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<\/a><\/dt>\ncredit: Vanderbilt Lirbary Art in the Christian Tradition<\/p><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
This reflection was presented as a weekly Meditation at Phillips Exeter Academy on October 17, 2012.\u00a0 The meditation began with a recording of Paul Simon singing Look for America, from the album<\/em>:\u00a0Concert in Central Park<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n All my life, in one way or another, I\u2019ve been looking for America, for what it means to be human here.\u00a0\u00a0 And I gravitate to various kinds of folklore, story telling and rituals, ways in which people survive and share their hope and groaning.<\/p>\n This fall I began to write a blog of reflections about this looking, and about the gospel readings which have been part of my weeks for over three decades now.\u00a0 I chose the name for the blog, The Bite in the Apple<\/em><\/strong>, in a sudden burst of inspiration.\u00a0 The name works for me.\u00a0 But then I realized, while everyone in the world knows what the apple is, there are all kinds of assumptions\u00a0 about what it means, and what it means to me will not be apparent to anyone unless I write a bit about \u00a0it.\u00a0 This, then, is my personal journey into the meaning of Eden, a myth that is woven into the cultural fabric of America.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing older than Eden, in human knowing.\u00a0 \u00a0And about Eden, we know nearly nothing.<\/p>\n In each of us, and I think in every creature, too, there is a dream of an idyllic place, a true home where sorrow and sighing are no more, and where every good thing has root; a place from which we have inexplicably gotten lost.\u00a0 That\u2019s Eden, the longing and the lostness.<\/p>\n The story of Eden is ancient, separated from the world we know. And at the same time it is as close as a heartbeat.\u00a0 Adam and Eve are older than Judaism, older than we can possibly imagine. They live in a time outside history.\u00a0 And they also live inside us, they live\u00a0in an\u00a0\u00a0eternal now.<\/p>\n The tale of Eden has outlasted empires. And been reduced to a children\u2019s story. \u00a0Yet it is terrifically powerful in cultural battles in our own time. Laws against sex between people of different races or the same gender have their root in Eden. People have been put in prison because of Eden.\u00a0 And men have been excused from responsibility for acting on their sexual urges because of Eden, in the authorized theology of St. Augustine, who wrote the original Eve-made-me-do-it<\/em> defense, which is official doctrine for Catholics.<\/p>\n The theological doctrine of Original Sin has a history\u00a0filled with political intrigue, the rise and fall of empires, the buying of votes in church councils, bribes, threats and chicanery.<\/p>\n The best of books describing this is Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity<\/em><\/strong><\/a>,<\/em><\/strong> by Elaine Pagels, who teaches at Princeton. You can get it online, and it is a real page-turner, you\u2019ll have a my-G0d-I-can\u2019t-believe-this-guy-is-gonna-get-away-with-this \u00a0reaction<\/em> on nearly every page.<\/p>\n At the center of Eden, where Time begins, is the Tree of Knowledge, which bears the fruit of ultimate desire. \u00a0\u00a0Sometimes that desire is called eternal life, and sometimes it is called wisdom.\u00a0 The words are used interchangeably in the story.\u00a0\u00a0 But wait<\/em>, you may want to say, I don\u2019t see how . . .<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 and that\u2019s the point.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0We all have to wait to see how.<\/p>\n In the Christian book of tales, a quite similar place to Eden, called New Jerusalem, exists at the end of time.\u00a0 At its center stands a tree whose roots span four rivers, and whose leaves have the power to heal nations.<\/p>\n In between the first story and the last is a journey\u00a0 marked by\u00a0trees.\u00a0 In the Jewish Tanach, there are trees as well as animals on the Ark.<\/p>\n In the Book of Numbers there is a parable about trees, in which the lowly mustard bush becomes king over the mighty cedars of Lebanon. The fig tree, an icon for Israel in the Hebrew Bible, figures prominently in the teachings of Jesus, and before he dies he prays in an orchard of fig trees.<\/p>\n Elijah is sheltered by a tree on his wild flight up Mt. Horeb. \u00a0The Messiah will spring from the stump of the tree of Jesse. The Cross is considered a tree that bears the fruit of Resurrection. The kingdom of heaven is like a tree<\/em>, Jesus says.<\/p>\n Jeremiah Ingalls of Newburyport, \u00a0an early New England choirmaster,\u00a0wrote a shape-note hymn in the 1700s, calling Jesus Christ the Appletree. \u00a0It\u2019s still sung today.\u00a0 The first verse is:<\/p>\n The tree of life my soul hath seen <\/em><\/p>\n Laden with fruit and always green <\/em><\/p>\n The trees of nature fruitless be <\/em><\/p>\n Compared with Christ the apple tree<\/em><\/p>\n Each holy tree bears some kind of wonderful fruit: wisdom and life from the Eden Tree; honesty from the lowly mustard bush; protection for Elijah; food in all seasons from the fig; shelter for all in the kingdom tree; hope from the cross.<\/p>\n We mortals have bitten deeply into these fruits, and the taste of them has bitten deeply into us.<\/p>\n There are four major apple icons I can think of:<\/p>\n Eden\u2019s Apple<\/p>\n the Apple that fell on Isaac Newton\u2019s head<\/p>\n Steve Job\u2019s Apple computer<\/p>\n and the Big Apple, New York City.<\/p>\n And I think they are all related.<\/p>\n They are related the way the science of the heavens is related to geometry and to poetry, and to the history of human experience of dark and light.\u00a0 These four apples have shaped and changed the culture of the western world.\u00a0 All of them are archetypes of experience, and are mythic and real, in their hold upon us.<\/p>\n The Eden Apple, though mythic, could not be more real in its hold upon us.<\/p>\n Newton\u2019s theory of gravity inaugurated the age of science, but his Apple may be a fiction.<\/p>\n Steve Job\u2019s computer has become the icon of our age, and we all live in (and this essay comes to you from) cyberspace, an unreal world that has become our dominant reality.<\/p>\n New York, as the Big Apple, offers all these bites of wisdom, and the consequences of\u00a0 knowledge that Eve and Adam, Isaac Newton, and Steve Jobs tasted.\u00a0 New York holds the dreams of millions, offers a chance to acquire vast knowledge about life and death, and is full of stories about those adventures.\u00a0 As\u00a0is Eden, always.<\/p>\n And some of the tastes are heavenly.\u00a0 And some of the bites are hell.<\/p>\n Eden is a complex creation story, containing a refrain of Godly blessing:<\/p>\n It is good <\/em><\/strong>is pronounced over everything: the days, the nights; the heavens, the earth; the trees, the fruits, the creatures.<\/p>\n And so the Original Name of everything is Good<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The human creature, both the man and the woman, are good in a wonderful way: at their creation God says, \u201cmale and female we created them, in our own image we created them.\u201d<\/p>\n This litany of goodness opens into a tale about a slithering serpentine tempter, who knows more than\u00a0 humans do. And in this, the Tempter is God-like. Is the Tempter a Trickster figure, who is really part of God?<\/p>\n Is there something in the Garden that was not made by God?<\/p>\n If the answer to that is No, then the Tempter is part of the Good that is the Garden.<\/p>\n If the answer is Yes, then the primary question becomes, Whose Garden Is This?<\/p>\n Knowledge is a precious fruit. It marks the boundary between childhood and adult life. Childhood is replete with gifts, mostly from parent-guided living. Adulthood is not a gift, it is something a child takes hold of and becomes.\u00a0 So, too, knowledge is something taken hold of, not something given.\u00a0 Parents say to their children, Don\u2019t touch the stove! Hot! Hot!<\/em> \u00a0\u00a0But as they grow, children do touch the stove. There is never a day when the parent says, OK, now you may touch the stove<\/em>. \u00a0The children decide when.<\/p>\n The way to adulthood, for Adam and Eve and us, has to be a road taken. It cannot be a road not<\/em> taken. And it cannot be a trip planned for them. \u00a0In the tale, God speaks the Don\u2019t<\/em> which will eventually be overcome. In the journey to adulthood, there is no going back. Once a child is weaned, once a child can walk, once a child is sexually mature, there is no going back.<\/p>\n The fruit of knowledge holds sorrow as well as joy, regret as often as delight, hardship as part of wonder. These depths are named by God, after the humans have eaten the apple. Now you will know . . . . \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0St. Augustine views this as a curse.\u00a0 But it may just be wisdom, spoken.<\/p>\n Parents discover heartbreak, hardship and regret, as well as joy, wonder and delight, in their children. Artists learn this in their art, musicians in their music, bakers in their bread, preachers in their congregations, saviors in the souls they love. God learns all these things through us, says the tale of Eden.\u00a0 And this is just part of the way in which wisdom is life and death. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose image I chose, paints the Eating of the Apple as an intimate moment, Adam with his arm around Eve, Eve holding the apple up to him as they share this meal.\u00a0 But others show the apple in the Serpent\u2019s mouth and the serpent putting it into Eve\u2019s.\u00a0 Or Eve pushing the apple at an alarmed Adam.\u00a0 Or Adam and Eve greedily grabbing apples with both hands, from opposite sides of the tree, not looking at each other at all.\u00a0 Or Eve in ecstasy as the serpent wraps around her naked body, while Adam, still innocent, looks blankly on.\u00a0 In some paintings Adam and Eve stand far apart, in others, close together.\u00a0 In some, she is near the serpent, he is alone.<\/p>\n And there is even a stylized image found in both Roman and Greek art, of two handsome men who look much alike, one is Adam, you know him by his nakedness, the other handsome fellow has a brown beard and brown robe, and they are smiling into each other\u2019s eyes while the robed one touches an apple.\u00a0 They stand close together, while Eve, in these images, stands apart from them, and does not look at them.\u00a0\u00a0 She looks like Fran the Robot in the insurance commercials, with her switch off.\u00a0 She\u2019s just not part of the action.\u00a0 Well, what\u2019s this image?<\/p>\n In Rome, the captions say it is God warning Adam about the tree.\u00a0\u00a0 But that isn\u2019t a convincing caption, because both men are smiling gently at each other. \u00a0And in Greece, a several centuries older Christian culture,\u00a0and a much more tolerant form of Christianity, the robed man is said to be Jesus Christ.\u00a0 What\u2019s he<\/em> doing in the Garden?\u00a0 And why is he smiling on Adam while touching an apple?\u00a0\u00a0 Is he promising he can fix it, don\u2019t worry?\u00a0 Or saying he is the wisdom of the tree?<\/p>\n Neither of these captions is convincing, and both are surely later guesses.<\/p>\n These paintings are about desire.\u00a0 And the Apple is about desire.\u00a0 Whoever the robed man is, it seems that the conservative line, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve<\/em>, is not, in fact, the way the story has always been visually presented in altar art.<\/p>\n In the midst of all this fever for redemption through migration, Adam and Eve came to America, too.\u00a0 Serious academics in the literary field\u00a0have written about the American Adam<\/em> for years. For whatever reasons,\u00a0Adam and\u00a0Eve\u00a0split up before they stepped ashore\u00a0(now there\u2019s an American experience, in fact one of the very first freedoms:\u00a0 the Puritans enacted the first divorce law in the western world a short 8 months after landing in Boston.)<\/p>\n Adam has walked through America alone in all manner of guises.\u00a0 He\u2019s become a stock character in our literature, TV series, and films.\u00a0 He is not tied down, no wife and kids.\u00a0\u00a0 He is Natty Bumppo, living in the wilderness outside the settlements of British and Natives.\u00a0 He is Huckleberry Finn and<\/em> he is also Jim, rafting the Mississippi river between towns where this cross-race friendship would still not be allowed.\u00a0 In all of this, Adam keeps his Original Job, tending the Garden of Good and Evil.\u00a0 \u00a0He has some real flesh, too, men who\u2019ve ingested the apple of knowledge:\u00a0\u00a0Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie (who built libraries all over America), all these men are icons of wisdom.\u00a0 Martin Luther King, Jr,\u00a0 used his bites of wisdom to bring freedom to the oppressed, and is perhaps the best American Adam of all, though some, especially here in NH, see him as the Serpent in the story, tempting people to break rules and eat what they should not be eating. There must be others.\u00a0 Who would you name?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Eve, too, got off the boats, and has survived in America on her own.\u00a0 She has retained her sexiness, her smartness, her power to persuade, and her goodness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think she is\u00a0 Scarlett in Gone With the Wind<\/em><\/strong>, Dorothy in Oz.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>She is Amelia Earhart,\u00a0 In America, Eve saves the farm and navigates changing worlds.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She seduces slithering political serpents in every industry, which gets her through closed doors \u2013 and then many women follow along behind her.\u00a0 And she gets special knowledge and power by taking things she is not supposed to take \u2013 \u00a0shoes, money, men, fame, control.<\/p>\n She is outrageous and she opens\u00a0the doors of our closed world\u00a0to new experiences.<\/p>\n I heard the writer Margaret Atwood say that the American longing for Edens is evident in the proliferating theme parks that dot the country, offering fantasy escapes.<\/p>\nTrees<\/span><\/span><\/h1>\n
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<\/a><\/dt>\nApples<\/span><\/h1>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAdam and Eve<\/span><\/h1>\n
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used with permission<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/p>\nEating the Apple<\/span><\/h1>\n
<\/a><\/em>In the great paintings of the Fall, the Eating of the Apple is portrayed in a number of different ways.\u00a0 \u00a0I looked at an immense array when I was choosing an image for my blog.<\/p>\nAdam and Eve in America<\/span><\/h1>\n
<\/a>James Carroll, in his book Jerusalem<\/em><\/strong>, reports that the immigrants who filled the ships that filled America held the dream of the New Jerusalem, the reclaimed Eden, so powerfully that nearly 200 cities and towns are named New Jerusalem, most commonly in the shortened form of\u00a0 Salem, which means peace in Hebrew and in Arabic.\u00a0 From Salem MA and Salem NH to Salem OR, settlers desired not just a new chance, but a better world to live in.\u00a0 And these settlers ranged from Puritans to Sweet Betsy from Pike.<\/p>\n<\/a>He is the Lone Ranger, naming injustice, and an endless array of detectives, FBI agents, CSI investigators, and recently Patrick Jane and Castle, non-violent police advisors with special wisdom for naming good and evil.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Marilyn Monroe, Helen Gurley Brown and Oprah, each of whom is part fiction and part real, and each of whom lives by her wits, has bitten into the apple of forbidden experience, and breaks open our thinking by the way she lives.<\/a><\/p>\nEden in America<\/span><\/h1>\n