22 okt Stories untold

I was raised a catholic and I still am, because I am lazy and I do not like to leave things I know and grew up with. Besides I love to visit churches, I love the beauty of the buildings, the crafmenship, the high ceilings, the statues and the paintings, the darkness, the light falling through the stained glass windows and the cool air. It is a place where I feel safe and one with people mainly because they are there and I appreciate their energy but they do not approach me. Slowly the more I learn about what I am as a human being and what happens to us during this proces the story of the bible becomes better and better. Peeling the layers of the onion they say at twelve steps meetings, it feels like that. I was reading about Adam and Eve, there are many stories and this is the one I can understand much better than the story of Eve being the one who tempted Adam, it can only be a frustrated fearbased being that imagines such a story. Sadly we kind of have to start of by making opposites until we experience it does not really result in true happiness, and get so burned up and tired of that game that we are willing to let it go. It is a beautiful growthprocess. Utterly frustrating and frightening at times, but neccesary to learn, and it is worth the price when you are ones again at the top of the white mountains and can look back on the road behind you. The first split ever to be experienced is the one of gender, nine weeks in our development as human beings. 9 a beautiful number, the Hermit in the Tarot a time to come to our senses, that takes a lifetime. Before that we just are still one blob of cells (human be-ings) all one, that must feel like paradise. I spend yesterday imagining on paper what it would feel like to be Adam and Eve at the same time, connected as one. I did it my way, so I drew Eve and Adam as one being. I imagined Eve and Adam by impersonating those sides within me. And I must say I enjoyed it very much. A collegue past my desk to poor me some tea and I felt a bit embarressed, but than again, what the hell, this is what it is all about. Just being me, is weird for others, and at the same time people are all alike. And to stop hiding that part that was split off and left behind because it was shamed and blamed (by me) and RISE up is what it is all about. The purity I can achieve in my imagination is at times of doubt and fear hard to achieve in the game of life. Al to easy I play mind games, and hardly ever manage to make love without interference of all kind of old weird and wicked assumptions. It is waining moon these days, time to let go of all that does not belong.

This is a story I liked from a man who explains his view on the story of Adam and Eve, assumptions maybe but still wouldn’t it be helpful if we stopped thinking about Adam or Eve and started to think as one.
The Original Oneness of Adam & Eve.
While browsing in our parish bookshop not long ago, I happened to notice in a rack of cards a reproduction of an image of Eve being lifted by Christ out of Adam’s body – a colorful miniature that comes from a 13th-century illuminated manuscript. Adam sleeps peacefully while Eve is wide awake. The right arm of Jesus suggests his power to create and also offers a sign of blessing, while his left arm grasps Eve’s wrists in a gesture that reminds me of a midwife pulling a child from the womb. Jesus contemplates both Eve and Adam with a expression of wordless love. Was Eve made from one of Adam’s ribs? So the most familiar English translation of Genesis has it, but biblical translators point out that the Hebrew word in question, tsela, also means “side.” In that reading, Eve was one side of Adam. What is clear in either reading is that, before Eve emerged, she was an integral part of Adam. Adam carried Eve like a secret. Thus Adam’s maleness is coincident with his separation from Eve and the revelation of her femaleness. She is his other half, as he was her other half. Only in their complementarity, their actual oneness, are they whole. Both equally bear the image of God, and both equally bear the calling to acquire the divine likeness. As St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote: “One who is made in the image of God has the task of becoming what he is.” At the same time there is the elusive but compelling memory that has long haunted the human mind of a primordial Eden – a paradise in which there was no conflict, no murder, no war. After Eve’s creation, man and woman live together in an unwalled oneness, a relationship with no trace of enmity. (The first murder, Cain killing Abel, occurs only after Adam and Eve have been expelled from Eden.) But then comes the Fall. Eve is successfully tempted by a satanic serpent, Adam is tempted by Eve, and both eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. Suddenly they discover themselves not only naked but in a world in which walls are erupting all around them. In place of unity comes blame – Adam blaming Eve, Eve blaming the serpent, and neither repenting or appealing for God’s mercy and forgiveness. Ancient iconographic images of Adam and Eve often show them on either side of the forbidden tree, a wall-like barrier isolating them from each other. The unity they originally had is not altogether lost – it remains at the roots of human identity – but no longer is our original unity effortless. Men and women will in the future commit countless sins against each other. Men will even justify their domination over women as part of the punishment for Eve’s – not Adam’s – sin in Paradise. Most of us live a long way from Eden. We live in a world in which “the war of the sexes” is the oldest war of all. The ongoing combat between men and women was touched on by a recent New Yorker cartoon. We see a newly married couple standing side by side next to a huge wedding cake. Each is holding a plate with a piece of the cake, while the bride says to the groom, “Your piece is bigger.” One wonders if this marriage will last through its first anniversary. Husband and wife are focused not on each other but on invisible scales: who is getting the better deal? At least, one assumes, the two cake-eaters have a carefully written prenuptial contract that will make their divorce slightly less complex. Even so, it remains a great honor to be among the descendants of the first man and the first woman. An ancient Jewish commentary reveals our royal status by posing a question: Why was there only one Adam and only one Eve? The answer the rabbis gave is so that no human being could regard himself or herself as being of higher descent than anyone else. The basic fact about all human beings is that we all belong to exactly the same family tree. More than that, we all bear equally the image of God and all bear the same calling to recover the divine likeness. The human race has been far from paradise throughout known history. Who can guess in round numbers how many have been murdered down through the centuries? Most of the killing has been done by the sons of Adam, but often enough on behalf of Eve, if not with her fervent encouragement. These days, sadly, the daughters of Eve are increasingly joining the armed men on the world’s battlefields. For Nancy and me lately, this image of Adam and Eve has acquired another level of meaning. On the last day of October, one of Nancy’s kidneys was removed from her body and implanted in mine. After five years of kidney illness and twenty-one months of dialysis, I now have a healthy kidney, my wife’s gift. And what a gift it is. Renal failure had come on so gradually that I was barely aware of how sick I was even on the eve of the transplant. I knew in theory that each year on dialysis meant a life likely to be shortened by three years (which even so beats the rapid death caused by kidney illness without dialysis). Now that the transplant has happened and has been a success, I suddenly realize just how much impact the illness had on me. I feel a little like Rip van Winkel waking up from a multi-year nap. Even in these first few weeks, while still recovering from surgery, I find I tire much less easily than was the case a month earlier. I was often sleeping eight-and-a-half or nine hours a night, and even then prying myself out of bed with a mental crowbar. Now seven-and-a-half hours is more than enough. The creatinine level in my blood, a key marker of renal failure, has fallen from 900, just before the transplant, to 120 or so. There are other markers. Food tastes are more vivid. The world seems brighter, colors more intense. I find myself looking at familiar things with an Adam-like sense of surprise. A friend told me how her brother, after receiving a donated kidney, felt like he was seeing the sky for the first time in ages. That’s a nice way of putting it. All this is a gift from my wife, a daughter of Eve, from out of her own side. Nancy and I have put this image of the oneness of Adam and Eve among the icons before which we pray morning and evening. It serves as a visual reminder of what God intends for man and woman: a mysterious unwalled oneness in which neither dominates the other but rather both collaborate – a partnership in which neither supplants the other and neither is complete without the other. This is the daily two-way traffic between the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, a life of self-giving love. Jim Forest’s most recent books are The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life (Orbis) and a children’s book, Silent as a Stone: Mother Maria of Paris and the Trash Can Rescue (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press). He and Nancy have an online journal about the kidney transplant: A Tale of Two Kidneys: www.ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com.