A wise and truthful man told me recently that God has a relationship with only the real you, the actual you, the Created you, rather than your created selves. Perhaps then, that’s why discovering ourselves and what we love and hate and live for is so exhilarating, and so damn frightening. Perhaps that’s why when we meet ourselves, our true selves, in the darkness of night or in hidden corners of our lives, we so desperately want to run away: why we drink, or why we lust, or why we destroy our relationships with our friends. It’s not because we are realizing who our worst enemy is, but rather we are meeting face to face our greatest Lover.
I think I often forget that “a [hu]man fully alive is the Glory of God” & desiring after our hearts doesn’t necessarily mean evil pursuits of worldly trivialities. We tend to discount our Divine Creation in the American Church, in the modernism philosophy we all in some degree embody which is grounded in the sheer disaster of Mankind and defines life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan). Yet, even before Christ came to redeem our fallen nature, Judaic thought and law emulated the Creation cycle in order to re-enforce memory of the Divine Artist (Ed Morris, 2008), as well as His declaration of our ‘goodness’. While one may argue that the ‘good’ only existed before the Fall of Man, there is no argument against the definitive goodness of God. The creation story that involves the beginning of sin, and thereby spiritual death, has no inclusion article that deems man’s original beauty to be forgotten in the light of man’s original sin, but rather that his original beauty must end in death.
The truth be told, I don’t know about Genesis 2. I don’t know if I believe the fall of man was a bad thing (I know, I know… it’s a bit of a stretch). Or perhaps I feel that it was inevitable, that anything that falls short of the Holy Divine can meet the ideals set by it. And there is part of me that believes by Adam and Eve’s banishment from the garden was the most loving thing God could have done in the face of being confronted by His perfection unable to exist with sin. He sent Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life, so knowing wrong wouldn’t torment them for an eternity.
Regardless of what these Creation stories mean, some how we got where we are today. And for some reason, across the seas, and across the land miles, we all find ourselves seeking answers to questions that feel eternal and huge and silent. We ask, “What’s wrong with this world? It just feels like it’s lacking something”, we ask, “What will fill this emptiness inside of me?” Science comes up short, philosophies are dour and dismay, words fail to explain. Some of us travel to the moon and back and we still don’t know.
I remember being four-years-old. It’s one of my first memories: standing in the middle of Pogonip trail at night with adults chatting behind me, and me looking up at the stars I had so deeply fallen in love with and wondering how they got there. My young mind thought that maybe they were halos that angels had misplaced, or perhaps someone (at this point, I had no idea who that someone might be… that came almost 10 years later) decided to make an extravagant connect-the-dot puzzle in the sky for everyone to enjoy, and that if I could only draw the lines correctly, maybe I’d find out the reasons why. Yes, I was 4. And Yes, this is my memory.
I don’t think I have grasped Creation better since.
I think that we must come to terms that we are the eyes and the ears of the universe’s beauty, made in the image and likeness of God, a deity who surpasses understand and anthropomorphication. That we are known, and nothing is withheld from Him. That we are capable of great and wonderful things, that Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:12-14), and that because of the Holy Spirit’s work through us, and within us we, as human beings, are good.
Maybe it is time we take a step back, take a few days off, and turn off this wired world for a while. Maybe it’s time to realize that we are Loved, that we are all seeking Him whether we know it or not. Maybe it’s time to be okay with big questions. Maybe we need to take a night to be lost along side the angels’ halos, to find ourselves in our darkness and sit with this person we are beginning to get to know alongside of the God who made us. And maybe, as we begin to realize that God is within us, we can grow to see the God in others. Maybe it’s time to recognize not only our fears and our failures, but also our gifts and our beauty and the reasons we are Loved.
