The Garden of Eden - The Ultimate Meaning of Losing the Plot
A Reflection given to the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace - March 23, 2012
Thank you ICUJP for not just allowing me this brief period of reflection but for the very act of causing me to reflect at all. In our increasingly over-industrialized world, the art of reflection, like so much else, has become all too rare.
And yet, like many other scarcities in life, there is so much value in reflection; and through the gift of looking back we perhaps stand a better chance of not only correcting our future but even, given today’s world, of saving it.
If you are anything like myself – and in your support and care of ICUJP and all that it stands for, we must at least have a few good things in common; but you will no doubt otherwise find that not enough of your waking hours are spent in reflection, or, as John Lennon so aptly put it: “Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.”
However, even with that mini-reflection in mind, one does occasionally find that a pre-conceived idea long held in the mind falls away, much like a monolith of ice crashing into the surrounding jet black seas, exposing a wholly new and raw perspective which stands to remind us that life, more than anything, is a journey; and most of all a sacred journey of discovery into the mystery and meaning of it all. And in that, perhaps, is the greatest irony of our modern sophisticated Age designed to give us greater ease and leisure, in that we simply no longer find the time for Life itself.
And yet, even as we abandon metaphysical and more weighty thoughts, they can still strike us when we least expect them to come crashing through our mind, bringing in their wake a breathtakingly fresh look at the world.
For myself, such a revelation was most recently gained as I sat, as I all too often do, watching the news – in my case, the BBC of course – just a few weeks ago. The familiar talk that has so numbed us in the past was of another military build-up, this time – or one might say, once again – in the Gulf region of the Middle East as Western countries grow – once again – anxious about the development of atomic power in the Muslim country of Iran…
And then, in typical broadcast fashion, the screen showed the latest state of the art in military might as a large American warship unleashed wave after wave of smaller troop vessels upon the waters. Albeit this was just another military exercise but I imagine at least part of the intent was to bring the viewer a sense of relief and reassurance as America showed its strength the other side of the globe.
But catching me unawares, I did not focus on the naval ship or the small amphibious craft spilling onto the open seas, but instead upon the seas themselves: the ocean - this natural backdrop of Mother Earth here being used once more for the recklessness of man. And in the brief moments that followed, now no longer paying attention to the story unfolding on the screen, my mind ran over how we have so completely failed to develop an appreciation of the seas – and dare I say, a “Spiritual consciousness” of the aquatic life harbored within those seas, instead feeling it our inherent right and our prerogative to pollute and plunder the oceans with a gross and wanton abandon to the point of almost utter depletion of their life and resources; and how, in centuries past, we have with savage, blood-curdling cruelty slaughtered literally millions of the giant beasts held within the depths of those seas, the mighty whale, such as we now unleash upon the poor, unsuspecting tuna, the dolphins, and other no less wonderful creatures of the sea. And then as the reporter closed out his piece, my mind pictured the no less threatened creatures of the Earth and its land equally no more spared the dominion of wrathful man, and it caused me to further reflect how far we have fallen from that mythical Garden of Eden from whence, we are presumed, to have once come.
And what is perhaps even worse than this is that as a human species – and dare I say “a human family” – we no longer seem to care; it no longer appears to trouble us; and instead of feeling a collective sense of guilt and shame of how we have so fallen from that Garden, that Earthly Paradise, we hold ourselves up as the mighty and the proud, as if God – if God should any longer matter or even exist – would be pleased with what has been created in Its own image.
And as I continue to reflect upon these things in a world where we have, to my present way of thinking, become so ill – so horribly, mentally ill that we no longer know how ill we are; embroiled in war and thoughts of further war and conflict; of flawed ideologies inciting competition and possession, together spawning the disparate twins of poverty and greed; and so many other un-natural ailments brought on by the ignorance, weakness and limitations of man that Paradise, to which we still pretend to aspire, were we to encounter it, we would not recognize until it became so shockingly apparent that we felt once again our tragic shame and pitiful nakedness, and separation from a God that had always dwelt there just as It dwells silently within us now, and all around us in the creatures of the Earth and in the Earth itself; and Which had never deserted us even though we had so evidently deserted It in the ultimate extreme of all our follies in choosing freewill, and thus sparking the inevitable downfall from that allegorical Garden of Perfection all those many eons ago, as if to try and suggest we could improve upon it!