I Want

The Fall of Mankind

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any animal of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’”

The serpent said to the woman, “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves waist coverings.”

The sin of Eve was taking that for yourself that God did not freely give. Eve was not only the mother of all humanity but she was also the mother of all sin. She led her husband into sin, but Adam’s greatest sin was not so much that he ate the forbidden fruit his wife gave him to eat, but that he failed to protect his wife from the serpent. Adam’s greatest mistake was blaming God and his wife for his failure. Adam did not have a repentant heart. Instead of owning his mistake he blamed others for it. We may still be living in the garden of Eden if only Adam could have asked for forgiveness.

My mother claimed to be Buddhist. In the last week of her life, as she lay dying in the hospital, she asked to speak to a minister. I went to the Lutheran church of my childhood to ask the pastor there if he would visit my mother. The he was actually a she, a woman pastor. In our conversation I told her that I was in formation to be a Roman Catholic deacon. She scoffed at this and told me that she was once also Catholic. She chose to leave the Church because they would not allow her to become a priest.

“So,” I replied, “The sin of Eve then?” She looked at me quizzically. “Taking that for yourself that God did not freely give.” The pretty much ended our conversation.

Desire is one of the most powerful and the most cunning weapons in the devil’s arsenal. It is also one of the easiest he has to use. God put into the human heart great desire. The first desire is the desire to know, love, and be with our God. The entire purpose of life is to learn to love the way God loves so that we can reclaim the image of him who we were created in. We all were created in the image and likeness of God, but that image and likeness was veiled by Eve’s sin.

We were also instilled with a great desire to be in relationship with one another. We were created by Love, through love, for love, to be loved, and to love. Love longs to be shared and it grows when it is. In the slightly modified words of Obi-Wan Kenobi,

“Love is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together."

Because desire is such a strong emotion, it can easily be manipulated. This is why we are surrounded by a constant barrage of advertisements. Advertisements attempt to manipulate your desire to make you believe you truly need whatever they have to offer. The devil manipulates desire in the same way to get us to sin. Anyone who loves God never wants to do anything to hurt him. Adam and Eve certainly weren’t looking to hurt God when they ate the forbidden fruit. The problem is that we are so blinded by desire that we can’t see the damage that will happen if we give in to the object of that desire.

With desire God gave us the ability to discern. We are to use our intellect to determine if something we want is good for us or not. It is not enough to discern if something is good for us alone. We also have to be aware of how our choices affect those around us. We are called to be in relationship with one another so we also need to be concerned how our choices affect those we are in relationship with.

Vocation means to be called. We often associate it with the clergy and religious. I was called to be a deacon. In reality, we are all called to a specific purpose. Some are called to be teachers, some soldiers, others are called to be great leaders, and some are called to be mothers. Life is like a finely tuned Swiss watch. It runs perfectly when all parts are doing the tasks they were created to do. None of the parts are more important than the others. Even the smallest cog fulfills a great purpose and if it fails to do what it was created to do the whole watch fails in its purpose.

The trouble is that the Holy Spirit is not the only spirit capable of calling a person to something. The evil spirit can do this as well. This is why it is so crucial to discern every calling. A calling from God will never go against something God has established. A calling from God is always for the betterment of the people he loves. Any calling that goes against something God has commanded is never from God no matter how strong it may be.

Take for instance our Lutheran pastor. She felt called by God to be a priest. She felt it so strongly that when it was denied to her, she left the Church that God created to seek that which a man-made church allowed her to do. God established the all-male priesthood. There is good theology as to why he did this but that will have to be a topic for another day. If God established the all-male priesthood and he wanted it to be an all-male priesthood only, he would never put the desire into a woman’s heart to be a priest. The devil, on the other hand, would put the desire to be a priest into a woman’s heart. Just as he used Eve to destroy man’s relationship with God in the garden, he uses women in an attempt to destroy the priesthood and, through that, the Church from within.

At the heart of every sin is the desire to take for ourselves that which God does not freely give. Sin always begins with, “I want.”