though—a story fraught with unknown possibilities of free will. And so a part of our struggle has been to get back to the garden ever since. As Joni Mitchell puts it in her song “Woodstock”:
We are stardust;
We are golden;
We are billion year old carbon;
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
It would have been easier, yes? It would have been easier to have stayed in that fertile crescent of divine completion. Easier to have stayed in the garden where we were one, unseparated from the universe, from mother/father god. It would be simpler even now to be back in that garden—not to be challenged by issues of the environment or oppression or world hunger; issues of political inflexibility or sectarian warfare. We would have no need to anguish over the things we don’t know, and more over things we do know. We wouldn’t have to worry about where we came from or what might be our ultimate destiny. We would never have to fret over unrequited love, or grieve the loss of a loved one, or mourn the advent or the conclusion of a debilitating disease or some other loss.
If we didn’t know ourselves as ourselves, we could not know of a universe where anything less than completion or wholeness is possible. In such a garden we couldn’t experience a sense of separation from our source, from one another or from our planet. Nor though, could we appreciate the beauty of the very earthly, very spiritual connections that do hold us all together.
There are religious perspectives that encourage people to go back, to deny the world. There are religious perspectives that encourage people to consider themselves as separate from creation in order to be closer to God, closer to the source of being, closer to a state of bliss that might be achieved by shutting the world out.
But I believe theologian Matthew Fox got it right when he described the fall in the garden, not as original sin, but as “original blessing.” That little bite of apple doesn’t represent a fall so much as it represents a blossoming.
The first garden was never meant to be ours forever. We had to leave in order to learn what it was and who we are. We had to leave in order to learn how to hold life and those in it as precious. We had to leave in order to learn to care and to love. We had to leave so we could figure out ways of growing—not back to, but forwards toward—the garden, carrying with us our burgeoning humanity of knowledge and love.
Here’s the thing—our desire to get back to the garden is as natural to us as breathing. But unless we are able to leave that shelter first, then nothing else could ever be precious to us. Until we are expelled from the garden, until we choose life, we are incapable of loving anything or anyone. What being human allows us is the possibility of recognizing our mortality, so that we might hold dear every moment and every connection that makes us real, makes us alive, that makes us human in this world.
The truth of it is that we are all challenged by issues of the environment and oppression and world hunger, issues of political inflexibility and sectarian warfare. We do anguish over some of the things we don’t know, and over many more that we do. We are left to consider, often with more than a slight amount of trepidation, where we come from and what might be our ultimate destiny. We do fret over unrequited love; we grieve the loss of loved ones; we mourn the ravages of disease and other losses. We do all of these because that’s the result of self-awareness, the result of being human.
In this all-too-short script that is our life, these are the blossoms and the vegetation, the annuals and perennials, that we have been given to cultivate so that we might grow our souls.
Our lives are beautiful accumulations of all kinds of flowerings that come as the results of the gifts—including the hardships—that have been given to us Our part of the story is, and has always been, our free will—the care with which we choose to embrace or ignore the opportunities to tend the soil and the spirit in the ongoing work of creation.
We rejected Eden, that garden of naïveté, when we sprouted from the womb. Like Adam and Eve, our very nature calls us to the cultivation of discovery, appreciation and love. The garden we seek now is not the one that we left behind long ago. It is a much finer garden, with far richer soil, blessed by all the trials and tribulations that have been and that will be a part of our lives. We are stardust;
We are golden; We are billion year old carbon; and we’ve got to work our way… up to the garden.
- The Garden of Eden - May 1, 2013
