My previous blog post might seem to suggest that Eve did the right thing by eating the apple. Did she? If everything is part of the ineffable plan, and if the serpent is a creature of God and if the devil is really an angel, well then I can’t say anything Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman haven’t already said in much better words. God doesn’t play chess, it’s more like Solitaire, isn’t it? So did or didn’t Eve act according to the ineffable plan?
It’s not so much that Eve did the right thing. Arguably she didn’t, because she defied God. But in the story of Adam and Eve, Eve is the archetypal woman. She behaves like a woman would. Firstly, let’s revisit the serpent. It speaks with forked tongue, which means it speaks some truth and some lies. The truth: you won’t die from eating the fruit. But it also lies, by omission. If the serpent knows the true effects of the fruit (and it does seem to know), it probably also knows about God’s intention to eventually tell Adam and Eve to eat it. But not before the groundwork has been laid. Ideally, you give your children assignments that are challenging but not too challenging, tasks that are opportunities for growth. You don’t give them driving lessons when they’re still crawling around in diapers. That’s why first, the naming of the animals has to be done. If the serpent knows this, it doesn’t tell Eve. Now Eve, she is like a newborn. She doesn’t know much about the world yet. But she’s eager to learn. The serpent plays right into that, and tells her that by eating the fruit she’ll learn.
If women have one flaw, it’s that we focus on end results, sacrificing first principles and process along the way. We reach for the fruit, instead of trusting that the natural progression of life will lead us there. We want interventions to ensure a desired outcome. So we eat the fruit of promised learning. We then get the outcome, which includes “Go outside and learn, then, shoo!” and a bunch of other side effects that make us cry “But I didn’t want that!”. Tough luck.
Anatheism, to return to God, requires a full and total surrender to life as it is. To vow never to reach for a desired result, to not demand output from the universe, but rather to focus on the inputs and to adhere to first principles.
You can’t believe in God a little bit. It’s all or nothing. God, defined as the ultimate good, that which encompasses everything, that which knows what is good for us even if we don’t know it ourselves, is either at the center of your life or it isn’t. For women, it means to let go of the demand that any action shall establish the desired outcome. Instead, to ask ourselves, what has God told me to do? And to follow faithfully.
For us who walked away from God, we don’t choose to return once. We have to decide every day, because the muscle that disobeys has grown strong. We must let it atrophy from disuse and trust that if, instead, we focus on the highest good, not our own enrichment, we will eventually be rewarded, when God knows we’re ready.
Not easy, for a woman raised in this era.