eThoughts : Celebrate Eating the Apple?

Speaking of reporting, yet owning that it could be a spin (which is why we make and compare our reports to begin with), it seems to me that instead of crying out about what Eve did, we need to celebrate it. That deed in the Garden of Eden is at least as worthy of celebrating as the resurrection or the crucifixion. In fact, I would suggest that both the crucifixion and the resurrection were reminders of our legacy, but eating the apple in the Garden of Eden was the formation of that legacy.

Oh no, sounds like trouble.

Before I go on, this is not a thought limited to Christianity, this is a thought, using a story in the Christian bible, about the philosophy, the psychology, and the practice of religion— powerful magnets in polarizing human perception.

All right, what’s that legacy again? Regardless of which religion we seem to choose, most deal with the inherent separation of humans from some divinity. And most see this separation as a problem requiring lots of suggestions and rules about how to not get lost in that separation. In other words, separation is the Great Bugaboo and seems to require authorities and experts to help the rest of us navigate.

Well, what if this seeming separation was actually the Great Unifier? What if Eve realized, however dimly, that without eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, humanity was doomed? What if the serpent was actually God speaking, tempting Eve to unleash human awareness, without which there could be no re-unification, only continuing separation. In other words, living in the Garden was already a separation in the sense that Adam and Eve were living like lambs who could never understand the shepherd.

If so, eating the apple would not be the beginning of original sin.

Not so parenthetically, the use of the term original sin obviously doesn’t mean from the beginning of humanity, but after the “Fall.” By most accounts, all was well before Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation, which I guess meant that there was original blessedness followed by a screw-up. The beginning of that screw-up was the beginning of sin—hence the term original sin. But that term is often used to depict humanity as originally sinful, as opposed to originally blessed, who then fell from grace.

All right, back to the notion that there was no fall from grace—there was peaceful, yet naïve existence. Eating the apple was a vehicle that allowed humanity to bust out of the pleasant, but myopic awareness that existed. That the break was and has not been entirely peaceful, it was and is entirely necessary. And if one wanted to motivate another to wake-up from their benign separation and join in on the wonders of awareness, what better polarizing agent than to create a forbidden something in the midst of an everything-is-good world? So, perhaps eating the apple didn’t cause a fall from grace, it changed the kind of grace available. And in so doing, it gave humanity an opportunity to sit with God rather then to be milling around him. That’s a gift to celebrate. And if we want some symbol to remind us of where to check in for some relief in living as a population we view as inherently sinful, maybe we should be wearing pendants depicting Adam and Eve partaking of the Apple. After all, opportunity may cost, but do we still need to keep bemoaning what we left behind—isn’t it time to let it go and step up to the wonders that were offered?