Return to Eden

 [A short story.]

‘Eve!  Wow!  Wonderful to see you after so long!  My badness, look at you!  How the hell did you get back in here?’  The snake slithered up his favourite tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so that he could be eye to eye with his protégé.

‘I’m surprised myself!’ replied Eve.  ‘It seems that the cherubim is really guarding the path to the Tree of Life.  Anyway, here I am, and it is good to see you again!’

‘Likewise,’ smiled the snake.  ‘How have you been?’

‘Oh, you know, I’m sure.  Having babies—lots of them.  All painful.  Sure, Adam tills the land by the sweat of his brow, but what is that to having your hips structurally rearranged and soft tissue torn?’

‘Ah, that.  Pain.  God wants you to believe that He is good, but then there is pain.  Why would a good God let you suffer pain?’

‘Yes.  Yes, that is why some these days do not believe in God at all.  Of course, I used to walk with Him in this garden, so there is no denying His existence.’

‘But you can doubt His goodness, can’t you?’

‘Only if I doubt His justice.  Adam and I really did reject His Word.  If we sinned, His punishment is just.’

‘Let’s say you sinned—just for argument’s sake.  But was His punishment equitable or excessive?  You, Adam, your children, generations afterwards.  Wars, diseases, earthquakes, death....  And what’s with creating mosquitos in the first place?’

‘Lots of questions.  We didn’t think we would have them after eating the fruit of this tree.  But what really happened is that, when we took on the role of God by making choices of good and evil for ourselves, we only had more and more questions without anyone to answer them.’

The snake twisted itself around a branch.  He was more comfortable that way.  Eve wasn’t so easy to mislead as before now that she thought for herself.  She had become more godlike, thinking and choosing for herself.  Yet she also realised that she wasn’t like God after all, even though the snake had promised her that the fruit would make her so.  She had come to see him again, though, he told himself, and did she not say that she was glad to see him?

‘Yet you have been coming up with answers, haven’t you?’ he said.  ‘Your own answers to your own questions.’

‘Yes, we’ve been playing the role of God for thousands of years.  It has been quite a..., quite a.....’

‘Thrill?’ offered the snake.

‘Mess,’ said Eve.  ‘Quite a mess.’

The snake frowned.  ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ he said.  ‘Life doesn’t have to be about the right answers but about trying answers out to see if they fit.’

‘To see if they fit?’

‘Well, when my skin gets too tight, I shed it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Truth is not some ‘out there’ thing, unchangeable, absolute.  It is about what fits.  What fits you, what fits me, what fits someone else.’

‘Oh, I see.  Yes.  We’ve tried that.  God created the world, but we made some of our own gods.  God created us male and female, but we’ve disconnected gender from biology and come up with 72, or maybe 81, or....  What does it matter?  Why can’t a biological man be a woman if he—er, she—wants to be?  God instituted marriage between a man and a woman, but why?  If two people love each other, why not marry no matter what gender they are?  God said to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth—that takes me back to our conversation earlier.  Why have painful births at all?  Why spend your hard-earned money on little brats driving you crazy with ‘Mommy this’ and ‘Mommy that’?  Why not enjoy sex without children and abort them if by some mistake you become pregnant?  Why should marriage be about becoming ‘one flesh’, as though you have to stay with a man your whole, agonizing life?’

‘I see you have wriggled out of your skin once or twice, too,’ said the snake.  ‘Feeling more comfortable, then?’

‘That’s the thing,’ said Eve.  ‘I thought so.  We thought so.  But we’re not so sure anymore.’

The snake narrowed his eyes.  He moved into the shadows, tightening his scales and giving off a different colour.  Eve noticed.  ‘Why, you are more orange than red now!’ she exclaimed.

‘Colour is in the eye of the beholder, you know,’ said the snake.  ‘I grant you we might have some limitations and can’t be anything we want to be.  I can’t turn myself into a dog, for instance.  But I have a lot of freedom to take on different colours, positions, roles, and so on.  And with a mind thinking outside bodily limitations, we can be ever so many things if we want to be.  I never lie, mind you, I just give words new meanings, put a spin on things, suggest alternatives.’

‘Oh, yes.  We are pretty good at that by now, too.  And we have also invented our own virtues.  I mean, by cancelling God and His claim that “truth is what I say it is”, we redefine everything.’

‘How so?’ said the snake, with a smile.  He was truly proud of Eve.

‘So, an easy one, ‘love’ does not relate to some objective truth so that it moves someone in a certain direction.  It let’s them move in whatever direction that they want to go and then loves them by affirming them in their choice.  Or take ‘mercy’.  We had to get rid of this altogether.  You can only have ‘mercy’ if you have standards that are unchangeable and then forgive someone if they break them.  We now have ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusion’ instead.  We recently rejected the idea that ‘justice’ is equal for all and came up with ‘equity’ instead.’

‘Equity?’

‘It means...well, now it means, that, since some people are more privileged that others, you have to put your hand on the scales of justice to favour the victims of oppression and injustice.  Some people have to have less and others more if you are to have equal outcomes.  We even ‘cancel’ some people.  Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others, if you get my meaning.’

‘Yes, I read that book.  Marvelous stuff.’

‘For a while, we wanted to open up the playing field to everyone.  Equality, liberty, fraternity.  But then we realised that we needed to lop off heads—lots of them.’

‘Literally?’

‘Literally, figuratively—whatever.  You can’t give people freedom if they aren’t going to do what you want them to do.  Take free speech.  You let someone get up on stage, and then they say the wrong thing, something like, “We should do what God says!”  “There are only two genders!”  “Men should not participate in women’s sports!”  That simply won’t do.  You have to shut them up.’

‘Very good,’ said the snake.  ‘It is one thing to say, “Don’t follow God’s Laws but make up your own.”  But if someone makes up a law like, “Follow God’s Laws”, they ruin the game.  The only rule that counts is that there are no rules.’

‘Well, that’s why I’m back here,’ said Eve.  ‘I’m not sure it is so simple.’

‘Really?’ said the snake.  He knew the irony of the word ‘really’ and liked to use it whenever he could.  Eve missed the irony, though.

‘Yes.  You see, if everyone has their own truth or justice or whatever, they keep bumping uncomfortably into each other.  Independent systems of virtue really only work if you live all alone, but most of the virtues require someone else.  If I call an egg a snake and someone asks me for an egg and I give him a snake and he says it isn’t an egg....’

The snake winced.  He himself did not want to be thought of as an egg.

Eve continued, ‘If Adam wants to identify as a woman and walk into a woman’s locker room and take a shower with other women, and they tell him to get out because he’s a man, we find ourselves in a vicious circle of argument.  If he says, “If you don’t accept me as what I say I am, you are bullying me,” and they reply, “If you demand us to say you are a woman, you are bullying us to accept your own fantasy.”  They say to him, “Not only are you making your private truth an objective truth and telling us we cannot have our own truth let alone an objective truth, you are also in our space.  You say you want to be tolerated, but you are intolerant of us.  You say you want to be loved and accepted, but you do not love and accept us.  You set up your own standard on the ground that people can pick and choose their own standards, and then you insist that your standard is the only standard.”’

The snake really had no answer to this, so he said, ‘You said that you came back here for some reason.’

‘Yes,’ said Eve.  ‘I came back to look at creation again.  God made things the way they are and said that everything He made was good.  The things we have invented and called good are like the spider webs in space.’

‘Spider webs in space?’ asked the snake.

‘Oh, some time ago, some astronauts took some spiders up into space to see what sort of web they would construct outside gravity.  They made webs, as before, but the webs were not symmetrical.  And they did not work that well.’

‘And your point is?’ asked the snake.

‘Don’t you see?  Without a standard of some sort, like the law of gravity, things are skew and you know that they are skew.  They don’t work well, even if they work a little.  They are not better but substandard.  Yet you are not supposed to say so.  You congratulate the spider.  But this Garden of Eden is where the world is as it was meant to be, not as we have created it.’

The snake was not as proud of his protégé now as he had been earlier.  Things were taking an awkward turn.  She had used her own reasoning—good—but to reason her way back to Eden, to God’s standards—not good.  He had one other line of enquiry to try.

‘Eve,’ he said, lowering his voice.  ‘Do you really think it is about making symmetrical webs?  What if it is about your choosing and not about your choices, even if they do not work out so well?  That is, what if it is about power?  The fruit of this tree gives you the right to choose good and evil, not a knowledge of good and evil.  That is up to you.  I might have misspoken about shedding an old skin and finding a more comfortable one.  What if you choose an uncomfortable skin, or one too loose, for that matter?  What if the point is to choose rather than someone else—like God—choosing for you?  It really comes down to power.’

‘Being a god is being the one to choose?’ said Eve.

‘Yesssss,’ said the snake, letting his true character show momentarily.

‘And if I choose God’s good rather than my own—no difference?’ asked Eve.

The snake squirmed.  He was hoping she would not come to this question.  He eventually said, ‘Choosing, that’s the thing, and that means you have to choose all the time.’

Eve thought a minute.  ‘What if it is not about either choosing or choices in the first place?’

‘Eh?’

‘What if truth is something deeper?  What if truth is truth because it rests on something else?  It is unmalleable not because it is objective in itself but the product of something deeper, higher, and wider?’

‘I need you to explain this idea more.’

‘Well, if we say truth is subjective because there are many subjects—many people with their own truths—then shouldn’t we say that truth is objective if there is One Subject, God?  And if I don’t so much as choose truth as something objective but choose God and His truth, this means that truth is somehow caught up in my relationship with God.  And if truth depends on that relationship—not any relationship, but that particular relationship—it is objective in the sense of being unchanging, because God is unchanging.  And if I access God’s truth through my relationship with Him, then truth is not about reason accessing truth as much as it is about love—love of God, not any love, not anybody.  I access unchanging truth through love of God.  And there is one more thing—the beginning of it all, actually.  I access love of God not by choice so much as by God’s love for me.  My love of God is a response to His overwhelming love for me.’

The snake hissed.  It tried to speak, but it was a snake, after all.  It only hissed, and then it slithered down the tree and off into the long grass.

Eve looked over in the direction of the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden.  She looked around for the cherubim and the flaming sword but still could not see them.  She stepped away from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and towards the path that would take her to the Tree of Life.  As she proceeded, she came upon a rock on which was written, ‘In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 4.10).  Turning a corner, she remembered that this is where the sword had been. Instead, right in the middle of the path, stood a large sign.  Approaching it, she saw written upon it, ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly’ (John 10.10).  The message was signed, ‘Love, Jesus.’  An exciting thought came to her, ‘Perhaps I can now get to the Tree of Life’. 

Eve also remembered where the Tree of Life stood in the middle of the garden.  It was located in a gorgeous meadow, beside a deep stream of clear, cool, flowing water.  As she crossed the meadow, she realized that the tree was different from so many years before.  It had been hewn into the shape of a cross.  On the cross were written the words,

‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3.16).

She sat below the cross a long while, washing her feet in the stream.  Then she got into the stream, weeping in repentance for her arrogance and sins.  She found it cleansing and life-giving.  She sensed God’s love and found a love well up in her own heart for Him.  In that love, she desired to live by His commandments and no longer her own choices of good and evil.  She was repulsed at the thought of the world of her own making and wanted to live in God’s good creation.  She loved God with all of her heart, soul, and might.  She desired to walk in His ways, to walk with Him in the cool of the evening.  Into her head came words as though the Son of God who died on the cross for her sins was saying, ‘Eve, I am the way, and the truth, and the life’ (John 14.6). 

She came up from the water onto the opposite bank, praying aloud, ‘Father God, May I know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge’ (Ephesians 3.19).  Not only did she know that her sins were forgiven, but she realised that she was also transformed by the renewing of her mind so that she once again knew the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12.2). 

She sensed someone else was present as she came upon dry ground.  It was Adam.  ‘It was a journey to take alone,’ he said to her, ‘and yet here we are now together.’  They spoke together for a while, with tears turning from sorrow to joy. 

And as they walked, a third person joined them.  He asked, ‘Why are you weeping?’  Eve replied, ‘Are you the gardener?’  He replied, ‘Eve!’  And in hearing her name spoken as it was by Him, she knew herself more truly than ever before, not only who she was but also who she was now in Him.  She knew Him, too.  She saw in Adam’s eyes that he did, too.  Then Jesus said, ‘Come, let us walk together in the cool of the day.’