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Sin, Crime & Evil are Acts of Love.
“God created humans in God’s own image,
in God’s image God created them;
male and female God created them.”
How can I look like something no one’s seen? Michelangelo seemed convinced God had a righteous beard. I’m working on that. The movie Dogma put forth Alanis Morissette as the Almighty. That would be ironic.
God is variously depicted as totally invisible, unapproachable light, fire, smoke and other non-forms. John, in the same section where he shares that God is Love, also makes the bold assertion that “no one has ever seen God…”(1 John 4:12). So to be made in the image of something which has no form and no one has ever seen must have to do with its essential nature. And that nature is Love.
Human beings are made not just as the result of love like the rest of creation, but in the likeness of Love. This is what it means to be human.
Ahavas, writ small. Limited edition replicas of the Real Thing.
This might explain why we are so inspired by the seeming otherworldliness of acts of love. When we see someone live towards others with the arrows of consideration pointing outward, the person giving themselves to another, something at our core recognizes it as the highest, holiest good. It’s a glimpse of our true essence.
Mirror neurons in our brains show us that we experience other people’s experiences in our own physiology. Anyone who has cringed when someone else has a spider crawling up their leg understands this. We are wired to feel beyond the boundaries of our own self. Our stomachs go in knots for the grieving. We cringe at other people’s bloody knee. Our hearts race to see a child rescued. We feel elated when the underdog hits the game-winning home run.
We the observers, simultaneously the participant. We’re made to not just observe, but to connect and care and co-experience. It’s our nature, because we’re made in the image of a Love that’s always finding ways to unselfishly choose for another’s highest good.
The Buddhists also began teaching the principle of Bodhicitta long ago. Bodhicitta is essentially an enlightened mind that doesn’t only know things, but is fully attuned to its untaught, hardwired default setting; compassion. An ability to feel others’ feelings. While the modern human thinks of his or her self on the basis of what has been accomplished or acquired, the ancients were more dialed in: we are compassion that comes from Compassion. Chips off the oldest Block.
How many of our favorite movies involve us getting weepy because the protagonist give their fortune, their reputation, their comforts, their position, their life- for others? Isn’t it all of them?
Even after having been debunked, how long did that story continue to show up in our inboxes about the mother bird found dead by the fireman after the forest fire? Her babies survived because she’d apparently given herself as a living, winged firewall to save her offspring. We continued to forward it, and a hundred stories like it, knowing that even though it wasn’t true, somehow it wasn’t false.
A boy lifts a wall during an earthquake to save another kid, himself dying as a result. Who wouldn’t call him a hero of the highest order?
Who wonders why firemen eat for free all over town?
Who’s against the woman who gave her car to a poor family and just started taking the bus?
Who doesn’t think something mature and wonderful and inspiring has just happened when a child decides to share her cake or legos without being told to?
Who doesn’t feel something warm in their hearts when they hear a couple haring wedding vows? No matter if we’re poor, sick or times get tough- I give you me. Only the cynical and the distracted DJ don’t feel a bit elevated inside, more somehow alive.
The serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
We’ve come to refer to this moment in the Garden of Eden as The Fall of Man. Well played, ladies.
The serpent was an interesting choice of animals as the villain. Doubtless the snake was feared by the time Genesis was written for all the reasons a snake is feared today. But the primordial picture of a limbless animal might suggest that, before serpents carried with them so much lore and psychological baggage – or came to be used to actually make baggage – they may have been seen by the first people as a mere stick with a face. A benign little reptile tube, cast in Genesis for appearing, like many things we regret later, harmless.
How much more unthreatening could an animal be?
A serpent is not endowed with limbs. No hands and feet used, like Adam and Eve, to serve. The serpent “was more crafty than the other animals”. The author probably didn’t intend a scrap-booking brand of crafty here. The serpent was smooth-talker crafty. And smooth-talkers talk smoothly because they want to get something without you feeling pain. You smooth-talk to get, not give. Always. I know this to be a fact because I used to sell vacuum cleaners and I know a lot of R&B lyrics.
The serpent has no hands to make, create or assist. It has no feet to travel alongside others. It can’t hold, carry, hug, comfort, pull, push, build, plant, fix, cook or do anything in the sphere of providing work or service. It can only live in holes dug by others, absorb the sun but provide no warmth, hiss, strike, constrict and eat.
This is why we say give me a hand. It means help me. Show me some love. No one says give me a snake. Maybe a few churches say that, but my point stands.
Snakes can’t ahava, making them utterly unlike Christ. They’re self-prioritizing and dialed almost entirely to “self.”
This is the creature who dupes two solid, mentally sound people made in the image of Love to act like nervous idiots. And perhaps this is why the story of Adam and Eve deserves another look for both the devout Creationist and the staunch Biblical Antagonist: maybe it’s historicity isn’t the point. Maybe the point is that this is what always happens to people.
And what happens is this: We’re not just sinners. We get anxious. Worried we’re not going to be okay. Worried we’re going to miss out, be mistreated, die. This makes us shortsighted. And in this blindness we turn our Love in on ourselves. Statues of God rendered portraits of parasites. It’s not simply evil. It’s afraid. And fear leads to the bastardization of Love, turned in on the self with a defensive, survivalist tone.
Love doesn’t necessarily go anywhere when fear takes over. It’s just inverted. Oscillating fans turned nervous vacuum cleaners. The issues compound as we feel shame about how we have acted. Look back on your mistakes, and if you’re anything like me you don’t say, “man was I evil.” You say, “Man was I an idiot.” If only I knew then what I know now, all that. The shame we carry is of course a reminder that we are just as unloveable as we fear, so we double down on the hiding. Never forget sham is shame without an e.
At this very moment your body is warring against disease. In ways you are maybe completely oblivious to, your physiology is fighting foreign invaders. You are managing resources to make sure vitamins, minerals, oxygen and a list of other unpronounceable elements get to where they need to go for maximum health. You are managing waste, in liquid, solid and gas form. You are currently regenerating and repairing, your limbs and your organs and in many of the 37 trillion cells that have you Legoed together.
Add to this the unthinking work of things like balancing in your chair, your readiness for sexual reproduction, digestion, breathing and thermoregulation, and you begin to realize how busy you always are taking care of you. How many minutes do we spend a day unconsciously evaluating threats to our safety? While driving or getting on an elevator or reaching out a little too far to clean out gutters, it’s all risk assessment on the level of instinct.
We subconsciously evaluate others’ body language throughout the day, looking for threats, cues allowing us to relax or stand down. Our hands and our legs subtle readied for peace or escape or aggression. All interactions are managed, vigilantly, to maintain safety and security.
On a conscious level you may be medicating to reduce pain, stiffness or infection. Our own relief is ever in view. As well as how we are viewed. Billions of dollars of industry are based on our desire to be physically attractive. Even after we bag a spouse, the most romantic way I could think to put it, the unconscious desire to be found attractive remains.
We also want in many subtle ways to be found intellectually pleasing, as saying or thinking or believing or rooting for the wrong thing can be perceived as weakness. A social/tribal liability.
Our deepest psychology is always measuring threat. Physical, social, emotional.
Just underneath our sophisticated vocabularies and designer jackets, we remain coiled, ready to spring. Fight or flight, that primal readiness that worries itself away from harm. Locked and loaded.
You could say that life, at its ground floor, is the vigorous effort of not dying.
Generally speaking, this is all normal and natural. These things operating in the background are there to keep us alive. There’s an appropriate selfish interest in us required to live. Add to this that it was God’s idea.
The problem for so many of us is that it doesn’t operate in the background. It becomes anxiety overwhelming the foreground.
It sounds pathetic. Maybe too pathetic and you’re right now assuming I’m describing someone else. Maybe I am. But next time you get angry at a coworker or loved one for lying to or about you, next time you fly off the handle at someone’s erratic driving or their bad customer service or lateness to an appointment, or next time you realize you’ve been thinking for weeks about a sideways glance or a bad review you received and it’s haunting you and you keep mentally marinating about how to change the person’s opinion of you, or next time you find yourself enjoying the dog pile and excommunication thrust on someone who’s been a troublemaker in your life, ask yourself what else but the fruit of self-defensive fear it could be. A fear that others are going to spoil your life and therefore need attacked, rallied against or fled from.
Ask yourself if you are most tapped into love for the other, or if you are behaving as one tricked by a snake. One who isn’t free and unhindered, but is anxious, threatened and bring to find a way to sew fig leaves and blame others for your internal fall.
The pain we are in, or believe is being inflicted on us, make us focus on good ol’ number one. Our love is flowing, but the wrong way. Others are no longer the objects of our compassion. They are threats or they are relief for our discomfort. Whether we abuse or use them, we’re not having much compassion for anyone other than ourselves.
Faith may be the death of the survivor impulse. Perhaps the active killing of it. Death to the anxious user who works against the truer nature, the Lover. The Christ teachers us to look at the world and observe our minds’ fearful response to it, and say, “I won’t be afraid, because being afraid makes me very much unlike myself.”
The Christ comes to assist us in our crucifying the part of us who takes his or her cues from snakes and ticks. His cross was in large part an act of Love. Our cross an act of revealing it from deep within ourselves. Back to the Garden of our being in snakeskin boots.