Fallen: God’s love, after Eden

By the time I was 16 or so, my life had changed significantly. While my entire life I had been on the run from sin, I had now graduated to the big leagues. My fear of sin and punishment had, up to now, been largely theoretical, or minor stuff like shoplifting a box of Lemonheads from the 7-11.

I was now entering an age of sinning in earnest.

Coming of age in the Garden of Eden

When people tell the story of Adam and Eve, they often interpret it as a fall from perfection. Adam and Eve were perfectly innocent and without sin. God commanded them not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Satan, in the form of a serpent, tempted Eve to eat the fruit, saying that it would make her and Adam like gods—and that God’s jealousy about that was why he had forbidden it. She thought God was holding back something wonderful from them, so she partook, and convinced Adam to, as well.

At that moment, they realized they were naked and they were ashamed of it. They sewed clothing for themselves out of leaves and hid from God when He came to visit. Once God realized their sin, he punished them because of their disobedience, giving Adam the curse of having to work to make a living, and giving Eve the curse of having pain in childbirth. Adam and Eve were banished from their perfect idyllic life in Eden, and had to go out into the rough, real, and now fallen, world to make their way.

I used to take the Adam and Eve story as a straight-up description of the Fall of Mankind. Now, looking back over my life, I see it much differently. First off, I’m not sure if there really was a single Adam and Eve, or if these are symbolic archetypes and mankind really evolved over a long slow period from earlier upright mammals. But that is immaterial—whether they were real or just legends, I still believe there is truth in this story.

I believe this is a story about growing up. I don’t see it so much as a story of people who stopped being the perfect people they were supposed to be. I see it as a story of people who went through the pain of becoming EXACTLY what they were supposed to be. The key to this realization for me is that the tree they ate from was knowledge. When they ate it, they were transformed because they knew things now that they didn’t know before.

When they were in their youthful innocence, Adam and Eve never really knew good from evil—they just existed, and were blameless. The world was a lovely garden for them. But when they became aware of good and evil, they became aware of themselves. They realized that they were not the perfect beings they always thought they were, nor were they ever going to be. They realized that life was not the perfect Eden they thought it was. Things were going to be hard. Survival was going to require work. Being fruitful was going to be painful. This growing up caused them to feel exposed, afraid, and ashamed. They would never go back again.

The knowledge of good and evil

In many ways, this was the experience of my teen years. It was during this time that I wanted to taste the world and all it offered, even though I knew it was wrong in the eyes of God. I wanted to do what my culture was doing, what I saw some of my friends doing, what the music and movies and my own desires told me to do. I wanted sex, drugs, rock and roll, and went out in earnest to find them.

I had no escape plan or scriptural loophole that I could rely upon to justify my rebellion. I would repeatedly ask God for forgiveness when I felt I had done something wrong, but I didn’t think my repentance meant much right now, because I knew that at the next party, on the next date, I was going right back in again. I only hoped that God would hold off his wrath for a little while longer.

But once I realized that I was no longer an innocent, and that I could no longer pretend to be blameless and holy, there really was no going back to Eden for me. Jesus had told his listeners that even if they lusted in their hearts, it was the same as if they committed adultery in real life. Sinful desires were sin, acted upon or not. And my desires were definitely not what I thought God wanted them to be.

It was a scary time for me. I had dreams about Jesus coming back by surprise, and as I watched the spirits of the saints float up to the sky, I would be one of those left here on earth to withstand the great tribulation. Or worse, there were some dreams when I was simply loaded onto the down escalator to Hell, just like I had seen in the cartoons as a kid. And now that Jesus had returned, there was no last-minute apologies. I would be judged on what I had done, just as Adam and Eve were.

Fear begets the beginning of wisdom?

One of the ways of the world that I experimented with in those days was smoking pot. I was a terrible pot smoker. If I only had a little, I’d get silly, want to listen to interesting music, and eat lots of tacos. But it was rare that I would only have a little. Typically I would smoke way too much, and then get paranoid. Theologically paranoid. I wasn’t convinced the police were after us. I was convinced that God and the angels of heaven and demons of Hell were after me, and that maybe they were taking my soul right now, and there would be no chance of repentance before the THC worked its way out of my system.

As such, I was really no fun to take drugs with—you can ask any of my friends who I partied with at the time.

One night, I was out with a good friend of mine. He was someone who had grown up in a family that had attended church—he was even a former altar boy—but he had given up on religion as nonsense years before.

Now he was punk-rock cool and cutting-edge sophisticated, full of rebellion and progressive politics and criticisms of the greedy, conservative, meat-eating, wage-slave world into which we had been born. He had sisters who lived on the east coast, and provided a pipeline to progressive thinking we would never otherwise see in Indiana, and a steady stream of Mother Jones magazines and an occasional Village Voice.

My friend was in-the-know enough to know how messed up the world really was.

But underneath what looked like cynicism that was a man with a tender heart—someone who cared about the world and the creatures in it, without having to be forced into it with threat of divine punishment. Vegan, pro-worker, and patient with hung-up souls like mine.

Despite his impatience for the church, this friend was always willing to talk about God and church with me. Frankly, we were in a town where most of the people were churchgoers, so it would be hard to have meaningful conversation with many people if one weren’t willing to broach the topic of church.

He never held back his scathing criticisms of the church and the things that were ridiculous or hypocritical about it—and often he was right—but he was still enough of a friend to give me a listening ear. Especially when I was panicky about it.

On this particular night, we were out riding around and decided to go to a park and smoke a joint. I don’t know why I kept coming back to pot when I knew it made me feel crazy. I think on some level it was a challenge to myself to get over my fears and just calmly enjoy the ride like I saw my “normal” friends do. But that calm zone never really happened for me.

We sat in the park on the kid’s merry go round, and I looked at the stars overhead. Once more, I began to feel that light-headed sense of vertigo, where it was like the lid was lifted off of my existence and I was weightless—in a bad way. It was like I could float right off the face of the earth, right out into the heavens and to the seat of judgement.

My friend had seen me in this state a number of times before, so I had no problem telling him, “I’m feeling it again. I feel like God is just going to take me and send me straight to Hell. I hate this feeling, I wish it would stop.”

My friend looked at me for a moment, with his brow furrowed in concern, then calmly said words that have had a huge influence on me ever since:

“You believe in God, right?”

“Yeah.”

 “And do you believe that God loves His children?”

 “Yeah…”

 “Would a God who loves his children send them to Hell?”

I took a deep breath and sighed out into the universe.

I honestly didn’t know, but I really hoped the answer to that question was no.