Last night in Bible study we hosted Pastor Yee from the
Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church. Who knew Baptists could be so rad?
We read Genesis
2 (starting at verse 5) and 3 -- basically the Garden of Eden story. That's a well-trod one and one I usually just dismiss as yeah-yeah-every-culture-has-creation-stories. If anything, when I think about it, I just get annoyed at modern Christians who read into the "woman came from man's rib" and "Eve fucked up" things and find justification for male supremacy. Also
shit like this. Puke.
She suggested a reading though, that looked at the Garden story not as prescriptive transgression and punishment story (i.e. Listen to God
or else...), but as a descriptive story that can help us think about the nature of humanity in relation to God. She explained that most Biblical scholars believe that this part of Genesis comes from the
Jahwist source which is characterized by an emphasis on relationship.
We didn't get all into the from-the-rib thing, but we did talk about the names Adam and Eve, prompted by T, a transwoman who told us that she was mostly of the mind to just throw out all this Adam and Eve bullshit because it has nothing to do with the loving God she knows. "What about Steve?" she asked, "And Stevette?" She insisted that the trans community has always existed and that the gender binary in this story is a bunch of bullshit. Boom.
Adam, PY agreed, is the Hebrew word for human. (Flashback to the first year of college, when we learned to push back on the idea that the man is the universal and that then woman is a variation; that White is universal, and that People of Color are variations from that norm.)
I was still tripping on the part that went, "And he called her Eve because she would be the mother of all the living." That cause and effect relationship made no sense to me. Sounded a little like "because I said so." So when I asked, PY told us that "Eve" is a lot like the Hebrew word for "living," which is kind of interesting. God created humans, and then so that humans could have companionship, God created living. I'm gonna keep thinking on that one.
So eventually the two major tensions that we got to in this story are:
(1) That we are not God. That's what we came to know when we decided to do things our way instead of God's way. Reading it this way, the silliness of the don't-eat-that-tree rule can fall away as just one arbitrary instantiation of God's order: When we follow God's rules, participate in God's order, we experience Eden. Eden: all creation living harmoniously. When our free will leads us away from God's just order, we eventually experience the humiliating pain of relative powerlessness before God -- a pain that can translate into the trampled end of oppression, but also the
trampling. Those with "power" (in the human sense) deceive themselves as somehow deserving of it, as somehow godlike.
We are not God. We are not eternal. We know death -- not because we are being punished with it as a result of Eve's disobedience, but because death is fundamental the experience of humanity. There was death in the Garden before they fucked up. It takes a lot of death to make living possible. Plants and animals die for our consumption, and for consumption by innumerous other species. But in right relationship with God, trusting absolutely in God's provision, we could live without the overwhelming desire to put off death. We wouldn't scramble to create ways for us to have power over death. We'd know we're not God and be cool with that.
(2) That we are image-bearers of God. When after they hide from God and are found, God asks them, "Who told you you were naked?" God made us Good, but then when, as a result of our free will, the world came out of God's order, we came to "know" that we are not good enough as we are, that we have reason for shame.
I thought of the question that's been hanging around me over the past few months. I was telling my therapist a story that I was thought was fairly inane about a dude whose attention I'd wanted so badly in college. My tone was amused, self-deprecating; it's not an issue for me anymore -- over it. I was smiling, but she wasn't. She does that. Makes me take myself more seriously than I'm wont to do. My storytelling ended abruptly when she interrupted me saying, "I wanted to be important enough to him that..." to ask me, "Ellen, who taught you that you're not important?"
"Who told you that you were naked? I made you Good."
When we thought about it that way, it made sense to us why Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, from absolute harmony. If we'd followed God's plan, lived under God's justice, we would be unconcerned with our not-Godness
and we would be in touch with our Goodness. We wouldn't know power struggles -- on interpersonal and international levels. We wouldn't know war, rape, the use of imprisoned bodies for profit. We wouldn't have to know.
The word ignorance was tossed around the table.
I thought about the afternoon a few years ago when I was driving home by myself, up 57, and I got a call from my principal. I love driving up and down 57 between Champaign and Chicago, but that's because I generally run melancholy. For most of the year, it's
not not a bleak landscape.
Definitely bleak in late November, which is what I'm pretty sure it was.
 |
| This, but waaaaaaay grayer. |
She told me that the school-wide antiracist project that R and I had been working our asses off to launch had failed to meet a hurdle it had to meet in order to move forward. All our efforts were essentially for naught. It'd be dishonest to withhold the truth that the humiliation of such a public failure didn't sting.
But when I got to thinking about it, I got viscerally overwhelmed by the realities of the what it looks like for racism to keep sneakily and slowly but steadily pushing our babies out of our classrooms and into prisons. Most of the way up, I earnestly wished (as embarrassing as it is to admit) that I'd never learned what I have about racism. I tried to understand why so many of our colleagues refused to get on board with our project, and I thought back to high school, when I had no idea I was White and that it mattered. I could have had the English teacher life I'd imagined for myself when I sent in my college applications: drinking tea before a sea of adoring students who behaved just like I wanted them to and who loved literature like I did. My own book club. That possibility seemed so fucking blissful as I drove up, my shitty driving worsened by the sobbing that was puffing up my eyes.
But I do know, and I know that it's better that I do. What I didn't want to know, but was having to confront, was not just that racism is ubiquitous, but that I am almost powerless before it. "Ignorance is bliss," but not really because the more life-giving, sustainable thought is, "I am not God."
