Eden Is Here

September first is the liturgical new year, which we celebrate annually in Orthodoxy. Included in the celebration are scriptural readings and church hymns that expound the meaning of our festivities. One of those readings is the Lucan passage in which Christ reads from the scroll of Isaiah,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19).

Our Lord then tells the people in the synagogue, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (v. 21). It’s a powerful statement of our Lord’s desire to set us free and heal us.

During Vespers, we read the Isaiah passage more fully and add to it a reading from Leviticus 26, which could be summarized as, “If you obey My commandments, you will prosper and the land will be blessed. If you do not obey Me, then the land will be cursed and things will go badly.”

In a recent encyclical on this feast day, our Met. Tikhon tied together some of the themes in the hymns and scriptures, reminding us that we Christians are priests who offer up to God the good things of this earth and, ultimately, “receive back the Flesh and Blood of God himself.”

The Dream

I pondered these things as I went to bed on August 31^st, and consequently, had an intriguing dream. In the dream, a man came to me and explained that in some sense, Eden never fully disappeared from the earth after the fall of mankind. It was dragged down, it was tarnished, it was wrapped in layers of impotence, but it never died.

“When you pull an apple off your tree,” he said to me, “and taste of its sweetness, you are receiving a tiny bit of Eden.” We are living on the fringes of the outskirts of Eden, partaking of the crumbs that come tumbling down the mountain. What we receive is imperfect and fallen, but the vestiges of Eden are the reason that we have life, beauty, fruit, and harvests in this world. Eden is a force, that even when crippled, can bring upon the earth unspeakable beauty. If we find this earth to be sweet and beautiful now, then we can only imagine what it was like when it operated in its full divinely-given power.

The natural disasters and destruction that we see in the world are the result of our fall into sin, the writhing of a disease-ridden Paradise. Eden never completely died, but it has faded away like a dream that we can’t quite grasp. In the language of the Church hymns and Scripture, this is often expressed as a closed gate,

“O Paradise, share in the sorrow of thy master who is brought to poverty, and with the sound of thy leaves pray to the Creator that He may not keep thy gate closed forever” (Matins of Forgiveness Sunday, Canticle 6).

In the Leviticus passage mentioned above, God tells Israel to obey Him and the land will be blessed. This is not a tit-for-tat system where God asks us to fulfill an agreement with Him. Rather, He is telling us the laws of creation, how reality works. “Do good,” He is saying, “and you will be transformed into My Image; you will become like Me. Likewise, you will transform creation around you.”

Since we are the crown of the material creation – its rulers and stewards – creation rises and falls with us. When we live righteously, we are transformed and so is the material world around us. God has “made us kings and priests” of this earth, after all (Rev. 5:10; 1 Pet. 2:9). When we live according to Christ’s commandments, we receive the healing that our Lord spoke of when He read from the Prophet Isaiah.

But when we disobey God, we replay the Fall of Genesis, reintroducing the primordial sin into our own story. Our sin renews the disease upon Eden and the land suffers around us. In every minute of every day, we are agents of transformation: paradisaical or diabolical.

Through His life, death, and resurrection, our Lord has reopened the closed gate of Eden, and He has given us the grace to bring it forth healed. Eden is truly here. But we must do the hard work of repentance.

“O precious Paradise, unsurpassed in beauty, tabernacle built by God, unending gladness and delight, glory of the righteous, joy of the prophets, and dwelling of the saints, with the sound of thy leaves pray to the Maker of all: may He open unto me the gates which I closed by my transgression, and may He count me worthy to partake of the Tree of Life and of the joy which was mine when I dwelt in thee before.