SEARCHING FOR THE LOST GARDEN OF EDEN

Ever since Adam and Eve got thrown out of the Garden of Eden because of their disobedience, humanity has been trying to get back in, searching, if you will, for the lost Garden of Eden. The belief is that were we able find that place, all would be well. It would, once again, be heaven on earth. That is assuming that the first Garden was actually that place of bliss and enjoyment.

We don’t know. We may only think, or wish, it to be so. The story of the Garden of Eden, of course, is only a parable that reminds us over and over again, each time we read or hear it, that all of creation is good including, and most importantly, the highlight of creation, namely we human beings. The fact that humanity, from the very beginning, has not taken care of creation, has used an abused it, does not lessen the command to respect and love all of it and everyone and everything in it.

Even more, it does not mean that the Garden of Eden no longer exists or that we have to go looking for it or recreating it somewhere here on earth. The Garden is still here. It is everywhere we look. It is all around us. It is this earth and not a specific and special place on this earth even though whenever we think about the Garden of Eden we may have visions of some place that looks like Hawaii.

All of creation is good. There is nothing bad. We are to love creation in no less a way than we are to love our God and love our neighbor: with all our heart and mind and strength. We are to love it and to love them not because in doing so there is some reward in it for us, but simply because as part of creation, we are to love ourselves in no less a way than we love anything and everything else. Or as Wendell Barry once observed, “It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools.”

But we don’t and that is why this world, this created order, is in such a mess. That is why we dream of and desire a place like the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve in the biblical story, so often we use and abuse creation for our own selfish purposes and not for the purposes for which they were intended by God. God’s command not to eat the fruit of a certain tree was not to  rules and regulations or to see if Adam and Eve would be obedient. It was simply a reminder that God had another purpose in mind for that tree and that purpose had nothing to do with them. So leave it alone.

As the story goes, they could not. Neither, it seems, can we. Even though there are moments and places where we think we have found the lost Garden of Eden, times and places where it seems that we are experiencing heaven on earth, where we feel totally loved and love totally in return, those times and those places seem too few and too far between and away.

They are not. They are everywhere. There is no need to go searching for the Lost Garden of Eden. It was never lost and finding it does not demand a search. It only demands that we open our eyes and love and respect everything and everyone we see.