No one has full self-acceptance, but I think all of us have moments when we experience it. These moments are hints of where we have never been but where we long to return: Eden. Have you had these moments? Have you gotten so lost in a hobby you become what you were doing? The brush paints for you? The skis do all the work and you just enjoy the ride. You get so lost in a novel that Roanoke disappears and you are fully in the author’s world. It is the state of Adam and Eve before the Fall: self-acceptance without self-awareness.
How do we lose that self-forgetfulness? How do we lose that childlike innocence?
By eating the forbidden fruit, that’s how. The rule in the Garden is not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What makes the temptation to break this rule so strong is that the fruit is so within reach, so ready to taste. Right there within a flat-footed grasp is the fruit ready to be plucked and tasted.
In the movie Wall Street, the young broker asks his mentor, Gekko, why he bought and wrecked a company, causing the loss of thousands of jobs and financially benefiting only one person, Gekko himself. Gekko’s answer: “Because it was wreck-able.” For Gekko, the possible is permissible.
The possible is permissible. This past week, I saw the story of a law student seeking to create an assault weapon that would be undetectable by x-ray and could be dismantled into parts so as to be packed in a small bag. He is doing this because he is so in favor of gun rights that he wants to build an assault weapon that authorities can’t even detect, much less register. Never mind that his invention could be taken undetected on planes or inside schools by anyone. For him the right to bear arms even by someone who would do such a thing is more important than consequences. The possible is permissible. Why? It is a question of liberty, he says.
Such is the logic of the Serpent. “There is nothing wrong with eating this fruit,” the Serpent says. “It’s there within your reach. Be your own God. Grab it. Claim your destiny. Be the ruler instead of the ruled. Be the served instead of the servant. Be your own court of appeals. Take, eat, this is your body and soul to claim for yourself.”
Adam and Eve learn, though, that just because the fruit is within reach doesn’t mean it should be plucked and tasted. Just because something is grasp-able, doesn’t mean it should be grasped. Just because another is seduce-able doesn’t mean that person is yours for the taking. Just because we possess better and better ways to destroy each other doesn’t mean we should make them and share them with whoever can buy them.
When Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit they attain knowledge they cannot handle. Their grabbing and eating is the sin of strength, of false pride, of elevating self over others, of wanting the unaccountable liberty of gods, to be their own masters unregulated by anyone else’s moral code. But as soon as they overreach and eat the fruit, they experience Pretty Pride’s twin, Ugly Shame. They realize they are naked and are ashamed. Pride: claiming unfettered liberty as if one were a god. Shame: wanting to hide from the one who is . . . actually . . . God.
The Genesis narrative has the view that we can be reconciled with, or estranged from, God, but we cannot be God-less. Adam and Eve are up Eden’s creek because they cannot run from themselves, and they cannot run from God.
Is that their damnation or their salvation? Because they can’t run from God, there is at least the possibility God will provide a way to bring them back to him and to a place of being naked and unashamed.
We won’t get there by going back to Eden. The Eden of unknowing innocence is gone – lost – unrecoverable. We’ve proven we cannot handle unfettered liberty. No, the only way forward to recovered innocence is by way of reconciliation. The innocence Adam and Eve must hope for is to accept themselves after knowing; to get beyond pride and shame to a mature self-acceptance as forgiven sinners who accept being accountable to God and to others. We cannot get away from what we have done, but we can get away from the shame of what we have done. And according to the overall story that scripture tells, from Genesis to Revelation, that is precisely God’s goal, to reconcile those lost to pride and shame to a restored right relationship with him.
Full self-acceptance will never be ours completely because we continue to succumb to the enticing logic of the Serpent who says we can be our own gods. But we can grow into reconciliation, and along the way have those moments of self-forgetfulness that will help us remember the place we have never been, Eden; and anticipate Heaven, the place we have never seen but which, upon arrival, will seem like a homecoming. In those fleeting moments, we can catch a faint whiff of the flowers of Eden and hear the splashing of its rivers.
Dr. George C. Anderson is Senior Pastor at Second Presbyterian Church. Visit them on the web at www.spres.org