Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Now let’s look at “The Fall,” as we usually refer to the pivotal event described in Genesis 3. The Fall is not simply something that happened in one historical moment to one archetypal couple, Adam and Eve. It happens in all moments and lives. It is the shape of creation. It sets the plot line.
After Adam and Eve took their identity as separate from their Source, “the eyes of both of them were opened” to a split universe of suspicion, subterfuge, doubt, and alienation (Genesis 3:7). And “they realized that they were naked.” This is indeed the lie and the “fall” from original grace and innocence. Teachers of prayer call this the “subject-object split” where most humans live their whole lives.
This happens to each of us whenever we stand over and against Reality, apart and analytical, and can no longer know things by affinity, likeness, or natural connection (“love”), but we merely know things as objects out there and apart from us. Then we are no longer in the garden, or even part of the garden, but we “eat” the garden like a possession. It is this alienation that all religion is trying to overcome.
The split begins in all human beings quite early, and for abused or neglected children even earlier. By the age of seven most have “left the garden” and have begun to live largely in their minds—looking over at the garden. Before that time, we exist in unitive consciousness, when “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30), or my mother and I are one, as we enjoy in the first months of life.
Enneagram teacher Russ Hudson describes the inevitable split:
At the root of our ego patterns is a profound suffering caused by our alienation from ourselves and from God—from our direct sense and experience of the Divine, moment by moment. We learn how this suffering drives us to do many things we would not choose to do, and to not do many things we would choose to do [see Romans 7:15]. In this sense, it is telling us that, without presence and awareness, we transgress against our own heart, our own truth, often without realizing that this is what we are doing. [1]
That’s why I often say we are not punished for our sins; we are punished by our sins.
Hudson further clarifies this by explaining the roots of the word “sin”:
The Greek word hamartia was most often translated as “sin” in the New Testament. But this word did not imply transgression in the sense of breaking a rule or defying an authority. It meant “to miss the mark” as in an arrow that misses its target. Hamartia is the way we lose balance and “self forget”—the way we fall away from the direct experience of Divine Grace. . . . Our ego then becomes a way of covering up this suffering rather than addressing it. [2]
Gateway to Silence:
I am hidden in the love and mercy of God.
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Prayer—Battle in “The Secret Place”
When you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. —Matthew 6:6
Jesus did not say, “Dream about your Father who is in the secret place,” but He said, “…pray to your Father who is in the secret place….” Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.
We must have a specially selected place for prayer, but once we get there this plague of wandering thoughts begins, as we begin to think to ourselves, “This needs to be done, and I have to do that today.” Jesus says to “shut your door.” Having a secret stillness before God means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and remembering Him. God is in secret, and He sees us from “the secret place”— He does not see us as other people do, or as we see ourselves. When we truly live in “the secret place,” it becomes impossible for us to doubt God. We become more sure of Him than of anyone or anything else. Enter into “the secret place,” and you will find that God was right in the middle of your everyday circumstances all the time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless you learn to open the door of your life completely and let God in from your first waking moment of each new day, you will be working on the wrong level throughout the day. But if you will swing the door of your life fully open and “pray to your Father who is in the secret place,” every public thing in your life will be marked with the lasting imprint of the presence of God.
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