Going Home to Eden

One thing the Christians got right: we live in a fallen world. 

At least since the time of the most ancient Greeks, humans have generated myths about Eden, that place where humanity lived in ancient days in peace with ourselves and in harmony with nature. Along with that myth is always a story of the fall, because it’s obvious that we don’t live in Eden, anymore.

But, to think that our fall was a punishment for sin is ridiculous. Our Creator is not punishing us. The fall is the logical outcome of our sin. We have brought it on ourselves through our cruelty and greed — while the Creator weeps. 

Although we live in a world ruled by a cartel of cruel and greedy people, surrounded by wasteland, weak, tired and afraid, if we reach out for an alternative reality, we will find it. Like a parallel dimension, the alternative reality exists in material overlap with life as we are living it, and it takes only a shift of perception to move into that alternative reality and live there in spirit, even as the rest of us, (that is, the body, mind and emotion), struggles to survive in this fallen dominator world.

We cannot go back to what was. The mythical golden age, in its historical and material reality, was harsh and difficult in its own ways, but that's ok. Eden does not mean comfort and ease, anyway. 

Eden is a garden, which symbolizes earth in the balance. 

Eden is a place of abundance. What we do with that abundance is up to us. 

Eden is where we belong, where we live together in kinship, kindness and empathy, where we give generously to one another and nurture one another as if each was a child of our own flesh.

Reality is malleable, my friends, and we have the tools and skills to change it. The reality of Eden we can create for tomorrow could not be the Eden of yesterday. We have long since awakened from yesterday's paleolithic dream of gathering apples. It will be different. I can only know that the Eden we create for tomorrow will be the fruit of the kindness and generosity ripening in every human heart today.