A New Beginning

I carry a torch in one hand,
and a bucket of water in the other:
with these things I am going to set fire to Heaven
and put out the flames of Hell
So that voyagers to God
can rip the veils
And see the real goal. – Rabia

This past week the story of Genesis 2 has been floating in and out of my subconscious. I have been thinking about the tree of good and evil and what happens when Eve and Adam eat from it.

As most post-enlightened, conservative interpretations go, the story of Adam and Eve explains the fall of humanity and why we wrestle with sin today. If we’ve been raised further right from right, we might even believe the fault falls on Eve alone with poor Adam not knowing that Eve had disobeyed the commands set by God. But even if we were to take a literal reading of this story, no where does it state that this was the fall of humanity. So what does this story mean for us now? Or, rather, how can we reinterpret this story for our time and place?

Last week my partner and I drove up to Sydney from Melbourne, leaving Wednesday evening. We left right after work and didn’t make it to his mother’s house until about 2:30am. It was a long, dark journey, one in which we’ve done before. We managed to stay awake thanks to some pretty traumatising podcasts of True Crime that left me gripping the steering wheel for my own life, fully fueled by sour snakes which, if you don’t eat candy often, gives you a wicked sugar-rush that can keep you going for days. We made the journey because his grandmother had died the week before. We were lucky in that we were able to fly to Sydney a few weeks ago to say our last goodbyes to a woman, still full of humor, joy and not-so-subtle racism, take her last breaths. Both trips were beautiful as this 96 year-old woman brought a divided family together and broke through the surface of the cultural and social norms Sydney tends to construct on its inhabitants. But as we drove back to Melbourne, something shifted in me. Maybe it was the way the minister evangelized at the funeral or the sadness I felt when someone shared with me that they were grateful they were raised in fear because it led them to Christ. Or maybe it was the conversation I had with my father-in-law who, even though against the Adani coalmine in Queensland, expressed disappointment at the way the Left ignores the employment-needs of the lower-middle class. But the drive back to Melbourne arose something I have been struggling with and working on for a while: humanity’s (and my own) need to judge what is right and what is wrong.

This past week was a struggle to show up back at work. Spending 5 days in Sydney without a moment to reflect was full-on: contemplating death and dying, spending most of our time with my partner’s family, and then being trapped in a car for 18 hours listening to psychotic Melbourne murderers (who have still yet to be caught) and then shitting sugar at every pit-stop. So I was not in the right space to be compassionate or present to some of my co-workers who were breaching my ethical-capacity.

Adam and Eve.

Like I said earlier, this story has been coming in and out of my subconscious, particularly as I have been trying to deconstruct, reconstruct and apply a theology of sin. What is sin? Is there a better, less historically damaging word we can use? But as I thought about sin with the proddings of the Adam and Eve story, I noticed something about the placement of this story. Perhaps the reason this story is in the beginning of the Bible was not to tell future generations that we were born into sin (again, not even a literal interpretation) but rather that if we begin our own lives believing we have the capacity to judge good from evil and right from wrong, we will create a habit out of it and, ultimately, separate ourselves from the beloved in the process. And this is what sin is: the audacity to believe that we can separate our world into dualities. From a toddler, our first words besides ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ are ‘that’s not fair’. We think that coal mines are the devil-incarnate, without listening to the yearning of low-income families who want to work for their money. We think particular political parties are the devil incarnate, without really hearing or understanding why people vote for them. But when we divide our world in half we, consequently, end up separating ourselves from the beloved who lives and breathes even in these people. So where does that leave us when we see our neighbours digging up our earth or using doctrines of fear to make followers obedient? When we see co-workers taking advantage of and stealing from seniors? I don’t have the answers to these questions. But I do believe that responding to the polarisation with more separateness can’t be helping. Separation is not the response of love. Love is living in the discomfort of our differences. Love is sharing, particularly in a climate of scarcity. Love is listening to both sides and living in the in-between spaces. Love is a coming together, a working towards the oneness, the reconciliation, the union of all things and this means all people too. This is, after all, the source of the trinity that we too can experience even here, even now, and live in its naked freedom.

I carry a torch in one hand,
and a bucket of water in the other:
with these things I am going to set fire to Heaven
and put out the flames of Hell
So that voyagers to God
can rip the veils
And see the real goal. – Rabia