Here in the garden
glimpsing the kingdom of god
I love the transition of seasons. So much cosmic energy: awakening, birthing, breathing, resetting. Days getting longer. The gloom and weariness of winter lifting. The “going in” season is yet again passing away.
This time, this moment, feels pregnant with so many things. Every now and then, I catch a whiff of the news when my self-proclaimed “news junky” friend plays NPR podcasts while we sip mid-morning coffee. When I speak to my mother, she’ll sometimes ask me what I think about “all this?”
I say, “Mama, I’m sure I don’t know.”
I empathize with my neighbors whose citizenship, rights, and access to healthcare are being compromised; whose housing is being compromised. Livelihoods revoked. Spirits bowed under the material realities of systemic oppressions. Sometimes I think about that time I almost got top surgery a year ago, but decided not to, and I wonder if I’ll be allowed that opportunity again. I’ll be alright though. My heart is with the ones for whom it is not alright.
Being attacked on all fronts as we are, the psyche manifests one of four responses.
Fight: often taking the form of public rebuke
Flight: passport fantasies of flying off to a part of the world somehow unaffected by America’s/capitalism’s bullshit, never to return — jury’s out on whether that place exists
Freeze: don’t vote, but clock in anyway
Fawn: maybe we just need to elect ‘the right’ people into office
With all that collective unrest spilling over, it’s hard to see the glimpses of goodness in the world, the moments that bring us closer to ourselves, to each other, and to God. I’ve been sitting with this verse — verse 15 in Mark, chapter 1. It reads:
“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and hear the good news.”
In the Gospel of Mark, these are the words of John the Baptist, echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah. John the Baptist makes an appearance in each of the Gospels, but his voice figures most prominently in Mark, which is partly why the Gospel as told by Mark is my favorite of the four. Mark’s account puts the reader “en media res” of a proclamation from John the Baptist, the camel-hair-clothed, locust-eating, wilderness wanderer. It is John the Baptist who is sent to be Jesus’s witness.
The word witness draws my attention.
Have you ever thought of the power of witnessing—of seeing, like really seeing? I think about witness in my own life. Witness is more than looking or taking in a scene with one’s eyes.
“Witness lives. Witness is about the living and the ways we choose to live. History that becomes witness is history that shapes the paths of the living, bound up with their heartbeats and their breathing. Witness reveals the telling of history without the false pretense of history for history’s sake. Witness exposes the storytellers and their desires to shape worlds, large or small.”
— Willie James Jennings, Acts: Commentary
Witness implies some truth-telling, some authenticity. Jesus’s ministry was a ministry of witnessing, of seeing—i mean, really seeing—all the people he encountered as they were: in their affliction, sickness, madness, meanness, trauma, and lament; their joy, triumph, and strength too.
This semester, I have a class called American Agrarians — the primary goal being to gather to think theologically about how we live a life closer to creation, God, and one another. Facilitating discussion around Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Agrarian Way” and four chapters from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall, I was most taken by the idea of the sicut deus vs the imago dei, in the immediate aftermath of Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden.
Of this sicut dei state that Eve and Adam find themselves in, Bonhoeffer writes,
“Eve, the other person, was the limit given to Adam in bodily form… Now he has transgressed the boundary and come to know that he has a limit. Now he no longer accepts the limit as God the Creator’s grace; instead, he hates it as God begrudging him something as Creator… This means that humans no longer regrard the other person with love. Instead, one person sees the other in terms of their being over against each other; each sees the other as divided from himself or herself. The limit is no longer grace that holds being in the unity of creaturely, free love; instead the limit is now the mark of dividedness… [Now, in the aftermath] In their shame of their nakedness, human beings acknowledge their limit. This is the peculiar dialectical nature of a world that is torn apart, that human beings live in it without a limit, and so as one, yet always with hatred against the limit, and so as divided, and are ashamed in their nakedness.”
— Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, “The New Thing”
Witness and shame are opposed.
“Nakedness is revelation. Nakedness believes in grace. Nakedness doesn’t know it’s naked… It is therefore a most profoundly contradictory state of affairs that human beings who are rid of all limits are, after all, compelled to point out their limit without wanting to do so, inasmuchas they cover themselves up and feel shame.”
— Bonhoeffer cont’d, Creation and Fall, “The New Thing”
Witness and shame are opposed. One cannot be fully witnessed while exhibiting shame. One can only be witnessed when they are naked.
So much of biblical text is interpreted through a lens of shame. Even the creation story! This story of Adam and Eve is the first story from the Bible I ever learned, and foregrounds the context for all of what is to follow. The understanding has always been that it was eve’s fault. or it was the serpent’s fault. Someone had to be at fault. And fault is shameful.
Throw on top the framework of patriarchy that is also at work in dominant interpretations of this story, and now, we’ve got a big shameful mess.
Now, women get to be the scapegoat for humanity’s foibles. Now, men cannot recognize their own limit in the creature that was supposed to be their companion. Now it’s not only the cis, hetero woman that is implicated, but its anything to do with femininity; it’s gender roles and associations; it’s perception.
As a Black, nonbinary, masc-of-center person, I too am implicated in the shame narrative. I could make a list of all the things that I’m ashamed of, but it all boils down to being ashamed of being not enough.
That’s the kicker; that’s the rub.
Being as the Gods, the sicut deus, one forgets or ignores or outright denies their nakedness, their vulnerability, the dependence of the love and grace of others and is prone to behaving in a manner that is less than thoughtful to others. In trying to prove my enough-ness, enough-ness becomes a zero-sum game whereby in order for me to be enough, I must encroach on someone else’s enough-ness.
I could write more about how this theological perspective of the sicut deus maps onto the colonial enterprise. Whiteness as an embodiement of the sicut deus. The violence that the sicut deus inspires and makes possible. Patriarchy as another iteration of the sicut deus. Capitalism/class too. Instead, I’ll end with a prayer.
God, help me to remember that here in garden, where I am naked, I am closer to you. Help me to remember that I don’t have to hide from you or my neighbor. You have created me in your image and likeness; because of this, I am already enough. Help me to love my neighbor better and in doing so, love you better.
Amen. Ase.