The Garden of Eden, a perfect place. Safe, comfortable, a place where everything is named and maintained. A place where all of your needs are met – and we have learned that when all of your needs are met, you grow. Many of you may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from a psychology or human development class. The bottom of the needs pyramid, or most basic needs identified by Maslow are: physical survival and safety: food, water, rest… Adam and Eve have rivers, roots, and an oasis paradise over which they have dominion. Check. Next on the growth pyramid are psychological needs: belonging, intimate relationships, esteem, and accomplishments. Here we have a partnership so intimate that they are described as becoming one flesh. And is there much higher esteem than being intimately formed in the image of the Gods by a God’s own hand? Then, finally, the last stop, the top of the needs pyramid: self-actualization. The ability to achieve one’s full potential, to become a creator. Or, as the snake puts it in the book of Genesis: “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” You will be like God – fully self-actualized.
The Garden of Eden story is a story about childhood – a happy childhood. Adam and Eve grew up because that’s what children do. And Adam and Eve rebelled because that’s what children do. Notice the snake says: “God knows that when you eat it”, not “if you eat it.” Parents, how many times have you heard “Well, why not?” or watched your child burn themselves on the stove because even though you said is was hot, they still needed to verify it for themselves? Rebelling, making your own decisions is a necessary and natural entry into adulthood. After they eat the fruit, the story tells us that Adam and Eve suddenly knew they were naked – they were embodied in a new way. Do you remember when you began to change your clothes in private, or stopped backyard sprinkler-chasing in the nude? You suddenly realized that you were naked. Adam and Eve are making sense of a new reality, just like adolescence, figuring out what to do with all these new thoughts and feelings and bodies and understandings. And the hardest thing to learn may be the one foretold by the snake: there is good, but there is also evil. There are blessings, but there are also curses. Growing up means not only recognizing evil, but realizing that we are capable of it.
God is not a helicopter parent in this story. I do not believe that this is a story about a God who requires innocence and blind obedience. God placed the tree and the snake in the garden, not because they were tricks or tests – but because they are necessary. God wants us to become fully formed mature, wise, adult humans – self actualized. Those able to make decisions – and deal with the consequences. After the apple-eating, God never yells at Adam and Eve. God calls them by name, turns figs into clothes, and sends them out into adulthood, into fertile land to make their own way. God warns them of the hardships ahead, not a curse, but with honesty and preparation for the cost and pain that comes with living a full life. God does not banish Adam and Eve from the Garden – that’s not even an option; the verb used in Hebrew translates as “sending forth in peace.” Adam and Eve must leave the safety of home and follow their calling as self-actualized adults. The Garden of Eden is a coming of age story.
We, self-actualized adults are like God – and we, too, want to keep our children safe. Even if you are not a parent, I believe that you want to keep our collective children safe – we pray it over our departing work tour groups and over our graduates. We support them in climbing past every step on Maslow’s needs pyramid.
We know that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is ever present, but we want them to dance around it a little longer, preserve their innocence a minute more, and keep them in the Octopus’s Garden in the shade. And when they do catch a glimpse, or get a taste of pain or fear, we are able to comfort them and frame their pain and questions with our careful responses. Some people’s homes got flooded in the hurricane, but we are sending disaster relief buckets to help so that it will be ok again. We can make it right. Just last week, on Work Tour, one of our youth reflected: “For me, the hurricane was just an awesome night’s sleep, but here there are literally houses in the canals. People lost everything. I am so lucky that I get to help.” Because our children are safe, they can have experiences that allow them to encounter things that are frightening and unjust, experiences that give them esteem and help them achieve their full potential as people who are creators like God.
I wanted to preach a sermon all about Work Tour and about what remarkable people our youth are, how hard they worked and how kindly they treated each other and how compassionately they met the needs of a community still in so much need. I wanted to talk about praise. Instead, this week, I found myself in a state of deep, consuming lament.
I was in the shadow of story after story of people coming to our borders begging for kindness and being met with evil. Thousands upon thousands of children torn from loving, safe arms, and being put in cages where needs are not met and full potential impossible. What helps make us healthy, functioning people in this world is a sense of belonging and attachment: intimacy, trust, and agency. It is never justifiable to take these things by force.
Gade and I live with the ramifications of what happens when a child is taken from a loving family every day. I am profoundly grateful that Aiyana had an incredible foster family that loved her and nurtured her for almost 2 years – and I will never forget the sound of her terrified, painful, all-consuming screaming and sobbing as she clung to and clawed at our front door, inconsolable – not understanding where Mommy Karen went or why she left Aiyana behind. I know what trauma sounds like and I know how much work my child has to do every day to overcome what has been taken from her- twice. Aiyana is surrounded in love, care, therapy, and every need is met, but all of that hasn’t healed her anger and fear and insecurity, and we have to come to terms with the fact that trauma will always be a part of who she is.
How then, can I comprehend children physically removed from loved ones, loaded on buses, put into pens, all while making that same painful, terrible sound that I heard my daughter make and knowing that they will not be comforted? How can this ever be made right? The reality and the horror is that it probably can’t ever be made right. These children may never be whole again.
How can they grow to be self-actualized when they have been ripped off the needs pyramid? They did not choose the apple, they did not walk out of the garden with a trusted partner- their Garden has been laid waste around them, the roots ripped out, and they have been sent out, unaccompanied. Not only is evil real, but we are capable of it.
I don’t talk about sin often. When I teach it, I use Paul Tillich’s working definition: sin is anything that separates us from God, ourselves, or from others. I need to talk about sin this week. The sins of bad things done, good things left undone, and the system of oppression, degradation, and violation that I am witnessing and that I participate in as a person of privilege.
You may have heard this Garden story told as the one where sin crept in, where the act of eating the apple made a part of all of us rotten forever. Original sin, the concept that our most basic identity is separated from God. Today, I don’t need the reminder that we are sinful – I am very clear about that this week. What I need is the reminder that we are loved. To be reminded that only when we are rooted and grounded in love can we be the people that we are called to be. Danielle Shroyer wrote that it is “an act of violence to say to another person, created in the image of God, that they are made of something sinful – it’s dehumanizing” (another thing I have had quite enough of). Instead, she says, we are born with an Original Blessing. And that there is no way to claim the Original Blessing just for ourselves, or for people just like us. If it is true, it is true for everyone. The Garden story tells us that original sin can’t be the great equalizer of humanity, we can’t all be inherently evil because before we ever chose to sin, we were loved – created and sustained by love from the divine. The original blessing is what we hold onto, it’s how we take love with us, no matter how far we stray from home – whether we leave by choice or by force or by fear. Love is the great equalizer.
We CANNOT look at any other human being, much less any human child, and say “You are not every bit as loved and every bit as divine as I am.” We are nothing but a vast diversity of creation, all who deserve our own peaceful garden of growth, warmth, and safety. We are capable of evil, yes, but it is not who we are at our core. What’s at the core of an apple after all? At our core, we are seeds. Seeds grow, seeds participate in creation, not degradation.
Last year, I attended a lecture with Soong-Chan Rah, a seminary professor in Chicago. He had just published his book: Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times. He recounted this story:
“The church has lost its ability to lament!” This heartfelt cry came from a seminary student as she prayed with other graduate students, faculty and staff who gathered together to seek God for racial justice and reconciliation throughout our nation. As we cried and prayed together we realized that our theology and spiritual formation hadn’t given us sufficient permission, language, or tools to adequately sit with the despair and sadness of recent racial injustices, senseless acts of gun violence, and social unrest taking place in the world around us. We even saw this on social media where people also seemed paralyzed and helpless to know what to do and how to respond.
Sincere, well-meaning Christian people asked, “What should we do?” while people who were fed up with the seeming indifference of those around them expressed their outrage through a hashtag that proclaimed “Silence is Violence!
He continued: “The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in the loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We then forget the reality of suffering and pain.” Lament recognizes the struggles of life and cries out for justice against existing injustices. There is power in bringing untold stories to light. The status quo is not to be celebrated but instead must be challenged. The freedom to speak about the reality of suffering and death results in a freedom from denial. Lamenting reminds us that we cannot ignore what is right in front of us; no scrolling past suffering.
We know that we cannot do justice with our eyes closed. We have to listen to the snake and bite the apple of truth – Knowing that it will be hard to swallow.
I learn more about the trauma of having ones roots severed every day, and I know that the answer is a lot more complicated than grafting a child onto a couple of loving strangers to make a new family tree. But I know that we will keep trying, keep loving, keep learning, and keep growing together – no matter how hard is, for the rest of our lives. That part of trauma-informed care is that we are brave enough to be sad together – to sit in the pain and the grief and bear it together.
I don’t know how we fix what has been done to those who have asked for help and been met with suffering, but I know that I must cry out the injustice and claim my part in its creation as well as act towards its ending. You may have heard the quip: “Name it to claim it” That’s lament: recognizing that as self-actualized grown-ups, we must eat the apple of good and evil, face the truth that has sharp fangs, and set about walking out of the garden of naivety with purpose.
Resistance isn’t futile, it’s fertile, and we have some re-seeding to do.
June 24, 2018
Talia Raymond