Immortality in Remission

Last week I attended the first session of a Bible study on women of the Bible. I'm not impressed with the workbook, but digging into Genesis and looking at Eve with DiDi has already been fruitful.

During this morning's peek, I was drawn to Gen 3:22-24:

Then the LORD God said: See! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil! Now, what if he also reaches out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life, and eats of it and lives forever? The LORD God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken. He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Prior to this Adam and Eve were allowed access to this tree, and presumably (to my mind), ate from it.

I wonder if it was those days of freely eating that fruit which allows us eventual physical immortality? Is there some lingering effect that will be triggered at the end of time causing us to burst force bodily into full bloom like an ancient pine nut after the forest burns down?

Be still?

God has been showing me how He provides realizations of Himself through other people.

This sounds so tame, when what I mean is so untame.

So wild. So excruciatingly joyful. So wonderfully heartbreaking.

He says to be still and know that I am God. Know that I am God.

Know me. Just as Adam knew Eve.

He sends us people so that we may know them and so come to know Him. Through mess and sweat and tears and blood. Through heart-pounding, pulse-racing, soul-wrenching love.

Through joy and grief, sometimes combined.

Through highs and lows and hurts and restorations.

Through passion, we know Him.

Lord, you are a mystery... It hurts to know you.

Chance or the Dance? Excerpts from Ch. 7 (Sex) Part 2

"Oddly, the rite of life, this most common and most mysterious thing, describable both by plumbing and mystic terms, appearing as both ridiculous and noble, slimy and sublime--this was not only the rite of life, but of knowledge. That is, the act which generated life was at the same time the act which signaled the high point of knowledge between two beings. It suggested that the nature of that knowledge between the one mode and the other was fruitful. The old term was 'know'. Adam knew his wife. "

"Then, finally, it finds its perfect form in the enactment by the two unveiled images, the images of male and female, of the energy that strains toward total union. That is, the thing that I want passionately to know, while I am aware that it appears only under this fleshly image and is itself more than that image, I can only know via the greatest possible experience of that image.

Here the distinction between spirit and matter disappears, as it does in the Sacraments. For here I experience the oddity that flesh is the mode under which I apprehend the truth of the thing. It is the epiphany of the thing. There is, in the sexual rite, a sense of struggle. It is the mad straining of the two images to get through to the very center of the thing (and this is not merely a pun; according to the view being put here, the anatomical placing of things would be itself a perfect image of what is at work in the situation, so that the fact that the final rite occurs at the 'center' of the bodies is to be expected.) There is, ironically, in this most soaring of all satisfactions a radical sense of incompleteness. The ecstasy accompanies the exploration, an exploration that never quite finds that ultimate elysium where the union is unimaginable to us, but toward which union we strain again and again, and which very attempt we find to be ecstatic."

"...the human body is available for any number of activities (sports, medical inspection, work), but when it is taken into the service of the sexual rite, a univrse of significance comes upon it, like God into the Mass, and immediately the participants are less than the thing in which they are participating, and it is theres to oserve the rubric with awe. The equipment is no longer merely object; it is image. Taken into the rite, it is transformed. As in poetry, courtesy, ceremony, or any of the ritual ways in which we shape our experience, so here the imposing of a form upon mere function paradoxically elicits the true significance of that function from the raw material. ... A doctor may probe it strictly as a complex of organs and tissue; a gymnastics coach may maniuplate it as a pattern of muscles. But the sexual exploration of this mass of tissue and muscle puts the bread and wine on the altar: the real presence of the person must now be reckoned with."

Day 29: knowledge of evil

Back to the garden I go...

I was thinking about the snake telling Eve that the tree would make her like God, knowing good and evil.

I thought about the word know, and the "biblical" use of the term as sexual union. I think that original sin came about because Eve -knew- evil. It became part of our spiritual DNA through her having come to -know- it.

It was the first act of covenantal infidelity which the Jews imitated throughout the OT history, and which we continue to perpetuate even now.

I'm beginning to think that all of Christianity centers around sexual union in one way or other.

Day 28: return to nakedness

I was looking at Genesis again over the weekend, this time at the story of the fall. The passage regarding covering the nakedness of Adam and Eve caught my attention. I thought about what it must have been like before the leather garments which God crafted for them.

It reminded me of how God strips away my clothing as I walk through the waterfall, so that I come to Him naked.

Francis de Sales, my patron saint, coached his protege Jeanne de Chantal about being naked before Him.

I think that in the fulfillment of time we will cast off all barriers to each other and to Him, returning to the nakedness of the garden, gloriously resurrected and unashamed.

The promise of apple blossoms

I woke thinking about the fall of Adam and Eve, and of how certainly I would make the same choice that they did.

I thought about the beauty of God's creation, and of the splendor of that first garden and all that was in it. And I wondered about that tree; how lovely must it have been?

It must have been very lovely indeed.

I took a look at what the scriptures had to say:

Gen. 3:6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

It was pleasing to the eye, and desirable.

I'm guessing that was an understatement. A vast one. I'm guessing that the tree was incredibly beautiful, and the fruit magically enticing.

And I thought about my own struggles.

How delicious it would be to approach the tree, to press up against its roughness, to smell the fragrance of leaf and bark and temptation.

I would climb up and rest among the boughs, feeling the wind swaying my cradle, and reach out now and then for a taste of certain sweetness.

I completely understand the desire Lewis describes; to want to get inside to where all the beauty comes from.

And it is hard to understand how sin can be so thoroughly enmeshed in beauty. The beauty is so very understandably desirable.

How can the wanting of such beauty be wrong?

And then God, in his generousity, sent this reading in my morning devotional:

2 Cor. 12:6-10 Although if I should wish to boast, I would not be foolish, for I would be telling the truth. But I refrain, so that no one may think more of me than what he sees in me or hears from me because of the abundance of the revelations. Therefore, that I might not become too elated, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

I can't say that I pray that my thorn be removed, because it is too enmeshed with the beauty. The beauty is too beautiful to sacrifice.

But He shows me that in this struggle, in this recognition of my weakness, in the knowledge that I too would eat of the beautiful fruit, He is strong. As I acknowledge the draw of the beauty, He grows in strength in me. As I surrender all pretense of courage and honor and fortitude, He rises up.

So I dream of the tree, and rest in His strength, trusting that the garden He has created for me is perfect in every way, despite the beauty of the tree beyond it's borders. Perhaps even enhanced by it.

And I am comforted by the sight of it in the distance, and the scent of apple blossoms, promising fruit.