The Apple

Note:             No, I don’t know if I believe this is literally how it went down.  This is the story we tell of how we came to be.  As Christians, this makes it just as important as if it did.

So sometimes I think about Adam and Even and the Apple.  Mostly because the idea of Knowledge as the Apple has haunted me all of my life.  Because I love knowledge, I eat it up desperately, hungrily.  It has made me a better person.  And I have tried ten different ways to reconcile that thought.

Of course, I know that the Apple is Knowledge of Good and Evil, but somehow that’s even harder.  What does that even mean?  Were we supposed to be like the animals in the field?  Unsinning because he had never known sin?  But then – we were told.  We were told precisely one rule, and we were given the consequences: separation from God.  Eve knew that she would be telling God that she didn’t love and need Him if she took the Apple, and the snake had to tell her something that would completely disillusion her (falsely) about that relationship in order to get her mad and jealous and hurt enough to bite down on the Apple in revenge.

And yes, the absolute surface lesson of this story is that if you tell humans there is ONE AND ONLY ONE RULE then you can bet that by teatime they will have broken it.  I even went through a period where I thought that perhaps God was playing us; that the Apple was what he wanted us to have anyway.  But that’s…well, I don’t pretend to understand the mind of God, but that just doesn’t scan in my ordinary human one.  Because, yes, He showed us how much He truly loves us because after the Apple He sent His Son, but, well…about the time I figured out what Eve was really saying in the Garden, I thought “Who wants to hear that from their creations?”

And we already had free-will and decision-making powers and sentience and something that separated us, forever, from the animals and from the angels.  We already had a (very, very short) list of Things You Shouldn’t Do, Please.  We already had a reason for doing that – Love of God.  That’s what the Snake broke to get Eve to eat the Apple.  He told her God had betrayed her.  That He had never really loved her.  So she said, “Damn if I’m going to let Him tell me what to do on top of it!”  Suddenly it wasn’t God taking care of you, offering you a choice but telling you what would make you happier, suddenly it wasn’t God offering a show of trust and letting the tree stand as a bond of mutual love – I trust you enough to put this here, you love me enough not to eat from it – but a manipulation.  A withholding.  A powergrab.  A lie.  Not something you do to someone you love, right?

So, what I came up with recently is: what if the Apple is Shame.

And not even personal shame and accountability but the icky Cultural Shame.  Here me out here on the sequence of events that led to the discovery that Being Naked is bad – or even a thing.

Adam and Eve were naked in the garden.  Presumably this was a physical fact of existence, although no one cared.  No one even thought anything of it.  It didn’t lead down bad roads.  It wasn’t a prelude to sex (necessarily).  It wasn't an empowering claim of self-acceptance.  It wasn’t a gift of trust to your spouse.  It wasn’t a violation to be seen by uninvited eyes.  It wasn’t a thing.  It had no power.  Can you even imagine a world where a naked body has no power?

Then came the Snake and his lie and the breaking of Eve’s faith and heart.  So she ate the Apple, and she became aware of the knowledge between right and wrong (or thought she did).  And maybe she was ashamed and couldn’t bear to be alone in having betrayed God, so she committed her second sin of dragging Adam down with her.  Or maybe she was still furious with what she saw as God’s betrayal and wanted Adam to be free as well.

But she wasn’t naked yet.

Not until she convinced Adam to try the Apple too.  Then, suddenly, they were Naked.  Suddenly, nakedness had power.

         
The instant there was a community that had bitten the Apple, there was Shame and things like nakedness had the power to just completely wreck us.  The amount of terrible things that have happened because nakedness is a Thing is untold. 

Of course, it isn’t all bad – but we could have loving sex without it.  We could have intimacy without it being a Thing.  What I’m saying is that when you turn the sacredness of the naked body back around, when you take something that you’ve been told to hide all your life and find the bravery to uncover it before eyes that you trust, then you are using the piece of the Apple inside of you to make you braver, to make you better and more loving.  You are facing the Shame that God never wanted you to have to feel, and you learn how to become more.  You find love of God in this.

Acting in defiance of the Apple feels powerful, but what are you proving?  That nakedness is powerful and that you can use that power rather than it just being used on you.  How lovely for you.  But you’re only giving the Apple more power.  Don’t get me wrong – you can make yourself better and find God in that too.  But the first example is the only thing I can think of that actually combats the Apple itself – and that only obliquely.  Defying the Apple still empowers the Apple.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe we could move toward a whole where everyone has the Apple inside them – everyone has the instincts for Cultural Shame, for embarrassment and for bullying and for all the terrible things we do to each other because of cultural norms – but has the strength and the mindset to fight it down and away so that it has no power over us.  Or to find the escape hatch and to reject all the dichotomies and the limits and the nonsense and step outside the conversation.  I'd like to believe that, because I would like to live in that world.  I think that is the world that Jesus promised us.  I think it is the Holy Spirit that shows us each trap door and that gives us the strength to live in the world that insists on treating all these things like Things.

But for now that is the punishment for our lack of trust – for our inability to believe.  For the first broken faith and lost love in human history: Shame.

So what does that leave us with?  If original sin, the sin that is inborn in us, is the instinct to Shame ourselves and others, to make ourselves less and press down on the necks of others, to make up rules and treat them as absolutes, to try to control each other – then what do we do?

The two responses to Nakedness, to what a Thing it is in our world, is to repress the hell out of it or to flaunt it.  Both are just powertrips.  We're not capable of remembering that it doesn't have to be a Thing.  Maybe as individuals, but not as a whole culture.

We ate the Apple.  It’s never going away.  Not until the Second Coming.  Trying to take away the power of Nakedness just seems to give it a different kind of power, and we don’t seem to be able to stop bullying without turning it around on the bullies – who feel just as pushed down by Shame as the rest of us.  So what do we do?  The Apple gave these things power.  We have, now, superpowers.  How we use them determines everything.

They’re powers of manipulation of self and others.  You can break yourself or use Shame to help you correct your faults.  You can push people down or lead them away from danger.  They’re powers of being able to see everyone’s levers.  They are powers that make it easier to get what we want and easier to see someone else’s pain.  They are powers of forgiveness, because we can see the forces that bring people to sin.  They are powers of control, because we can try to keep people repressed and dismiss them for stepping out of line.

And it’s the same with all of the Things we give power to (yes, WE pick them, as a culture).  Nakedness, Homosexuality, Race, Gender, Pork…none of these things are inherently good or bad, but denying that they are lightning rods is an excellent way to get burned.  Lightning is not a good enough reason never to go outside, but you’re a fool if you ignore the storm.  These things have enormous power – for good and evil, for transcendence and repression, for acceptance and for cruelty, for love and for fear.  If you cannot escape a lightning rod, you must wear rubber-soled shoes and heart -- or let the fire burn away the parts of you that are harming yourself or others.

They are powers, in short, to love and to hate.  We chose a world with things that are powerful beyond anyone’s individual power to resist.  We chose it in a fit of pique in the world’s first bad break-up, but we chose it.  We’re stuck with it.  What will you use your superpower for?