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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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15. We Must Re-Myth Genesis This hour of the day is so incredibly beautiful that I am filled with wonder. The late afternoon sun, still vigorous with warmth but mellow with diminishing, is flooding our deck and beach and small cove with lustrous sidelighting. Like a Vermeer painting, it catches the white sides of the moored boats, making them gleam like translucent ivory. The sun goes in for a moment. I look up and see sheaths of lighted vapor shooting up out of the cloud like streaks of ethereal power. The sun comes back, and the sea is lit to an incredible aqua blue which shines back at me with a liquid sheen. I have always wanted to paint this hour and the evening time which follows it -- to attempt to capture, as the French impressionists did, the wondrous glories of light in nature. When my children were small and constantly demanding and interrupting at this hour, it seemed to me the very first thing I would do with post-motherhood leisure would be to try to paint this. But I never have, perhaps because I fear the failure to capture such an elusive essence. Instead I find I want simply to experience it deeply, over and over. And so I sit on my deck and look out. And I feel and see and notice everything -- the small white butterflies playing in twos and threesomes over the beach roses, the gulls flying in lazy swoops over their island, the different way each evening takes shape as the pale blue sky gradually deepens until it almost matches the deepening blue-purple of the water, striated now with a thousand ripple lines which catch the sun and cast their own tiny shadows. Each evening is different, unique, special. The sun and the earth, the wind and the water and the birds -- each is a glorious gift of life to me... if I participate, ... if I am still, ... if I can listen and receive and wonder and worship. The Covenant in Creation We have never understood that there is a covenant in creation itself. God reaches out to us in creation, births us into being, surrounds us with the splendors of sensual life in a sensuous universe, and pledges faithfulness to us in the steadiness of the seasons and in the bounty of food for eyes, mind, ears and stomachs. God's gift to us is this life, this world, this creation. God's pledge to us is the constancy of the pulse of life in creation itself. The poet laureate of South Carolina, Archibald Rutledge, has this sense of the creation as the foundational communication from God. The more I thought about this, the more it appeared that Creation supplies us with only two kinds of things: necessities and extras. Sunlight, air, water, food, shelter -- these are among the bare necessities. With them we can exist. But moonlight and starlight are distinctly extras; so are music, the perfumes, flowers. The wind is perhaps a necessity; but the song that it croons through the morning pines is a different thing. • • • I stood recently on the shores of a mountain lake at sundown after a heavy rain, and watched for an hour the magnificence of the west; the huge clouds smoldering, the long lanes of emerald light between them, then isolated clouds like red roses climbing up some oriel window of the sky, the deep refulgence behind it all. Superb as it was, momently it changed, so that I saw in reality a score of sunsets. I looked across the lonely, limpid lake, past the dark forest, far into the heart of the flaming, fading skies .... Neither a day-dawning nor a sunset (with all its attendant beauty) is really a necessity. It is one of life's extras. It is a visit to an incomparable art gallery; and no one has to pay any admission fee. • • • Almost the whole complex and wonderful matter of color in the world seems an extra. The color of the sky might have been a dingy gray, or a painful yellow, or a plum-colored purple. But it is sapphire. And my philosophy makes me believe that such a color for the sky is by no means the result of mere chance. Granted that it is the result of the operation of certain laws, forces, and conditions; yet behind it all, back of the realized dream, is the mighty intelligence of the Creator, the vast amplitude of the dreamer's comprehension.... *** ... I went one day into the forest to try to escape from a grief that had come to me.... All about me were the rejoicing looks of the flowers, and the shining hush and loveliness of dew-hung ferns and bushes, and the gentle, pure passion of the sunlight. And music there was from myriads of sources: gossamer lyrics from bees; the laughter of a little stream jesting with the roots of a mighty pine.... God seemed very near to me in that wood .... I saw there both life and death -- in the green leaves and the brown, in the standing trees and the fallen. [1] Rutledge tells here of the renewal of his sense of the constancy of the pulse of life in creation: "Passing from a state of keenest grief I came to one of quiet reconcilement -- to the profound conviction that, living or dying, God will take care of us." [2] The Covenant Set apart from Creation The covenant in creation has never been properly understood. Instead, the covenant has always been construed as something apart from creation. Even though the Genesis myth pronounced the goodness of all of creation, Judeo-Christian religion never saw that in the creation of the world there had been a covenant given. Instead the ancient Hebrew made another covenant with God and made circumcision its sign and seal (Gen. 17:1-14). It was that covenant-pledge (circumcision) that constituted them as God's people. This covenant religion, with its relation to a transcendent moral God, was sharply distinguished by all of Abraham's heirs from the Baal worship of the female fertility cults that flourished in neighboring regions of Canaan in the first millennium of their existence as a people. Yet in a strange way the ancient Hebrews had produced their own version, a male fertility cult, in which the central cultic act defining membership in the religion and tracing the descent of the bloodline focused upon the circumcised male phallus! Within the dimensions of the biblical covenant, nature became a backdrop. It was a carpet and a stage-setting upon which the drama of salvation was being played out between sinful man and the transcendent God. Nature became in that perception of things a non-category. When nature was not completely ignored in theological discussion, it became a foil against which to display the human and honor that part of creation which was inward, spiritual, and "supernatural." What had been completely overlooked was that God long ago had made a fundamental, initial and sustaining covenant with all of creation. Through the millennia God has been continually loyal to this covenant with an ongoing renewal of the seasons, the generations, and of creation itself. Because we missed seeing all that, we have not seen "honoring creation" as our side of the covenant. Honoring the Diversity God Has Created What God created was and is diverse. And complex. So the covenant is not just between us and God. Nor is it just between a few of the parts of what God has created and their Creator. The covenant, like the creation, goes in many directions. It is a covenant connecting, supporting and shaping all that in the intricate creation web sustains what has been made and recycles what is being reused and renewed. To honor the covenant means to honor not only the Creator but to honor all those sustaining and renewing relationships. The poet Phyllis McGinley pointed to this in her poem on the occasion of a Phi Beta Kappa dinner. Such occasions usually honor excellence, but "In Praise of Diversity" directs praise and honor toward the entire covenant -- toward all that the fantastically inventive mind of God has birthed into being.
Since this ingenious earth began
One whimsical beatitude,
Adam, perhaps, while toiling late,
And still the sons of Adam's clay ***
... Yet who would dare
Recalling then what surely was
And grateful for the wit to see Value has already been given to everything in creation by God's birthing it into being. Its value is its given function within a niche in the interconnecting webs of ecosystems, species, organs, tissues, cells, molecules and subatomic particles. Our present ethical and legal systems, which only give value to humans and to what humans value, are so hopelessly anthropocentric that they deserve a place in Garrett Hardin's suggested Museum of Obsolescence along with the notion of "an away you can throw things to." Christopher Stone's proposal of rights for natural objects is a first step in an appropriate correction of such systems. If we truly honored the diversity in creation, we would move our culture to a creation-based valuing of all the parts of nature. We would not place the value of any one species always above the others. All species would be validated by their basic imprimatur of worth given to them in creation itself. But some say to me: How could we possibly make decisions outside in the real world without valuing humans more than mosquitoes? How could we decide what to do, if all were of equal worth? My answer comes out of my experience with a similar situation in family life. Do parents consider all of their children to be of equal worth because they brought each of them into life? Then, if their children are of equal worth, how do parents make decisions about or between children? If the eldest is not superior because older or bigger, does the whole process of parental decision-making grind to a halt? Hardly! The point is that we parents continually find some grounds for making our decisions, grounds other than ranking our children in some hierarchy of their worth. What we perceive instead is that our children have differing needs, differing strengths, differing weaknesses. And occasions differ too. It is upon the basis of some convergence of all these factors that we make our decisions. And our decisions are always made within the overriding imperative that we seek to preserve the welfare of each of them as well as the welfare of the entire family! It will be a new experience for humans to make decisions within creation's family without our confident assumption that "we are of course always the most loved and most valued child in creation's family." We will need to learn and gain practice in a different sort of decision-making. It will be, I think, a decision-making akin to the decision-making of parents. Such decision-making will appreciate diversity and reward it -- without ranking it. Such decision-making finds value in each part as well as in the welfare of the whole. To say that such decision-making cannot be done outside the family in the "real world" is simply to prefer the thought-ways of the present because they are more familiar and therefore seem easier. Consider these reflections upon the value of some other parts of creation: If you are in the mood to be enchanted, stop, look, and notice fireflies. If these tiny insects came but once a decade, we would be arranging festivals for them, writing articles, and having private viewing parties to appreciate properly their nightly dance. Yet here they are for weeks absolutely free, transforming meadows, fields, backyards and lawns. These mysterious little creatures that baffle scientists with their ability to produce cold light are one of nature's most enchanting productions. Sit on your terrace some clear, moonless evening with all electric lights out and watch the night around you come alive with the weaving of a thousand pricks of light. This tiny light is their guide to each other. [4] • • • For several weeks our light blue delphinium in the perennial bed near the roses has been in full bloom.... It had been the center of interest for the local hummingbirds who come several times a day to sip nectar. Now today one little creature appeared, darting and hovering first here and then there.... The tiny bird rose in the air, perhaps ten feet high and a little to one side of the perennial bed. Flying so fast I could hardly follow him with my eye, he described an arc whose central low point was the delphinium itself. Here he swung back and forth like a pendulum in a great semi-circle. He did this about ten times and then took off. I was fascinated by his performance, and by the brief glimpse into one of the many other worlds that interpenetrate ours. When it was over I rushed to the bird book and found that this is what hummingbirds do. The lady is always somewhere near the lowest part of the arc -- next time I must look for her. It's a kind of courting dance although it seems a little late for courting now. [5] The rainbow as a symbol in our time seems to be dawning, suggesting the spectrum of diversity we now are beginning to acknowledge and honor in our culture. A ray of light broken open by a prism into the whole spread of primary colors seems an apt metaphor or parable pointing to a creation which likewise breaks forth into all the variegate beauty of interdependent diversity. The rainbow is like a banner or flag, waving as a symbol of diversity over the movements of ethnicity and difference, celebrating the dissolution of the norm and of monochromatic uniformity. Let's hear it for the chocolate brown of the good earth and dark skins! Hurrah for roseate tones of sunsets and Indian skins. Cheers for the yellows of sunlight and oriental skins. Here's to the blue-purple of skies and butterflies. Let's celebrate the green of trees and all of nature's "niggers," and let's storm the law courts till we acknowledge the intrinsic value of all in creation's rainbow. Human Identity Was Born a Twin We have most especially misunderstood the covenant in creation which has come to us in human sexuality. As I write this I am in my daughter's bedroom enjoying a breeze from the land side of the house on a very hot day, and I am looking at a poster of hers which has intrigued me. It shows two strikingly striped black-and-white zebras and has the enigmatic inscription: "Happiness was born a twin." Just so, human identity was born a twin. But not an identical twin, a different twin -- a pair, one male and one female. But somehow the male-born could not handle this fact of "difference." Apparently the inner need has been irresistible to perceive this difference in hierarchical terms of who's above whom, so that men as mythmakers and portrayers of their worlds have in millennia past never understood and mythed the true dimensions of this human twinship and difference. Always Woman Has Been Mythed Upon Never has woman spoken for herself or mythed the world out of her own psyche. "Out of the relics of thirty thousand years," writes Elizabeth Janeway, "there is no image of woman that we can point to and say: This was made by women alone, apart from the eyes or direction of men." She then goes on to consider the earliest evidence: Take the earliest images of all, the little "Venuses" of the Old Stone Age which have been found across Europe and Asia from the Atlantic littoral to Siberia. To name them Venuses is to imply that they are goddesses; and so they have been called by many an archeologist. But look at them with a human eye: they are not goddesses, they are fetishes, lucky pieces for a desperate man, hunter or hunted, starving or wounded, to thumb in time of need; a memory of Mum and Mum's protection and thus not a portrait of woman, but of man's need for her.... Even when the Goddess appears, her image is that of the woman seen by man from outside. She is the Great Mother, feared and adored, both mediator with and representative of necessity. This is not a picture drawn by woman. No girl child would form such an identity for herself, for there is nothing of her inner personal experience in it.... The Mother Goddess is an image shaped by emotions projected onto women, reflecting the desires and needs of others. In that pattern of making, a woman cannot be allowed to feel or express her own emotions, nor to originate any act, for her purpose is not to create her own life, but to validate the experience of others. Her experience isn't and can't be part of the reckoning, for it would confuse it hopelessly. It simply doesn't count and so she is absent from history. [6] Simone de Beauvoir has written powerfully of how women have been mythed or imaged as "other" -- that which is not-male. Elizabeth Janeway writes equally powerfully about what having woman as "other" has meant both to women and men. Woman-as-other provides a focus for many needs and yearnings: for tenderness, given and asked for; for maternal protection; for divine assurance; for support against forces of depersonalization; for evidence of the existence of self-sacrifice and loving-kindness. Women are thought of by men (and thus they are instructed to be) upholders and transmitters of high virtues and values. They are validators of emotions and interpreters of experience. To men, this seems a role of great dignity and nobility, an elevation. Why do women refuse the pedestal? How very hard it is for women to make clear that to the extent that one's life is spent as only a terribly necessary aspect of someone else's life, one ceases to be a person in oneself. To accept that one is "other" rather than human is to deny one's identity as a human and feel one's own personality as obtrusive, clouding the mirror one is supposed to be. [7] One Twin's Curious Psychic Blindness Mything the world always from the male viewpoint has resulted in a curious psychic blindness. This can be discerned in phrases such as Freud's "the fact of female castration." As Elizabeth Janeway sardonically observes, "What kind of fact can that be? So far as I know, no woman in Western society has suffered even the trauma of circumcision." [8] Only from the male point of view is the female castrated. From her point of view he has outside equipment he may seem obsessively and neurotically preoccupied with! Freud's remark is in the same category with "the body is the hero" and "flesh-colored Band-Aids" (which match only Caucasian flesh). When you think about these phrases, the blindness they reveal staggers the mind. The ultimate problem with this dominance of male mything and imaging of the world is not its oppression of women or its effects upon men in any given generation. The most fundamental problem is that it has allowed the psyche of male culture to become a worldwide monoculture, with all the vulnerability ecologists are familiar with in biological monocultures. Only what male culture perceives is perceived. What male culture does not perceive does not exist for that male culture. The boardrooms and the seats of power are occupied by males and occasional token females carefully preselected from among those trained to perceive just like men. So there is no one to cry out, "Look! The emperor has no clothes on!" The Other Twin Is Awakening What is now happening to that other human twin? What of woman, who through the ages has been mythed upon? She stands, as Elizabeth Janeway so aptly put it, "between myth and morning." It is consciousness, it is presence, it is woman wakened from a millennial slumber and looking around at a world in which, astonishingly, one might be at home: Galatea without Pygmalion, dreaming herself out of the stone by her own force of creation. [9] "It will be a long time yet," writes Janeway, "before we understand all that means, for first we have a great deal to unlearn." [10] We must unlearn all the male generic language and linear styles of thought we were so carefully taught in masculine culture. But more subtle, we must unlearn all the projections of female otherness -- passivity, sexual seductiveness, the need to please, the expectation that woman will find her fulfillment in living vicariously for others. It becomes like starting again as a person, being born anew. I still remember vividly a morning in a theological library some years ago when I read for the first time Valerie Saiving Goldstein's essay, "The Human Situation: A Feminine View." [11] I suddenly realized with her help that all of the theologians whose views I had so assiduously studied and assimilated in theological school were male! Valerie Saiving Goldstein was suggesting the possibility that their naming (or description) of the basic human condition as "anxiety" was a naming done from their male point of view. Perhaps women, she was suggesting, would name it differently. It was as if I had been engaged in a long, long game of intellectual Monopoly and suddenly I had been told: "Go back to Go. Do not collect $200. You must begin all over again." This was not good news. "You must try to 'undo' all that centuries of male thinking has done to you. And then you must see from your own flesh and your own intuition and your own experience how you yourself would name the human condition." This book has been my pilgrimage to do just that. The woman really is between myth and morning. The consciousness of the woman-twin is just awakening. What lies ahead is a new interplay of male and female perspectives which goes beyond old stereotypes, a mutuality and symbiosis in which both are truly autonomous. I do not think masculine and feminine will then be understood in terms of androgyny and Jungian categories which seem to me to accept that "masculine" is innately rational and active, while "feminine" is innately intuitive and passive. I doubt also that masculine and feminine will be cast in Yin/Yang terms which again confine the one to activity and the other to passivity. And talk of "complementarity" in these matters usually means using the female to add what the male feels he is lacking. All of these ways of thinking still confine woman, define her territory for her, locate her in a psychic space defined and named from the male perspective and experience. Who but woman knows what woman is, how she perceives herself and world, until she awakes, and out of her own experience of herself and her own autonomy she myths for herself her world awake? Who knows yet what can be for the world and for creation's human twins, until they see and myth the world together, and each is "subject" mutually and none is "other"? Yearning to Be "at Home" in the Earth I have been saying in this chapter, first, that there is a covenant in creation itself which we have never understood and so have not been faithful to; second, that we have most especially misunderstood the covenant in creation which has come to us in human sexuality -- in human identity being born a twin. Now all of this misunderstanding and misappropriation of creation has resulted in our alienation from each other and from the earth, our home. This alienation has been expressed in how we have thought and mythed God, ourselves, our world. "If you put God outside," Gregory Bateson warns, "and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables." [12] To myth ourselves apart is to myth ourselves alienated. Yet we yearn to be "at home" -- at home with ourselves, at home with one another, at home with our world and our shared destinies that lead us through joys and pains and finally to our dying. In her quiet yet translucent description of her life in her home in New Hampshire May Sarton gives us a glimpse of an "at-homeness" in which the house, the woods, the meadows, the furniture from her past, the presences of friends and relatives mediated by flowers, habits, memories, and finally the silence, are all appropriate and interwoven into a wholeness of space and time. Silence was the food I was after, silence and the country itself -- trees, meadows, hills, the open sky. I had wanted air, light, and space, and now I saw that they were exactly what the house had to give. The light here is magic. Even after all these years, it still takes me by surprise, for it changes with every hour of the day and with every season. In those first days it was a perpetual revelation, as sunlight touched a bunch of flowers or a piece of furniture and then moved on. Early in the morning I watched it bring alive the bronzed-gray of the bird's eye maple of mother's desk in my study and make the flowers in the wreaths suddenly glow. In the afternoon, when I lay down for an hour in the cosy room, I saw it dapple the white mantlepiece and flow in waves across the wall there. And when I went into the kitchen to make tea, there it was again, lying in long dazzling rectangles on the yellow floor. This flowing, changing light plays a constant silent fugue, but in those first days I had still to learn how different the music is as the seasons come and go. • • • Winter is the season when both animals and humans get stripped down to the marrow, but many animals hibernate, take the winter easy as it were; we humans are exposed naked to the currents of elation and depression. Here at Nelson it is the time of the most extraordinary light and the most perfect silence. When the first snow floats down on the rock-hard earth, first a flake at a time, then finally in soft white curtains, an entirely new silence falls. It feels as if one were being wound up into a cocoon, sealed in. There will be no escape, the primitive person senses, always with the same shiver of apprehension. At the same time, there is elation. One is lifted up in a cloud, a little above the earth, for soon there is no earth to be seen, only whiteness -- whiteness without a shadow, while the snow falls. Is it dawn or dusk? Who can tell? And this goes on all night and occasionally all the next day, until there is no way out of the house. I am sealed in tight. Many times during the night I wake to listen, listen, but there is no sound at all. The silence is as thick and soft as wool. Will the snow ever stop falling? But when at last the sun comes out again, we are born into a pristine world, into the snow light. The house has become a ship riding long white slopes of waves. The light! It is like living in a diamond in this house where the white walls reflect the snow outside. There are shadows again, but now they are the most brilliant blue, lavender, even purple at dusk. And sooner or later I must push hard to open the front door against the drifts and get myself out with seed for the bird feeders. Then, when I come back to sit at my desk, I look out on an air full of wings as they come to dart, swoop, and settle-jays, nuthatches, chickadees, evening grosbeaks, woodpeckers, making a flurry of brilliant color across the white. The plows go roaring down the road, and I am safe inside with a fire burning in the study, lifted up on such excitement at my changed world that I can hardly sit still. [13] The house itself, well-formed and graceful in design, spare and white, ordered and quiet. It seems a part of the woods and encroaching rough fields as birds and visiting animals and neighbors counterpoint May Sarton's solitude. I found out very soon that the house demanded certain things of me. Because the very shape of the windows has such good proportions, because the builder cared about form, because of all I brought with me, the house demands that everywhere the eye falls it fall on order and beauty. So, for instance, I discovered in the first days that it would be necessary to keep the kitchen counter free of dirty dishes, and that means washing up after each meal; that the big room is so glorious, and anyone in the house is so apt to go to the kitchen windows to look out at the garden or into the sunset, that it would be a shame to leave it cluttered up. The white walls are a marvelous background for flowers, and from the beginning I have considered flowers a necessity, quite as necessary as food. • • • Choosing, defining, creating harmony, bringing that clarity and shape that is rest and light out of disorder and confusion -- the work that I do at my desk is not unlike arranging flowers. Only it is much harder to get started on writing something! ... Here again the house itself helps. From where I sit at my desk I look through the front hall, with just a glimpse of staircase and white newel post, and through the warm colors of an Oriental rug on the floor of the cosy room, to the long window at the end that frames distant trees and sky from under the porch roof where I have hung a feeder for woodpeckers and nuthatches. This sequence pleases my eye and draws it out in a kind of geometric progression to open space. Indeed, it is just the way rooms open into each other that is one of the charms of the house, a seduction that can only be felt when one is alone here. People often imagine that I must be lonely. How can I explain? I want to say, "Oh no! You see the house is with me." And it is with me in this particular way, as both a demand and a support, only when I am alone here. [14] This is a portrait by one woman of her establishment of "at-homeness" within and around her. I don't think it is a making and mything of one's world and home you would expect of a man, even a man who was a writer. There is here a sturdy concreteness of attention to the form of living as well as a delicate sensitivity to the nuance of presence and to the past of memory. There is a pulling together of things cerebral and things physical, an interplay of the bounty of nature with the best subtleties of civilization. There is an openness to all that light and color, sound and texture, can bring -- to all that human and animal, living and dead, surround one with. Here the dead are not so much presences as part of the very fabric of my life; they are a living part of the whole. This way of absorbing death is not mourning. It does not look back romantically on the past; it builds the past into the present. So in a way I do not so much think about my father and mother as find myself in a hundred ways doing things as they would do. My mother tasted color as if it were food, and when I get that shiver of delight at a band of sun on the yellow floor in the big room, or put an olive-green pillow onto a dark emerald corduroy couch, I am not so much thinking of her as being as she was. [15] The Perverse Power of Negating Symbols May Sarton indicates in her title "Plant Dreaming Deep" the role of dreaming, the role of mything, the role and power of positive symbolization. "I had first to dream the house alive inside myself," she writes. [16] But as we ourselves reach to create such at-homeness, the Genesis myth of the Fall intrudes upon the consciousness even of those who do not normally think of themselves as in any sense believers. The powerful mythic tradition of which we are the involuntary inheritors has it that the harmonious life of the Garden of Eden existed only in some never-never land. We remain somehow deeply convinced that the lion will never lie down with the lamb, at least until some distant and unexpected Messiah comes. In short, to aspire to "being at home" with one's world, one's neighbors, one's self, is to evoke (from oneself as well as from others) the quashing epithet of Utopian or Romantic or hopelessly idealistic. Through the centuries the doctrine of the Fall and its concommitant, the doctrine of Original Sin, have functioned to pronounce the very worst side of the human self as eternal and inescapable, at least in this life. It is not just that Adam and Eve in the myth were banished from the Garden. The doctrine of Original Sin (based upon that biblical myth) has come to have sufficient mythic power and universality to overwhelm and seem to negate our faltering human outreach toward any world of greater peace, justice and wholeness with the earth. The perverse power of this negating symbol has been to take all those goals which would otherwise be socially catalyzing and banish them to an Eden so irrelevant to our present lives and aspirations that it might just as well never have been. Eden has been portrayed as an unachievable Utopia we spoiled long ago and that we cannot now dream of or hope for or work toward, let alone live in -- all because of the Fall. The Genesis myth of the expulsion from the garden of Eden has been interpreted in the Christian tradition as "the Fall," even though the word "down" is not in the biblical account and there exists in Hebrew no word for "original sin." Jewish biblical scholars see no textual basis for what the Christian tradition has done with that bit of biblical material. Biblical theologian Bruce Birch has commented to me in private conversation that "Never have we hung such a large doctrine on such a slender strand of biblical material." Nonetheless, the Genesis account of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden has been construed by the Christian tradition as the basis for the doctrine of the Fall and the sinfulness of Man. Both have functioned to legitimate as inevitable our worst side, to justify as normal "man's inhumanity to man," and to declare every non-oppressive social vision to be an impossible and sentimental dream. A Vision of the Garden Revisited We must re-myth our world! Lewis Mumford has observed that humanity dreams itself into existence. [17] Our old dream has become a nightmare; we must dream a better dream. Perhaps like the old woman I wrote of in chapter 6, we will see a new vision, a vision of the Garden revisited, without the old oppressive patriarchal stories. It is a vision of justice among groups, races, sexes, species. It is a vision of harmony, of wholeness. It is a vision of diversity and interconnection. It is a vision of human life -- from the cell to the household to the whole human society -- caught up in a symbiotic dance of cosmic energy and sensual beauty, throbbed by a rhythm that is greater than our own, which births us into being and decays us into dying, yet whose gifts of life are incredibly good though mortal and fleeting. Perhaps what we need to do is to turn the Genesis myth upon its head. Perhaps this finite planet and the here-and-now is our Eden. Perhaps our forebears erred in thinking that we were expelled from Eden long ago in some pre-history we never knew. What if the Fall was not down into sin and our worst self but more ironically a Fall up -- a Fall up in which we fail to accept or "claim" our full humanness, and the finitude of our bodies, and our mortality, and our trajectory toward dying? What if our Fall was up into the illusion that we were above dying, above mortality, above and apart from Creation? Perhaps the limits of our finite planet are like the biblical angel with the flaming sword, ready to cast into outer darkness those unable to perceive and live within the mixed blessings of the creation that God has prepared equally for all species, all sexes, all races, all classes. Perhaps our appropriate aspiration is not "dominion" but "praise"! • • •
This is the day which the Lord hath made.
Everything's scoured brighter than metal.
All, all is luster. The glossy harbor
Tonight -- tomorrow -- the leaf will fade,
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