A Knowledge of Difference
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Dr. Brian Bantum reflects on the story of Adam and Eve as one that initiates us into the freedom of individuality and difference, for good and for ill:
When I come back to the story of humanity’s fall I still see some of the pride and hubris I was taught to see when I was a young Christian. Adam and Eve desire to be like God and seek something that is not meant for them. They violate God’s law, God’s justice. But even more than that in the story of the Fall I see our propensity to mistake freedom for individuality. I see us estranged from our bodies, hiding the very aspects of ourselves that make us different than one another….
When God created us, God created us to be like God. God wanted us to love and to be loved. But when you love someone you have to choose them. You have to choose them in the big things and in the small things. To love someone you have to see how they are like you and how they are not like you, and you have to see how their differences are gifts, ways of helping you to see yourself and God and the world in new ways….
In the garden … God did not hide the tree [of the knowledge of good and evil] away or place it behind impenetrable walls. It grew among the many other trees. It bore fruit and grew like any other and in this way it stood before Adam and Eve, before us as a mark of their freedom. We could choose not to eat and in not eating we would confess God as our creator, the one whom we cannot be without.
In our freedom and knowledge, we enact a terrible cost:
But in our freedom we, Eve and Adam, did not rest in this relationship. We did not enjoy the trees given to us. We take, cut, tear, beat, consume, enslave what we believe is ours to know. Our eating was the slightest tilt of that beautiful freedom, away from God, and away from one another.
In our disobedience a new world opened up. We could see. The serpent was not lying in some respects; we human beings continued to breathe and think and love. But something had changed…. With this new knowledge we could no longer see the blessed significance of our bodies, of our lives together. The knowledge we gained drove us into hiding, hiding our bodies from one another and hiding ourselves from God.…
Yet, Adam and Eve remained God’s children, unique creatures with whom God desired to dwell, to love and be loved by. In this moment we did not lose the image of God. God did not withhold God’s animating Spirit and love toward us, but something changed nonetheless.
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Praying with the Seguaros Mark Longhurst
If you drive about twenty minutes southwest at sunrise from the Redemptorist Renewal Center monastery in Tucson, Arizona, you’ll find yourself in the barren, beautiful heart of Saguaro National Park. On a June morning like the one I experienced, the dry desert heat will not have yet begun its ascendant day-reign. A coolness mixes with the warm expanse. The group I traveled with broke off from each other, pursuing intentional solitude. Our morning practice: an hour of prayerful walking in the desert, accompanied only by the sturdy presence of saguaro cacti.
We learned the night before our early saguaro trek that the Tohono O’odham tribe views the saguaros as friends and even persons. Hia-Ced O’odham member Larraine Eiler writes about her place-based beliefs in a community of beings that “includes the Saguaro, and the mud turtles, the onion and the spinach, numerous species of migrating birds.” One of our retreat guides, a longtime desert hermit-mystic named Tessa Bielecki, spoke to us about how she encounters Christ in the saguaros. She evocatively described contemplating Christ and saguaros during Lent, and even experiencing the cacti embodying scenes from the Stations of the Cross. (Read her invitation to gospel, cacti-inspired reflection here). After all, in a well-known hymn in the letter to the Colossians, Christ is before all things, the firstborn of creation, and holding all things together (Colossians 1:15–19). That means that we know Christ through creation itself and not only through the biblical text. Nature also is a sacred “book” through which God speaks, as Augustine and many other theologians affirmed.
The first thought I had upon entering the national park was that it is so populated. There are no people, at least at the hour we chose, but there are saguaros in every direction. A city filled with two million of them, according to the National Park Service. And if the saguaros are friends, I thought, then I am not alone at all. I’m surrounded by other bodies in Christ. So, this being my first time ever to Arizona, and first time ever meeting saguaros, my prayer time included me pouring my heart out to God—and introducing myself to them. I slid a finger in between the sharp spines to touch the cool, cucumber-like body. I tried to listen to what each new friend might have to tell me, what stories and histories they held. After all, since a saguaro’s life span ranges from 150-175 years, most of them had been there long before me and, God willing, will still be there after I die. They have much to teach us. View this photo gallery to experience the saguaro’s sparse dignity.
The O’odham affirmation of a saguaro’s personhood has even galvanized activists to save imperiled cacti. If nature has being or “personhood,” then maybe nature has legal rights, some are suggesting. If we treat nature as our friend, we are much less likely to destroy it.
My desert companions and I are all part of a “new monastic” community hosted by the Long-Island-based Center for Spiritual Imagination. We are like-spirited seekers who have banded together to commit to a life of contemplative rhythm amidst our busy lives of work and family. We meet online once a week, go on retreats every year, and share a so-called “rule of life” that involves daily meditation, morning and evening prayer, days of solitude, and more. We converged on the Redemptorist Renewal Center in Tucson to experience the prophet Hosea’s words: “The desert will lead you to your heart where I will speak” (2:14, paraphrase). During a year dedicated to learning Carmelite spirituality and reading the famous Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, we also sought to discover the roots of the Carmelite order—that of Elijah and the desert.
I wrote in this book about some things the Bible has to say about spirituality and the desert (146): The desert is the archetypal and literal place where we meet God, the place of what writer and speaker Jacqui Lewis calls “fierce love.” Deserts of loss, grief, pain, and literal sand strip down our pretensions, as if to say that preparing for God’s way requires abandonment of all our prior ways. The ways that we are in the world are all too often directed by addiction and a desire for more. The desert demands us to be emptied rather than filled, to show up and be tested, for divine fire to refine our desire, to face inner barrenness head-on, just as Jesus faces down the devil in the wilderness/desert.
We are confronted with our naked selves in the desert. There’s no place for our pride, lust, anger, resentment, or need for approval to hide. No amount of posturing will shield us from the desert sun’s unremitting glare. Its clarity may even stir us to long once again, as the Israelites did, for the seemingly safe oppression of Egypt. Or the truth that the desert peels away may cause us to plunge headlong in love with God, to say with the poet of the Song of Songs, “Who is that coming up from the wilderness/desert, leaning upon her beloved?” (Song of Songs 8:5).
