KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 October
admin | 13 October 2017In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground
Ah, the curses of work and labour! There is, it seems, no escaping the reality of the Fall. It means a different relation to the world and to one another and all because of a falling out, we might say, with God occasioned by our deceit and disobedience.
We return this week after the Thanksgiving Break to consider the further consequences of the Fall in the Third Chapter of Genesis. In a way, it connects with some of the themes of thanksgiving since bread is very much an aspect of our human engagement through work with the good order of creation. It means that nothing is simply ready at hand; labour is one of the consequences of the Fall, one of the curses. And yet, in and through our labours with the good order of God’s creation, blessings are found. We can learn about what we experience. The Fall means that good and evil, which are known to God through intellect, are known to us through experience. Yet through our experience of estrangement and separation, we may come to learn intellectually and ethically about good and evil.
The so-called curses that are the fall-out of the Fall are also about a kind of falling into reason. The awareness of ourselves as self-conscious beings means our awareness not only of the otherness of God and of one another but of the natural world itself. To live requires now our self-conscious effort at the same time as there is our self-conscious awareness of our connection to the world, to the ground itself: “for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust shall you return”. This is not really news. The two creation accounts have already and amply chronicled our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation and to every other created thing. What is new is the idea of labour and hard work. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”
The curse upon the serpent is to crawl upon its belly on the ground, no longer upright, it seems. At once a just-so story about the characteristics of snakes, it also illustrates the nature of human reason as having turned away from God and having turned towards the ground, the dust. The serpent’s curse – turned towards the dust – is the very image of the cunning of reason in its turning away from God. For the woman, the curse is the pain of childbirth. For the man, the ground itself is cursed and becomes the place of human labour amidst thorns and thistles. Each curse illustrates the sense of estrangement and enmity – division experienced experientially. The further point is that creation is no longer simply a paradisal garden. The Fall means the expulsion from the garden of Eden and there is no going back; there can be no undoing of our self-consciousness.
“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” Joni Mitchell sang in Woodstock. Certainly the dreams and images of paradise are a recurring feature of the human story, from the “garden of the sun” in the Epic of Gilgamesh to the arcadia of the Greco-Roman world of antiquity to the Woodstock of the hippie sixties. But in an important way, there is no going back. Dante, in his magisterial treatment of the journey of the soul to God in the Divine Comedy, takes us up Mount Purgatory to the Garden of the Earthly Paradise but it is precisely not an end-point. It is the jumping off point to the Heavenly Paradise, having been made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars.” How? Through the purgation of sins and the acquisition by grace of the virtues of the soul. His vision draws upon these ancient stories in Genesis about creation and the Fall, about the curses and human labour. They are all part of the pilgrimage of education.
And so, too, for all of our students and faculty. Chapel is an integral part of the school’s educational programme precisely because it seeks to raise the questions about the human condition, about our moral and ethical commitments, about our intellectual and spiritual ideals and principles. We do so only because of what this chapter in Genesis presents to us experientially, namely, our sense of estrangement and enmity which becomes the ground or place of our labours. Our labours in an academic community are the works of learning and service where nothing is to be taken for granted and where we learn how to take care of the things that have been entrusted to us intellectually, ethically and materially. We confront ourselves in these stories and a way to think about the nature of our experiences.
Somehow in being turned to the ground we are also being turned to God. Pride in Dante’s view – and in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition – is the root of all sin. In Dante’s poetic vision, the opposite virtue of humility is acquired on the cornices of the proud by being bent down to the ground in contemplation of the stories about the great examples of humility, such as the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation. Those stories are carved in the ground, as it were, and belong to the ground of our being with God.
In a way, the lessons of Genesis here about the curses and human labour complement, too, the ancient Greek idea in Homer’s Odyssey of learning through suffering, learning through a new and altered association with the world about the truth of our humanity. The challenge and the task is to learn and to acquire the humility in which we discover the true virtue and dignity of our humanity. We may indeed be “caught in the devil’s bargain” as the poem song Woodstock suggests and not be able “to get ourselves back to the garden” but, as Joni Mitchell also notes, “you know life is for learning.” That is a blessing.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy