Trouble in paradise

Trouble in paradise 

I recently took an iconography class where I met Father Damian, a Greek Orthodox Catholic monk who taught at the five day retreat at the Benedictine Priory in my town. He was dressed in traditional Eastern European liturgical garments and taught the class with a charming and contagious sense of humor. As a part of explaining the mythology behind the art of icon painting he told us a wonderful tale about Paradise and how God walked with the first humans through that magic place of innocence, beauty and immortality. The old story somehow touched a chord in me, and a couple of weeks later I took my old Hebrew scriptures down from the bookshelf.  I use “The Five Books of Moses or The Schocken Bible Volume 1”. I wanted to go back and read the story again to try to understand some of the magic which has been one of the cornerstones of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

To sum up some of the highlights, the story goes like this. On the fifth day of creation God decided to create a being they called “Humankind” in their likeness. Yes, the bible starts with a mystical plural revelation of the God image which is quickly changed in verse 27 to “His” image. It reads that He created them in the image of God as male and female. God then instructed them to bear fruit and fill the earth. The interesting observation is that Adam and Eve were not created as children but as fully grown up persons who now wandered around in the Paradise God had just created. The text continues:  “Now God saw all that he had made and uttered : It was exceedingly good!.” (Schocken Bible Verse 31). It goes on to say that after all that work God “hallowed” (made holy) the 7th day because they needed a rest. God was not quite finish with the creative ideas and suddenly we  have Adam because there had to be someone to till the soil as it says. 

God breathes into a clay figure and Adam is alive. They (God) take the little human and plant it in the garden the way you put a figurine into a sand play box. After Adam is placed in the garden, he is told by God not to eat from a specific plant which is the apple tree because if he does he will die. He will die because it is the tree of the knowledge of  good and evil.  Now that is interesting because here we have a human who apparently never knew what it was to be a child, who has no idea whatsoever what it mean to die since everyone in Paradise lives forever. Children don’t understand death but in the story about Adam he is not a little child, he is created as a grown-up who is supposed to bear fruit although he still does not have a mate. God realizes that mistake and in verse 22, a woman is created with a little help from one of Adam’s ribs. 

Adam gets very excited and in verse 23 he proclaims “She is it, bones from my bones.”  Adam decides to call her Isha, which in Sanskrit means supreme Goddess and ruler. Both Adam and Isha (not Eve) are naked and as the text says, they were not ashamed. One has to ask why they would be ashamed, clearly they were developmentally like children who knew nothing about good or evil or shame or blame. They were God’s children playing and walking with God in the garden of Eden. The snake which God created who also lives in Paradise but somehow is evil, comes to Isha to tempt her to eat from the tree of knowledge well knowing it would cause disaster. The snake could apparently talk but that did not seem to bother God. It is somewhat of a doubling effect in the story. A tempting snake and a disastrous deadly tree.  Here it is appropriate to use the lens I learned from  Dr. Michael Conforti in the Archetypal Pattern Analysis training. If there is a dangerous situation would you put your child into that? Why are the Gods not taking care of their most beloved creation? No, the gods are off to something else. Maybe creating some other planet, we don’t know. What we do know is that the two children are left on their own with a devilish snake and an apple tree with deadly fruits. No good parent would do such a thing. In other words, this story does not show God in a very good parental light. I had to stop at this point and wonder why this tale has been told over and over again for thousands of years and I can only come to one reasonable conclusion. I believe the story, because of the many unanswered questions it poses, to ask ourselves questions and to question the story itself. It is the beginning of our dialogue with God. It is a very healthy “What in the world were you thinking” kind of moment that we repeat whenever we read the Bible. The tale has beauty but also contains a lot of confusion and contradictory messages. It has creative gods or god who’s power produce mixed results. It certainly seems to be a bad ending for the two crowned creations to be thrown out of the garden of Eden. I do believe that is for us to ponder, to argue and wrestle with the holy in an honest dialogue. One could say that the Gods appears in these myths to be in conversation with their creation. For that purpose it is an excellent story and I am in perfect peace even with the trouble in Paradise.