The Heretic's Lament -- The Fall

Get comfortable -- this is going to be a long one!

Today, something really clicked for me. And one of those Biblical stumbling blocks that has tripped me up always rolled away.

You never know where you're going to find yourself! I thought I was just reading up on Robb's blog yesterday (that's Robb Ryerse, Vintage Fellowship "director and narrational leader", http://www.thegrenzian.blogspot.com/). On the topic of "edgy" sermons there was a bit of a discussion of the line "Sometimes you have to lower the bar so someone can accept the invitation to a higher bar." One person said they didn't like this line. I DID like it and commented, "Life is messy. Lessons are messy. Higher things come out of it." Somehow this came to be the theme of my weekend!

Sometimes, the only way life makes sense to me to view every challenge as a lesson. When things get really bad, I can be angry or resentful or distraught or depressed or a host of other pathetic human emotions which probably do no good. Or I can ask, "Ok God, what am I supposed to learn?" There is incredible peace in viewing hardships as lessons rather than just random cruelty. So I really meant the "life is messy" statement. And sometimes I really cling to that concept because it all just gets so complicated and frustrating and seemingly-hopeless sometimes. And gosh, if we're not here to learn something then why ARE we here?

I see life as the lab portion of the class my soul is taking. I must say here that I avoided all classes in college that involved lab time because who has time for all that hands-on learning anyway when you should just be able to read the textbook (Robb -- there's something cosmically significant about your day job being in the textbook business!). But life is not college. Life is a lab. I wholeheartedly believe the new-age concept that we are "spirits having a human experience" rather than just humans having a spiritual experience.

Of course, the most colossal example of the spiritual having a human experience is Jesus. Now that I have worked myself past seeing him as a mortal prophet, I CAN conceive of Jesus as God incarnate coming down to earth in human form to walk the full-on human experience just like he expects us to do. I can finally see Jesus as God coming down here to get his hands dirty, diving into the thick of the complicated, exhausting, challenging, fatal, MESSY experience of being human. All the biblical foot-washing imagery makes sense to me from this perspective: if you walk through the dusty, dirty roads of life, you're gonna get dirty. (I'll save the concept of cleansing for later!)

And speaking of dirt: seeds never cease to fascinate me. You take a tiny little thing that can look like nothing and throw it in the dirt and it somehow knows what to do and becomes a plant! And it doesn't even have a brain. Or lessons. Or a textbook! So, to me, God has got to be in each and every seed. Somehow. Otherwise, how could seeds contain life and know what to do and complete mind-boggling tasks like it's something that just happens a jillion times every day?

So life's messy and dirty. And seeds have to get thrown on the ground and mixed up with the dirt in order to grow thereby rising above the dirt. And I, as a human, do exactly the same thing with both literal and metaphorical dirt. I get thrown down. I get all dirty. I get mixed in with the mess of it all. And because of this "misfortune", hopefully I grow. I may not like the dirt but it makes me grow. And ultimately, I somehow come to rise above, to something higher. That makes all the hard times make sense.

One of the songs at church this morning was "I'm Wholly Yours" by the Dave Crowder Band. Of course, it's infinitely better to listen to the real song and I hope you will (even if you're familiar with it) but here are the lyrics for the sake of the coming discussion. Meet me down below for the relevance of this.

I am full of earth

You are heaven's worth

I am stained with dirt, prone to depravity

You are everything that is bright and clean

The antonym of me

You are divinity

But a certain sign of grace is this

From the broken earth flowers come up

Pushing through the dirt

You are holy, holy, holy

All heaven cries "Holy, holy God"

You are holy, holy, holy

I want to be holy like You are

You are everything that is bright and clean

And You're covering me with Your majesty

And the truest sign of grace was this

From wounded hands redemption fell down

Liberating man

But the harder I try the more clearly can I feel

The depth of our fall and the weight of it all

And so this might could be the most impossible thing

Your grandness in me making me clean

Glory, hallelujah

Glory, glory, hallelujah

So here I am, all of me

Finally everything

Wholly, wholly, wholly

I am wholly, wholly

I am wholly, wholly, wholly

Yours

I am full of earth and dirt and You

I LOVE the visual message of this song. I wonder how many people have only heard it and not gotten the "sight gag" of the spelling: "You are holy... I am wholly (yours)". And, of course, all the wonderful dirt references!

By the time this song came on this morning, I had gotten past my previously-referenced tears because of the music and because I actually SAW the moment that the music got to Mark and melted away the issue of the morning. So I was freed up to be open to the moment. About that time one line reached out and grabbed me:

The harder I try the more clearly I can feel

The depth of our fall and the weight of it all

And something clicked!

I struggle with the whole concept of "the fall" of man. It just has never made sense to me. Eve got all blamed for everything. Adam didn't. Why was God so picky about his fruit trees. And what's this about talking snakes? And why was God so mean? And wasn't it all a set-up? And I have an issue with rules anyway. And who thought this story explained ANYTHING? I've been stuck on this one for forty-three years!

Then it hit me, from out of the place of struggle and exhaustion that I had just been in, how very far below perfect we are as humans -- and "the weight of it all". And that we aren't SUPPOSED to be perfect because we aren't God. Because we're here to learn and what can you learn if you stay all clean on the sidelines or in heaven or in spirit form and don't get your hands dirty?

So "the fall" to me isn't falling out of favor with God so much as "falling" from perfect spirit form down into the laboratory of earthly life so I can get my hands into the soil and learn something. One of my favorite garden quotes (from a plaque in my step-grandmother's garden) is "We come from the Earth. We return to the Earth. And, in between, we garden." This gets into other issues but I love the hands-in-the-soil sentiment of it.

I'm not sure where the Garden of Eden is exactly. The History Channel says they've located it in the Middle East. But it sure makes sense to me that the Garden of Eden is someplace closer to heaven than the Earth is and that we "fell" out of it into this human experience so that we can really wrestle with the issues both large and small.

The tree of "the knowledge of good and evil" never made sense to me. Why would it be called that? What did good and evil and knowledge have to do with it? Why didn't they just call it an apple or an quince or whatever if the point was just that Adam and Eve weren't supposed to eat from it just because God said so? Was there really something chemical or magical about this particular fruit? Or was it just an arbitrary rule? Or was it a dare. Or, like I said before, was it a set-up because God knew that Adam and Eve were human and would act in all their human-ness and that one darn tree was just too much temptation to resist. To me, we're not bad, we're just human. Replace the word "sin" with the word "human-ness" or "human failings" or whatever form of the concept fits the sentence and it all goes down a whole lot easier for me. More on this later!

Adam and Eve already had knowledge of good. They knew God, personally!, and God is ALL goodness. Ever noticed that the word "God" is one letter off of the word "good". Simple semantics (not that there's anything simple about the WORD "semantics" -- it took me most of college to get what that word meant!). In order to have knowledge of more than just goodness, to have knowledge of bad, of evil, Adam and Eve were going to have to rock their world a bit. I think the "and evil" part of "knowledge of good and evil" is why we're here. To have knowledge of evil man must gnash around in the dirt. You can sit on your cloud with your harp and your wings and have knowledge of good. But to have knowledge of good AND evil, one must have the human experience of wrestling with BOTH, down here, in the dirt, in the laboratory, where life's MESSY!

So, Adam and Eve, and I, must learn about good and evil through the daily hands-on contrasting struggle with both. I have to really FEEL the mud between my fingers to understand how good it really feels to have clean hands, experience, some good lessons, and a sense of accomplishment. Because, if my hands are always clean, I haven't experienced anything and there are no flowers or vegetables or fruits in my garden and I just don't really understand or appreciate the priviledge of having gotten to learn the lesson.

I think some mud pies sound good about now! Followed by a nice manicure!