I am a theoliterary Christian. I find spiritual meaning in the stories of the bible regardless of their questionable historical validity. However, I’ve never been much of a buyer-in of the Garden of Eden story. I guess I’ve never found anything in the story that has reached and grabbed my spiritual sensibilities.
There are many difficulties I have with the story. The main being that I don’t need a creation myth; science has given me more than enough ideas to chew on when it comes to how the universe began and how humanity populated the world. Also, the traditional Eden interpretation of humanity falling from grace is so imbedded between the lines, I’ve not been able to read the text a different way. Well, at least until yesterday.
In the story God says, “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.” The day we made the choice to live in a morally compartmentalized world is the day we died. Once society became based on right and wrong we lost the ability to live at center, to live embraced by god. Having to be a right way, compared to a wrong way, is why we are socialized. It is why we are molded to be what society says, rather than to be what we are.
What keeps us from God is all the junk we’ve been fed about how we should be. That junk is what was hung on the tree in the Garden of Eden. That junk is what humanity ate. God knew that once we created a knowledge of right and wrong there was no going back. We would be stuck in the cycle of trying to be a certain way, failing, beating ourselves up for it and then trying again. In this process we never find out who we are. We never find out who god is. Rather, we spin around and around hiding from ourselves and from the divine behind the sewed fig leaves of, “should,” “ought,” “don’t” and “can’t”
We never fell from grace, we fell into social conditioning.
