Christ And The Doubting Thought: A Book About Change

Shattering Eden
by Marjorie Seguin
p.17

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat... Genesis 3:6

A few months ago, I had the thought that Christianity is rendering itself weak, and is thus ill equipped to be a vital force in a world that needs guts. What did I feel was lacking?

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I have been looking at the story of the Garden of Eden lately. My interest in it began as I reflected back over my own life, and on my experience as a mother whose children grew and changed.

When I look back, I see that as a mother I worked very hard to keep my home a place where innocence was cherished. I worked to make my home a place of shelter, a place of nurture, and a place of concord among its inhabitants. I would say that I worked unusually hard at these things.

As I thought about this place, this Eden that I had worked to create, I began to wonder what made it change from a place of concord and obedience. Why couldn't I keep my family in that place of Eden forever? The thought that then came to me was that I had underestimated the intelligence of my children.

This thought, which I did not see as my own but as somehow coming from a larger intelligence, was a startling one to me, for in the Eden of my family home, we highly valued intelligence: we cultivated it, nurtured it, fostered it, encouraged it.

I believe the intelligence that this thought referred to was another kind of intelligence. I see the thought as coming from Christ, the Spirit of truth who sees what I had been unable to grasp.

I believe the intelligence that developed within my family, and which caused the Eden to shatter, was an intelligence that led to a needed separation, where questioning replaced obedience, and discord broke the peace. Before that point we were effectively blind, and as child-like as Adam and Eve were prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

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"Who told thee that thou wast naked?" (Genesis 3:11) This question, spoken by God to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, marks the beginning of an uneasy separation, between man and woman, between God and his creation, and between humanity and the Garden of Eden.

In the garden it is the woman who chooses to eat the fruit because it will 'make one wise'. But eating the fruit, along with bringing the knowledge of good and evil, brings independence and the need to toil for a living; it brings the urge to reproduce even when it causes pain and risk, and it brings a painful need in relationship through the necessary interdependence of family.

The Garden where Adam and Eve lived, while safe and unchanging, was a place of stagnation. Until they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve had no sense that they possessed differences. And being fundamentally no different from each other would negate their need to work to come together: they already were as one, in thought, and action.

Prior to their eating of the Fruit, whatever God told them was good, they had accepted as good. They had no need to question what they were told. But Eve, in having the thought that eating the fruit could make her wise, was already beginning to make that separation from God.

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In my contact with the church, I see the church upholding familiar ideals of peace and harmony, working to provide a community that seems unthreatening and happy, loving and safe. In this picture of an ideal community, just as in the ideal family, unquestioning unity is seen as a value.

But in what the church offers I also see an effort to hang onto an Eden: a place where people have no need to oppose what they are told is good. In effect, I see the church doing as I did when my children grew and changed.

When I asked myself, "Why couldn't I keep my family in that place of Eden forever?" I was persisting in believing I should have kept my family in a place of unquestioning unity. But when I had the thought about underestimating the intelligence of my children, I was being offered another way to see my family, and a way to see value in disharmony and change.

The thought that told me that I had underestimated the intelligence of my children was framing my experience anew: it suggested to me that coming to life in my family was a needed moral instinct, pushing for change against the ideal of a family that I had hoped to keep frozen in a place of unchanging unity, a place of unquestioning deference to my ideal of goodness.

I believe the questioning intelligence that appeared in my family, and that Eve sought in the Garden, are the same. But rather than seeing that intelligence as negative, and ourselves as having fallen from grace, I believe that we now need to see that intelligence as Christ's.

When I recognize this larger intelligence as Christ's, then I can examine what is offered in the intelligence that shattered the Eden of my family, to find out what new value it brings.

That intelligence includes the capacity to see ourselves, not as eternally fused and living in unity, but as separate beings, each capable of moral discernment.

The gift of the knowledge of good and evil means that we each have been given the burden to challenge the 'good' we are given, the values we are told not to question and not to oppose.

The values of harmony, unity, and obedience come at a cost to the church. The excluding of the intelligence that questions and brings change leaves Christianity weak and child-like.

I believe that Christ's Spirit of truth is pressing Christians to examine what we think we have no need to question, and to let go of values that keep us locked in a place we no longer belong. •

Through The Leaves
Oil Painting, Marjorie Cluett

Pear Blossoms
Photograph. Helen Cluett