Where do we best begin in this penitential season but in the beginning, with Eve? Her name means “full of life.” Adam elaborates: Eve is the “mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). As with most names in Scripture, Eve’s name cues her destiny and ours. In the mythical garden, Eve is the one who embraces life and so engages the mystery of creation.
In these latter days, the trait we share as Eve’s offspring is curiosity: our desire to know, to understand, to explore, to investigate. Eve was originally curious.
But in the second fateful story of creation, Eve’s curiosity encounters a caveat, a string attached, a boundary decreed. She tells the serpent that God instructed her and Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for if they do, they will die. The serpent counters, “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). How could Eve resist so great a temptation? To see? To know good and evil? Curiosity literally gets the best of her. The risk is worth her life. Now she sees that the tree “is good for food and … a delight to the eyes.” For one brief moment, her boundless and original curiosity prompts her delight in the given world.
“When Eve bit into the apple,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in an essay printed in the 1995 Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, “she gave us the world as we know the world — beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being. She gave us smallpox and Somalia, polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses. … She (not Mary) is the mother of my children, born in travail to a world of suffering their presence may refresh.” In and from the beginning, Eve is the mother of our gratitude, our giddiness, our glory in the garden where our senses tempt us to believe that nothing is off-limits — where our minds are awash with wonder at the given world, where all things seem to be available for our exploration and enjoyment, even God!
But then the plot thickens. Delight turns to dread, and astonished wonder gives way to religious certainty, setting the story of our salvation in motion. Eve freely chooses to know good and evil instead of God, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says. From that moment, Eve inhabits a world where the split second between delight and dread is all the time we are normally given to discern right from wrong. One minute our salivary glands are working overtime, and the next, we are wracked with guilt by what we have, in fact, eaten. Usually chocolate.
Welcome to the season of Lent. With the institution of Lent, organized religion put the kibosh on curiosity, and indulgences became a cash cow instead of an imaginative impulse. “While the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and ‘idle’ Curiosity is celebrated in the Greek and Roman era,” Global Curiosity Institute founder Stefann Van Hooydonk wrote on his website, “in the subsequent Christian era … curiosity is regarded as a sinful, perverted and arrogant diversion from the only object worthy of contemplation: God. … Later thinkers elevated curiosity to the status of a deadly sin, situated between sloth and pride.”
Still, I wonder what might have come to pass had Eve inhabited (and the church privileged) the garden of which the Lord God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed … ; you shall have them [all] for food.” That was that: a sixth day over, a seventh to rest. Imagine what we would be doing for the next 40 days. Imagine our species glorifying God and praising God forever. We cannot.Perhaps that is why Harrison argues that “without the genetically transmitted knowledge of good and evil that Eve’s act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow — we should not desire to know and to love God, we should have no need of [God]. … Eve, the occasion of our fall from grace, is also the occasion of our salvation.” She is the mother of our doubts, our longings, our sighs too deep for words. East of Eden, she accompanies us in this season. We wonder as we wander, children not of some mindless religious coercion but of the God who has given us room to roam, who has forgiven us the distance we continue to keep from the love for which we were made.
