MEDITATION-THE FALL

Rewrite the story of the Fall in Genesis without the spiritual element and the story is as old as humanity. It’s repeated every time some guy tries to get a girl into his bedroom. It’s repeated every time a joint, a line of coke, even a cigarette is offered with the tired refrain of “everybody’s doing it,” “what’s the matter, you scared,” and the classic “nobody will every know.” There’s at least one problem with trying to keep a secret. No matter how deep you bury that secret at least one person will always know what happened. You can hide things from everyone but yourself. Buried deep inside it festers and creates a wall between you and everyone around you.

And if you believe that in some way the God of scripture set the forces of creation in motion that resulted in humanity and every other creature in the universe, including a certain tempter; there’s always “don’t tell Dad.” And there’s another old standby. Take out the King James sixteenth century language and you might find that the story takes on a five year olds’ playground singsong; “I know something you don’t know.”

Perhaps the death blamed on man’s fall in the garden wasn’t the physical death that the far right evangelicals claim. After all there’s no claim in scripture that our physical bodies were meant to be immortal. Even stars and planets are born, age and die. Something the writers who preserved scripture wouldn’t have, couldn’t have known.

Perhaps the meaning story isn’t death of the body but injury to the soul. When truth is ignored, trust is impossible and without trust there can never be love or hope. And without love or hope life is meaningless.

MEDITATION-YOU SHALL BE AS GODS

There are two Creation stories in Genesis. The first story ends with man being granted dominion of the earthly part of the Creation. The second story ends with the Fall. The usual interpretation since the days of Augustine, the melancholy former Manichean, is that sex was somehow involved.

Part of an essay by Thomas Merton put a different cast of the story of the “Fall.” In Merton’s interpretation what man reached out to take on his/her own was something that we already had; but it was within the relationship with God. And it doesn’t have anything to do with sex. It has to do with men reaching for the power of Gods, without the relationship, knowledge or respect for the rest of Creation. To me that dominion was granted within our relationship with God. When mankind reached for the power of God outside that relationship we lost the right to that dominion. We’re still trying to exercise it, but damn it we continue to destroy far more than we create.

We heard the litany all through the eighties and beyond. “God gave us dominion, we can do whatever we want with the earth as long it makes a profit for somebody; especially me.” “And anyone who doesn’t agree with this is a tree hugging, tree worshipping pagan.”

I have a variation on the old philosophy question. “If a tree dies in a forest does it go to waste?” It’s a question that gets asked a lot in the Northwest. And the usual answer from the big lumber companies is “Yes!” We have very little old growth forest left and there are still some companies that would love to take their chainsaws to it.

And no, I don’t believe that when a tree dies and falls in the forest that it’s wasted. I’ve seen those old, fallen trees. They support a whole universe in that rotting tree. You can find insects, mushrooms, moss, lichens and small bushes living on that old log, For me the whole idea of sustainable logging is an oxymoron. There is no way you can keep taking the life from the forest and not put back. You can do it for a few generations but in the end you’ll be left with a forest that’s a shadow of the old growth stands.