Death, Adam & Theology

My Grandmother died today at 9:33am.

I loved her. The woman with a purse full of candy, and a glittery sweater. The woman who had lived tough life before I knew her. The woman I never fully understood.

I'll try now.

She was loving and quick-tempered, stubborn and merciful, wounded and blessed.

Her mother deserted her and her siblings when they were young, leaving my grandmother (age 12) to take care of them in the absence of my great-grandfather, the revivalist. The wounds cut deep and left bulging scar tissue on her soul. I think the pain closed in on her heart. With what capacity she had left, she loved as best she could.

It's painful to think about how my great-grandmother's decision to run away from her neglectful husband and sickly children affects me today. Pain, in the form of reactions to life that have been learned from parental modeling and passed down through my lineage, shapes my thinking-actions-habits to a large extent. I could give examples, but you are intelligent enough to understand what I mean. We all have our ways.

This is the fall. This is the casting out of Adam. This is the butterfly affect by which one man's sin made many sinners. This is the hell we have on earth now. One poor decision scars all involved and multiplies in it's affect. The affects are variables in themselves that multiply. They are a cancer of selfishness; They are mother parasites laying millions of eggs per day that, in turn, all become mother parasites who lay millions more.

The effects of that first selfish decision cast all of us away from the paradise we long for.

They have destroyed my predecessors. They have scarred my existence. They will wound my children and take their lives, just as all life has been taken.

Paradise is a distant memory in the fabric of our soul.

The following poem encapsulates the lament of humanity:

Adam Cast Forth

Was there a Garden or was the Garden a dream?
Amid the fleeting light, I have slowed myself and queried,
Almost for consolation, if the bygone period
Over which this Adam, wretched now, once reigned supreme,

Might not have been just a magical illusion
Of that God I dreamed. Already it's imprecise
In my memory, the clear Paradise,
But I know it exists, in flower and profusion,

Although not for me. My punishment for life
Is the stubborn earth with the incestuous strife
Of Cains and Abels and their brood; I await no pardon.

Yet, it's much to have loved, to have known true joy,
To have had -- if only for just one day --
The experience of touching the living Garden.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Time and effort would fail me to talk about our hope.
God's Kingdom. "The Anti-Curse..
...Death flowing in reverse" (1).
But there is hope if you look.
There is life if you find.
All you need do is die.

* (1) From The Very End by Derek Webb