“On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.6-7)
I am reading through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s excellent Braiding Sweetgrass. In the beginning of it the author shares one of her people’s Creation stories and contrasts it with the “Western” one. (Some of which is quoted above). You know—the Bible’s colonizer narrative with all its inherit hierarchy and the opposition of human beings with nature. Because the Bible tells a story about humans being exiled from the Garden, that means, in the Jewish and Christian stories, we doom ourselves to be in opposition to the earth.
I don’t think Kimmerer’s reading of the ancient Near-Eastern Creation story is a particularly good one. But it’s a valid one since this is what much of Western Christendom has acted like this story means for the last five hundred years or so. Personally, I think this has more to do with the secularizing forces of the Enlightenment—as many of our modern problems in church, state, and society have as much to do with the problems inherent in philosophical modernity as they do with our “Christian heritage”.
I don’t know as that matters too much, though, as I’m not sure the average person knows the difference between this caricature of the Genesis 2 Creation story and a better reading of it.
I wrote my master’s thesis on the imago dei in Genesis 1. Truly, so much ink has been split to try to describe in glorious detail what it means to be made after God’s image and likeness. By the time I was ending my thesis work, I started running into some writing about the second chapter of Genesis, including Richard Bauckham’s The Bible and Ecology, which explored that “second” creation story in Genesis 2. Since childhood, I have been influenced by writers like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who were themselves early ecological and anti-imperialist fiction writers, whose convictions both opposing ecological destruction and empire sprang forth from both their personal loves and their theological convictions. Read The Space Trilogy—particularly Perelandra, where the hero is “breastfed from the planet Venus”. Read Narnia—and remember that Narnia was for the animals, but kept by sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. Remember the Ents in Tolkien—“but who is on the side of the trees?”
I have not stopped thinking about these things, because I agree with Kimmerer that the standard Western view of human relationships to the earth sucks. I just disagree with her diagnosis. It’s not because we (Christians) understand our Creation story well and live it out—it’s because we don’t. If we understood the story, we might find ourselves in a better place to be healed, and find our relationship with the earth healed, too.
To say just a little bit about the drama of Genesis 2-3. The purpose of this origin story is not to explain what happened long ago in a specific place and time. It is to explain why the world today is the way it is. Like any superhero movie origin story, we learn about the hero’s motives to understand the plot of the present moment. Genesis 1-3 tells a story of regular divine intimacy with humanity, and a generous and fruitful garden (on a sacred mountain?) that gives life and health and flourishing to all creatures who live in it, including human beings. It acknowledges a special partnership in the human pair, and a special relationship of naming and identity with the animal kingdom. There is no strife, no exploitation, no hunger, and no scarcity.
And yet, the voice of temptation is present and enters in. A choice is made to trust the desire for more instead of the divine voice of caution. There is just one tree in the midst of a forest, a wild garden, that is off limits, and only one command. The way to the Tree of Life is open and accessible. This singular command—surely not difficult to keep amid all this abundance—is broken.
This choice is not meant to be merely plot, or one instance in historical time. Rather, it is paradigm. This is the choice of temptation that is always coming up for human beings. It is the primal deception that human beings fall for all the time. This is our pattern, and it is one that is still playing out today.
Where does exile fit in? Human beings are not, by nature, exiles on the earth. But our choices have made us live like exiles. God longs to lead us to a Promised Land very much like this “original” Eden. Indeed—that is what the entire story of the Torah is preoccupied with. How does God solve this problem that human beings have? That no matter how generous God is to God’s people, God’s people choose to try to solve problems on their own through their own means—and the favorite tool that these human beings use to solve their problems is violence. When violence is all grown up in human society it looks like murder and like empire.
The scarcity narrative has no place in Genesis 1-3. The ubiquitous idea that human society is born from scarcity comes from John Locke—Rousseau opposed this, but he lost the war of ideas. Time after time, human beings try to explain away the evil and temptation that human beings act out of by scarcity. He did not have this. She didn’t have that. Pity those who do evil because they did it out of what they lacked. I will not say that this is never true. It can be. But it is not the worst of human beings. It’s certainly not the worst evil of human beings. To act as if it is the worst is just because we excuse and ignore and justify and valorize all the things that are so much worse.
The worst evils that human beings commit are the ones they do not need to do at all. It is the sins of the wealthy and powerful. It is the moral stupidity of people who make war out of ego and carelessness. Who toy with lives and supranational powers out of an inflated sense of their own abilities and insights. It is that we would rather make enemies and then kill them than feed our own children. That we allow—and encourage and admire them for it—the venture capitalists to prey on and kill the elderly, the billionaires to nickel and dime minimum wage workers “to make a profit” while they pay themselves and their rich friends hundreds of millions of dollars of bonuses. It is the tech companies who are morally indifferent to radicalizing their audiences toward political extremism and violence, sexual depravity, and addiction…so that they can make another dollar, so that they can remain competitive. It’s the thieves and deceivers who stole from people to make AI, and then make chatbots that pretend to be human—indifferent to people literally going insane because of the work of their hands. But they will do it anyway, “because of we don’t, someone else will beat us to the punch.” It is the political actors and dishonest media who train their audiences on racist ideas to line their own pockets and get more power for themselves than they ought to have.
That we have robbed the working class of fair wages and a dignified way of life while blaming them and looking down on it. That we prey on people with all kinds of debt, and bankrupt people for medical treatment, or for the misfortune of living a long life without wealth. That oil and natural gas companies lied for decades about climate change to avoid responsibility—while getting “fabulously rich”. They want all of the rewards, and no responsibilities. That we tolerate the genocidal warmongers who kill and destroy whole civilizations to advance an idea of a society that they imagine to be superior or deserving. That we have allowed a craven billionaire class to flourish, who apparently do all kinds of evil to show off to one another. To show each other that no one can stop them. That they are like gods. That they are god. That they are in the place of God and should be worshipped and obeyed as any god should. We call this narcissism. I will call it the original sin.
None of these things happen because human beings don’t have enough. Many of these things happen because no matter what some human beings have, it will never be enough. The story of the Garden of Eden is a moral indictment of shitty human choices. You may think this is harsh or depressing. I don’t. I think it is good news. It is good news because we are free to do otherwise. We don’t have to live like exiles the way Adam and Eve did. It is important to the logic of the story that you don’t see Adam and Eve saying “I’m sorry, God, I screwed up. What can I do to make this right?” Because that is what ends the cycle of sin and exile—taking responsibility for wrongdoing and seeking to restore what has been lost. Adam and Eve—by extension the human family—do not know how to do this. This is what the story of the Torah is all about. It is God’s attempt to put things right by God teaching human beings how to treat one another (the law, sabbath and Jubilee), what to do when wrongdoing happens in the human community, and how restorative justice works. While this story starts with the election of Abraham, most of it happens under the auspices of the prophet Moses (Exodus-Deuteronomy) while the people are on the way back to the Promised Land, aka, Eden. We, too, could do the same. We, too, could correct our wrongs and live differently.
Now, notice that Numbers, a book full of tests and temptations and crises for the people of God—mostly ends in failure. The people never really learn to trust God in the way that God would like them to. In fact, they even drive Moses to disobedience towards the end of his life. But God ends up giving the people the Promised Land anyway. Not because they have earned it or are the most powerful (which, yes, is explicitly discussed in the book of Deuteronomy), but because God is kind and generous, and the one who gives people a home. (In Numbers, God doesn’t just assign Israel a place to be, the story also says he does it for other peoples in the same region.)
But the people cannot keep the land. They cannot stay in Eden. They don’t know how. Even after the law and the prophets, they mostly get it wrong. There are some good days and years and judges and prophets and kings—but a whole lot of bad ones as well.
So, what, then, are we doomed? Do we just get these stories and examples so that we can wave our hands and say, “Oh, well, that’s just how we are”? Absolutely not. Jesus is waiting for us to notice him and make better choices, and think better of the kind of life he would like to offer us.
To be clear, I don’t care (much) that Kimmerer doesn’t understand the Creation story in Genesis, or the Torah, or the story of Christian redemptive. She doesn’t have to, it’s not her job. It is ours. I do care that Christians don’t understand our own stories and mostly live sad, defeated little lives that rationalize the wickedness and emptiness of this world without really challenging it. It does matter that our witness is so piss-poor that Kimmerer’s reading can’t even be construed as malicious. If the people of God aren’t paying attention to what our stories say and mean, why should anyone else?[1]
“My people perish for lack of knowledge” is something Hosea said a long time ago. It could not be more true of our current generation. Our Creation story, and our stories in general, are stories that have empowered the spiritual and imaginative life of many human beings for thousands of years. And yet, you wouldn’t know it, looking at the church today. These stories are meant to help us live. They are meant to set us free. They are meant to help us understand what is wrong so we can learn to be different.
I do recommend reading Kimmerer’s book. My church read it for April’s (Earth Month) book club. It was a little bit of a slow burn for me, but after a few chapters I was hooked.
Part Two will actually have thoughts on the relationship between human beings and the earth.
[1] I don’t mean to suggest that my reading here is the only possible reading or interpretation of these stories. Only that Kimmerer’s reading is superficial, incorrect, and quite justified–because it is probably what most Christians assume. Because most Christians are either imperialists themselves or at least afraid that the Bible is.