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By Rev. Cynthia A. Snavely
November 14, 2010
Simon Tugwell in his book Prayer notes that “In (St. Irenaeus’s)
view, the Fall was essentially a matter of wrong growing up. St.
Irenaeus believed, as did many of the early Christians….that Adam
was created as a young child. The reason why he was forbidden to eat
from the tree of knowledge was simply that he had to grow up first,
and that takes time. Unfortunately, Adam was impatient; in trying to
anticipate his adulthood, by seizing the fruit before the time was
ripe, he thwarted the process of true maturing.”
Simon Tugwell says that the story of Adam and Eve is a story of
wrong growing up, but I would say it is not a story of wrong growing
up it is simply a story of growing up. It tells the truth that as we
mature we lose our innocence. We gain knowledge. We become adults,
who as Nikki Giovanni says, “both feel and inflict pain.”
I do not think it is simply coincidence that Adam’s punishment is to
labor to till the ground for food and that Eve’s is to have pain in
childbirth. In the agricultural society in which the story was first
told these were the responsibilities of adulthood for men and for
women.
I learned the old primer couplet, “In Adam’s fall we sinned all,”
but the idea that the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience meant
that all of us are born sinful—the idea of original sin—has never
been part of Jewish or Muslim theology. It is not even a part of all
Christian theologies.
I think of the story of Adam and Eve as one of those stories humans
have always told about why things are so, a story like a story about
how the elephant got its trunk or a story about why leaves change
color in the fall. In this case a story of why growing up can feel
like a rejection from Paradise.
I remember as a child thinking that it was possible to be perfect.
Some of my first jabs at growing up included lying to cover up not
being perfect. “Yes, I did study for the spelling test on which I
didn’t get a good grade.” “No, I didn’t walk through the mud in my
good shoes.” Of course, the facts that I didn’t know how to spell
the words on the test and that there was mud all over my shoes made
it pretty clear that these were lies. I also remember crying because
I had to lie to try to seem perfect and I was not perfect.
Perfection was the goal—what I was supposed to be. One wrong attempt
at growing up.
Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil. Looking back on it now not studying for a spelling test or
walking through mud in my good shoes seem like less than minor
crimes, but so much of growing up was learning what was right and
what was wrong.
I remember the struggles of young adulthood with the issue of sex.
Like many young Christian girls I had been taught that sex before
marriage was wrong. Better to “accidently” “sin” in the passion of
the moment than to have obtained protection and have “planned” to
“sin.” At 51 it seems silly now, but it seemed dread serious at 22.
So much of growing up is indeed as Tugwell says wrong growing up.
But it is in struggling through that wrong growing up that we come
to maturity. Nikki Giovanni needed to go through her moony debutant
and her young intellectual phases. They were part of her growing up.
None of us walk out of Eden fully grown. All of us do walk out of
Eden. Buechner says of Adam, “He could no longer remember why it was
he felt compelled to leave except that it had something to do with
asserting his independence.
Beyond that, he had only the dim sense that somehow a terrible
injustice had been done, or possibly a terrible justice.” That seems
to me a very true statement about growing up. We struggle to learn
what is good and what is evil on our own—not just believing what
some authority told us was so. We all eat of the tree ourselves. But
we find that we do not just suddenly know. We find out we don’t
know. And even when we think we do know, we are still feeling and
inflicting pain.
Is it a justice or an injustice that the world we would like to see
is a world without pain, an Eden, and the world that we do see and
live in and are a part of is a world full of pain? A couple thousand
years ago people came up with the idea that though this world isn’t
perfect someday there would be some cataclysmic event—and
apocalypse—and all would be made perfect. Whenever something goes
wrong my mother says, “Ah, well, Jesus is coming soon. But I am not
an apocalyptic thinker. I am not looking for the Messiah or the
Mahdi to make everything “right.” I am living in this world
believing that the only saviors coming are you and me and we are not
perfect and what we have come to know is that we don’t know.
Today I think a good part of my “wrong” growing up was my struggle
to be perfect. In the United Methodist Christian tradition in which
I was raised perfection was a legitimate goal. One of the
traditional Wesleyan questions asked at my ordination was “Do you
believe that you are going on to perfection in this lifetime?”
Correct answer, “yes.”
My present answer is “no.” Growing up is making a trip not just out
of Eden but down into the belly of the whale or into the underworld,
seeing the pain and evil in this world and surviving it. Christian
baptism, particularly adult immersion, is a symbol of that trip
below. Going under the water symbolizes death. To be brought back
out of the water is a symbol of a new birth, a return from death to
life. In order to become an adult one becomes again as a child. I
was taught growing up that that rebirth was a return to innocence.
That is not what I would preach today.
That new birth is not a rebirth of innocence and a new Eden. It is
more of an initiation rite into the adulthood of Nikki Giovanni’s
poem—an adulthood in which one comes to accept oneself as a real
person who both feels and inflicts pain.
We can come back from our journeys to the underworld to the Times
“usual recital—a new tax plan, the danger of oral contraceptives to
women over forty, the mayor’s special committee on child abuse.” Is
this some terrible injustice or some terrible justice? Will we call
the steward for a third martini to drown out the pain or will we
accept the mantle of adulthood and be a real live, black, brown or
white person who both feels and inflicts pain?
I would say that the second choice is the better one. I would also
say that most of us take many paths, debutant, intellectual, three
martini lunch businessman before we have the courage to choose to
really grow up and accept that this life includes pain. Leaving Eden
is not a punishment. It is what each of us must do to mature. To
face the pain and live life fully, not so much in spite of it as
with it—that is growing up. That is being a real live person. That
is the story of leaving Eden.
Rev. Snavely is currently Minister of
Goodloe Memorial UU Congregation in Bowie, MD
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