What if the Garden of Eden is a state of mind? A state of mind that we can learn to cultivate and inhabit. What if it is not God who chased us out of the garden but we who left and continue to leave. And what if we could learn to return.
Life In The Garden
Maybe starting with a taste of life in the Garden, imagining yourself in an oasis of abundance, growth and color, with verdant trees, grasses, shrubs and flowers blooming all around you and a peaceful river flowing next to you. God created this magical place for you and places you there. Actually the Torah says vayenihehu – from lanuah, to rest – God rests you there (Genesis 2:15), as if you are a precious newborn baby being laid gently in the comfy padded crib prepared for you. Let yourself rest there for a moment, in a bed of lush greenery, the sound of chirping birds and the gurgling river lulling you into a deeply relaxed state, riding the waves of your breath along with the stream. Perhaps, too, you hear God’s whispering voice on the wind in the evening, not saying anything in particular, just murmuring in a soft soothing tone, like the quiet indistinct sound of a lullaby heard as you drift off to sleep. You are loved and cared for.
Work In the Garden
In the morning you arise and there is work to do. It’s not that we just lie around all day in this graden. The Torah says that God places us here le’avdah uleshamrah, to work the garden and to preserve it, to protect it (2:15). So yes, there is work to do, but the work is of a joining variety. We participate in the organic growth of the earth, we go with the current of the river rather than fighting it, we collaborate with the natural movement of life, we tend to things, we coax them gently into continuing to blossom. This is Eden – a place of adinut, of gentleness. There is work, but the work is gentle and supportive, not coercive or aggressive. Here we hold all things and people in our hands as God holds us, tenderly, patiently, offering nourishment and support for the process that wants to unfold in them, trusting the process, trusting God and them and ourselves.
Can you feel what that’s like, to work from a place of joining and trust rather than efforting or pushing or forcing? To simply participate in the flow of life’s river. To go with the current of energy, to trust it, to join it, to tend to it, to smile and laugh and play with it as it moves in your hands, shaping and transforming itself without your effort to fix or control it. It’s so gentle, this work, so magical.
And yet we are so often not there. We feel that God has banished us into a world of thorns and thistles. What is it inside that takes us out of that magic, that leads us out of the garden again and again, that does not allow us to feel that kind of restful care and non-striving work?
The Snake: Sower of Doubt and Mistrust
So first of all there is the snake. We’ve all got one inside. I believe the snake is actually its own kind of angel – in leading us away, it actually leads us back – and that we can love it and honor it and over time, it will soften. But first, we need to see clearly the trap that it leads us into, to take away some of its power and authority over us, to shake our belief that what the snake says is always true.
Because this snake, what it does is to sow doubt. It doesn’t outright lie, but it twists the truth enough that we begin to doubt and mistrust, to doubt our relationship with God, to doubt whether God in fact loves us as much as we thought, to doubt whether we can trust God and the care that we are receiving. Really, the snake snickers in your ear, you think God just wants what is good for you? Ha. You think God cares, has your best interest in mind? Why do you think God didn’t want you to eat from that tree? God is saving the best for Godself, not wanting you to get too powerful. God doesn’t care about you. God just wants to keep you in your place (Genesis 3:4-5).
The Effect of Doubt
See how that doubt lands as you lie in the beautiful lush garden that God prepared for you. Oh, wait, you think. Maybe this is not so great. Maybe I’m being tricked. Maybe this isn’t really care. Maybe I can’t trust God after all. See how that shakes you to the core, how it ruins everything. It’s like the love has dried up and with it, the magic vanishes. Suddenly the garden seems drab and dreary, and the only beautiful thing is the one thing that you cannot have. You were content before, but now you are restless and desperate, desperate to fill the hole of hunger left by your sudden sense of abandonment and uncertainty. You have lost your center, lost the ground which holds you – the sense of being loved, the sense of trusting that God does care and wants what is good for you, the sense of divine goodness at the core of the universe. Maybe, you think, it’s actually a dog eat dog world and I need to look out for myself, to compete with others and with God, to fight for things, not just to trust and join like a fool.
Can We Return?
Oh, to be a fool again. To trust again. To return to the wide eyed innocence of the child, to the open heart and arms of the toddler, trusting love, embracing it, running towards it like a puppy towards a beloved master.
Maybe we have to leave the garden for a while, to experience the other way of being, but I submit to you that we can return, that we are drawn back, drawn back to our own innocence, to our own original trusting ways. And when we do return, when we do this circling back as a grownup, it is from a place of choice, a knowing intentional choice. It is no longer automatic, but a decision we make. A decision to live in the Garden of Eden, to live with trust in divine goodness and love. Because we know what the other feels like, we know how it is to effort our way through life, to live in suspicion, closed to nourishment, distrustful not just of God but also of human care. We know and we want to choose differently.
Because the truth is we have a lot of power. We create through our thoughts the world that we live in, even the God that we live with. We imagine that others are not to be trusted and so they seem and become untrustworthy. We imagine that God is angry and punitive and throws us out of the garden, and so it is for us. We imagine that work must be hard, impossible, that we have to kill ourselves to be effective, and so it is for us.
Choosing the Garden
But what if we chose to see things differently? What if we chose, with full kavanah, full intentionality, to live in God’s garden of plenty? Va’ani behasdekha batahti. But as for me, I choose to trust Your love (Psalm 13:6). I choose to trust love, to trust God, to trust each other, even when we are not trustworthy, to still trust, to trust that trust helps, has an effect. I choose to trust trust itself. To trust abundance, to trust the process of growth that wants to unfold, to trust the river’s current, to live not in opposition, but in participation with its flow, to believe in inherent goodness. Because to believe in it makes it so. God is for each of us as good and loving and gracious as we can allow ourselves to imagine and take in. Why not imagine ourselves back into that Garden?
With Others, Too
And why not choose it with others, too? Why not choose to trust their love? We are so often closed to the abundance on offer. There is so much more nourishment out there than what we allow in through our many long constructed barriers. The snake tells us not to trust the love, that it is not real, that the truth is self interest and not care. The snake tells us to interpret people’s actions through the prism of skepticism and self protection, to doubt their sincerity, not to trust all their past signs of generosity and kindness, all the commitment we have built up in our relationships. The snake says – forget all that goodness in the past, just look at this moment, this action they took (like the prohibition on eating the fruit) – doesn’t that seem bad? They are no longer reliable. It’s all over between you. They hate you. It’s like how the Israelites responded to the slight delay in Moshe’s return from the mountain, going straight to an idol, thinking it was all over with Moshe and God. Doubt forms in us so quickly. In the face of some new uncertain piece of information, all that investment in the relationship flies out the window. We are not steady. We give up on faith, on the relationship, we assume the worst so readily. We forget that God actually built this world out of love for us. We forget it all.
The Children That Guard The Entrance
And it’s to our own great great loss. The loss of nourishment that is readily available, a garden of connection and abundance and growth that is still very much accessible to us, if only we could open to it. The story tells of flaming swords blocking the way back to this garden (Genesis 3:24). That feels like an accurate description of our internal world. Yes, there are swords blocking the way back; there are parts standing in the way. If you look carefully, you can see that the parts holding the swords are actually keruvim, little angel children (Genesis 3:24). They are children. And they are guarding the way back to our tender vulnerable heart because they’ve been hurt. They’ve been terribly hurt in love before. Of course they don’t trust. They just need to feel some of that love and trust themselves, and they will, over time, put down their swords and turn to face each other – and you – like the cherubs over the ark of the covenant, creating with their wings an opening between them for you to enter and return to the garden, to the garden of your own innocent trusting childhood heart.
It is a painful return, yes, but one that we yearn for, one that we feel as an ache in our chest, a longing for the simplicity of that primordial connection, the trust of that cocoon, the faintly remembered knowledge of a place where we heard God’s voice singing to us through the leaves on an evening breeze.
Where Are You?
Can you hear that voice now? It is ever calling: ayeka, where are you (Genesis 3:9)? Meaning: where did you go, My love? Why did you leave the garden so fast? It is cried out not in anger, but in anguish and sadness and great grief. Why did you leave Me? You see, Adam and Eve, in their mistrust, in their loss of faith, in their hiding, in their giving up on connection – they had already left the garden long before they were thrown out. Maybe it felt to them like God threw them out, but it was they who left first, hiding there in the bushes. That is what we do. We leave. We leave the garden again and again. This is not to blame us. It’s not that we are bad. It is surely from past wounding, from trauma. It’s just incredibly sad, tragic really. I feel God crying and wanting us back so intensely. I feel us crying, too.
Maybe as we conclude, you can return to that garden cradle for a moment now, listening to the birds and the river, to the leaves and the lullaby, resting in the lap of soft green earth that surrounds you and was made for you and letting your heart open like a small trusting child.
So that when God asks ayeka, where are you, you can say, here I am, right here, back in the garden with You.
Photo is of the Garden of Eden view from my office.
