Recovering "Shining Bliss"

[We] enter "a fairy tale world" but quickly discover that this world offers no "retreat from reality," nor does it invite us to a world of shining bliss. Rather, anguish and darkness are the fairy tale's prevailing tone--the anguish of a lost paradisiacal happiness and the inevitable darkness that enters every life. (Here All Dwell Free, Gertrud Mueller Nelson)

Genesis 3 continues, rife with exactly what Mueller Nelson states above: movement from shining bliss to inevitable darkness. Or does it? That’s certainly the choice we’ve made, opting consistently for the darkness and losing any memory of the shining bliss.

7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" 10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." 11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" 12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." 14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." 16 To the woman he said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." 17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." 20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. 21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove them out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

What if we could recover the shining bliss?

I sat in a lecture a couple of days ago and listened to Bob Ekblad talk of new ways in which we must interpret and understand Scripture. Admittedly, my paraphrase, here’s what I heard:

At least in the Modern, Western world we have come to the Biblical text and asked, “What am I supposed to do based on this text?” What we need to ask is, “Who is God and what has God done for us in this text?”

Nearly all of our theology has flowed from and focused on the first question. When we’ve looked at Genesis 3 we’ve said, “Given this sad state of affairs, what are we to do now? We’d best seek to explain and understand what has happened and then work like h___ to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Our explanations have then taken forms we are all understand: the woman’s sin, the man’s temptation, the curse(s), the punishment, the banishment. The result of asking such? A near-total focus on sin, its accompanying cost, and its ongoing legacy.

The legacy is painful, one aspect of which I’m particularly aware: the price women have paid. Listen to voices of women who have reflected on Genesis, chapter 3, in A God Who Looks Likes Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality, Patricia Lynn Reilly)

“I was convinced that Eve was imperfect. She was fatally flawed in some way that made her “fall” inevitable. Her behavior proves the natural inferiority and fickleness of women.”

“Eve was bad. She did something wrong. She symbolized that women held a deep-seated corruption within them. Women were corrupters and manipulative temptresses. Eve was so evil that she persuaded the most righteous man to sin. She used her sexuality as a weapon to seduce and destroy him. Her body and beauty were tempting and negative.”

“Every time I experienced pain in labor and delivery, I cursed Eve for her sin. On a primal level beyond any churchy kind of memories, I believed she was the cause of my pain. I was being punished as her daughter. The pain and pressure of childbirth was to remind all of us that we are daughters of Eve.”

“As a child I was sure Eve’s sin had something to do with being curious. Women were curious. It killed the cat. Curious women who wanted to know about things got cast out of paradise. They turned into pillars of salt by angry male gods. They got sentenced to lives of pain and hard labor—in the fields and in childbirth. It was all supposed to hurt because Eve was curious.”

As a woman, I ache when I read these statements because I know how they’ve seeped into my bones, my reality, my understanding (and naming) of myself. They make me deeply sad. What’s more, these are not “truths” held uniquely by women. In nearly all the theology I’ve read as well as what has been taught to me predominantly by male pastors/leaders throughout my life, these statements would probably not be ones they would refute. They’ve seeped into men’s bones, reality and understanding (naming) as well. That should make all of us deeply sad.

And because of such, we should be that much more compelled to instead, ask the second question: Who is God and what has God done for us in this text?

Who is God?
In chapter 1 and 2 we encounter a God who has created beauty and perfection for us; a God who has empowered us to walk in its midst, naming and defining all that we see, all that we are; a God who has walked with us, talked with us, been in relationship with us. And nothing changes in chapter 3. God continues in relationship with us, seeking, pursuing, desiring. Even as movement away from beauty and perfection occurs, God’s presence remains – manifested in further naming of what life will now be like, covering, and care. Who is God? God is a present, generous, desiring of relationship One.

What has God done for us in this passage?
God has given us plenty and extravagance. God has given us autonomy and freedom. God has given us relationship. God has given us differentiation from God’s self and even creation. God has given us grace, love, and care. God has given us one another. God has given us life.

By asking these questions we shift our focus from the weight of Original Sin and an entire doctrine/theology designed to explain our inherent darkness (with women responsible for a particularly large portion of that depiction) to a God who still offers a taste of “shining bliss.” By asking these questions we shift our focus from our pride, willfulness, or even curiosity to a deeper awareness and appreciation of a God who knows us, sees us, and endlessly pursues and cares for us. By asking these questions, we shift our focus from an exhausting, narcissistic emphasis on our own sin and subsequent quest for salvation to a God who saves, redeems, and loves – not just someday, but in the thick of Eden, in the thick of our everyday lives.

Read the text again, looking for clues about who God is and what God has done for us. Read the text again and hold at bay your tendency to critique (the text and yourself), to attribute blame, to sigh with the heaviness of it all. Read the text again and wonder anew at a God who offers such freedom and spaciousness combined with such intimate pursuit and care. Read the text again and wonder how you might re-think not only Genesis 3, but the pages of your own story when God is the lens and not yourself.

I’m a bit overwhelmed by the idea of such. My mind quickly goes to multiple narratives, multiple scenes, multiple dialogues in my own life. I have to un-do much when I ask the same question, “Who is God in my text, my story, and what has God done for me?”

There’s definitely more to unpack in Genesis 3, but for now I just want to sit for a while in even the remote possibility that I don’t have to figure out what to do and instead can just rest in what God has done. That feels like a taste of “shining bliss,” a portion of Eden recovered, a portion of me renewed, redeemed, renamed. And that sounds like God saying, “It is good…still.”