Authenticity and the 9th – Part VI

It is an intriguing story, the one about Adam and Eve in the Garden. Adam and Eve were tempted to disobey God and they did. Then the sin was compounded as they bore false witness against each other and even the serpent. But, you say, the serpent really did tempt Eve and Eve did tempt Adam.

The false witness comes in that both of them were putting the blame on someone else. The devil made me do it. My spouse made me do it. In saying such things we lie about our own culpability in the crime. We think we are saying the truth when we are really saying more by what we are not saying. Truth-telling becomes a lie when the larger picture is hidden in order that the blame will rest on another.

What happens as a result of this sin? Adam and Eve have to leave the garden. Eve has to experience pain in child birth and they have weeds and back trouble when they garden. At a more fundamental level, a deep, dark separation has fallen between God and them. And between each other.

Adam and Eve are ashamed, embarrassed around each other so much so that they want to put clothes on, a thought they haven’t had until then. In their physical nakedness, they feel emotionally vulnerable – because they can no longer fully trust each other. They haven’t yet discovered forgiveness and they can’t go back to innocence. It is a painful moment of self-discovery. They have no where to go to relieve the glare of self-disclosure, so they hide behind fig leaves and trees and each other and the serpent. In reality they are hiding from themselves and it doesn’t work.

What did God really intend in the Creation? That we as people would live in trust and openness with one another. That we would not second guess each other’s motives. That we would believe the best in each other, treating one another as innocent until proven guilty.

Instead, in our woundedness, we lash out at each other and close the doors of our hearts so that we cannot be harmed any more, not realizing that in closing the doors we shut the pain inside of ourselves where it festers and grows like a cancer eating our very innards away. The day Adam and Eve shut the door on their hearts from God and from each other, that was the day they started to die.

Truth telling is not just about not lying. It is about living in integrity before God and one another – and with ourselves. It means waking up and realizing that we must and can face ourselves as we really are, believing that if God can accept us just as we are, so can we. The key is in being honest. That is what it means when the Old Testament prophet, Micah, wrote that we are to “walk humbly with our God.” Humbleness is honesty at its best.

When we accept the truth about ourselves, we can accept the truth about others. One of my favorite stories from World War II is of the Jewish witness on the stand in the Nazi war crimes trials. The witness in facing his tormenter broke down. The judge stopped the proceedings and apologized to the witness that this was so painful, whereupon the witness replied that he wasn’t crying because of the pain this man had inflicted on him. He was crying because he had suddenly realized that the accused was merely a human like himself, and if so then he, the witness, was as capable of these heinous crimes as the Nazi was.

Such a revelation didn’t make the Nazi innocent, but it changed the dynamics of the trial for that witness. He was back in the garden able to stand emotionally naked before his tormenter, the courtroom and his Maker.