The Fall

Genesis 3:8-15

However you look at it, whether you believe in a literal Fall, a doctrine of original sin or original goodness, the fact is that we live in a broken world.

I know that I'm not great at facing up to my own sinfulness. I wander backwards and forwards along a kind of continuum between thinking I'm pretty much OK really and being convinced of my inability to make any kind of useful or meaningful contribution to the world. 

I don't have a problem seeing brokenness in the world, in my nation, in my community. There are times when I read or watch the news and feel almost physically overwhelmed by how awful things are and yet I rarely look at myself in the same way. Even when I'm taking communion, the one time in my protestant, non-conformist practice of church when I'm supposed to be proactively thinking about what a sinner I am, I have a tendency to wander off.

I suspect there are a few things at play here. The first is that I've grown up spiritually in a church context which emphasises grace - God giving us the things we don't deserve (to paraphrase Ishmael). The second is that I didn't 'become a Christian' and the older I get the more I wonder whether that means that I haven't fully grasped what I've been 'saved' from. The third is that I am a product of my society and my generation which have become all about what's right for me, finding myself, being true to who I am. And any Christian who tells you they're immune to that kind of thing is telling you porkies.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about the value of confession, in the Catholic sense. She couldn't see any merit in it, but I wonder whether for me confession might literally be good for the soul.

Creation

Genesis 1:1; 2:4-9, 16-25

Reading these verses from Genesis took me back to my silent retreat in September. I spent five days at Scargill in the Yorkshire Dales reading, walking, praying and, ironically, talking (although only to my spiritual director). I'd wanted to do a silent retreat for a little while but it was through meeting with a mentor, the rather marvellous Carol, who's very good at holding me accountable for doing things that I think would be helpful, that I finally got round to actually going.

There's a huge amount I could write about that week but there's quite a lot that's far too personal for a public access blog (sorry!). But there is one particular theme that emerged, a theme that connects to a Bible passage that's been incredibly important to me over the last twenty years.

At four key points in my life, people have 'given me' Isaiah 58:11:

The Lord will guide you always;
    he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
    and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
    like a spring whose waters never fail.

At first reading it's a lovely promise. In fact, when I asked a Christian leader who I respect what the significance was of the fact that this verse kept cropping up, they told me, slightly dismissively, to just accept that it was a lovely promise.

Except that I was brought up to be wary of taking scripture out of context, and so that didn't seem a very sensible thing to do on balance. So what is the context of those verses? It's a chapter about justice, about the connection between what we tend to perceive to be 'worship' - going to church, reading our Bibles, praying etc - and what God actually calls us to:

‘Is not this the kind of [worship] I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter –
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Anyone who's spent any time with me over the last few years will know that the issue of justice is becoming increasingly important to me. So you can understand my frustration at being told that the context of this promise didn't matter.

So how does this all fit in with the creation story in today's advent reflection? On my retreat I decided I wanted to explore the promise, the idea of being a well-watered garden. Scargill has a walled garden in its grounds, neglected for a while but now slowly coming back to life under the watchful eye of Suzie and her team. Before I arrived for my retreat I'd earmarked the garden as somewhere I wanted to spend some time, and it proved to be an amazing place to walk, sit, think and pray.

On one day I spent some time particularly thinking about Genesis 3:8 - Adam and Eve's experience of hearing '...the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day', particularly reflecting on the fact that this passage immediately precedes the confrontation between God and the couple over the fruit they'd eaten; Adam and Eve had no idea how good they had it.

I also thought about other gardens in the Bible - Gethsemane, the garden with the empty tomb; I imagine there will be more appropriate points than this to explore those this advent.

And on one morning I walked in the rain and thought about the relationship between gardens and water, about the need for plants to have deep roots in times of drought, about the development of underwater springs over millions of years. I thought about my own 'roots' - my family, my church, my formative experiences of God at work.

Somewhat inevitably, I'm not sure I necessarily feel like I understand this verse any more now than I did when my retreat started, but spending time reflecting on it helped me to start to plumb its depths and by extension the significance for me of the whole chapter. Over the last five years I've frequently felt sun-scorched with a fairly wobbly frame. But the fact is that God has guided me, just not in the way I've expected or, indeed, wanted. And I've had to dig down into spiritual (and emotional and practical) springs and I've been incredibly grateful to the people and experiences which have given me the resources I've needed to draw on.

Advent 1: The Patriarchs

This year I'm revisiting an advent study I've had for a while, mainly because what with one thing and another I haven't had a chance to invest in a new one; David Thomson's Christmas By Candlelight.

The first week is all about the Patriarchs - Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses specifically. Slightly oddly the Sunday readings don't have Bible passages so I helped myself to Hebrews 11:7-30.

To be honest, this idea of faith 'being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see' has taken on a new significance for me this year. The last twelve months have been almost completely devoid of certainty in any human sense, and in many ways of struggled to know what it is I'm hoping for. That's a tricky place to be.

On a lot of levels I've felt a sense of displacement - moving house twice in nine months didn't help with that - but in a weird way that's enabled me to become far more deeply aware of the people and places I do feel rooted in. Reading Hebrews I was very struck by the idea that Abraham 'when called to a place...obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going to' - that resonates with my experiences of the last year. But despite that I've had a very tangible sense that God has been alongside me, only showing me one step ahead, allowing me to experience new things and giving me space to reflect on their significance.

But my sense is that perhaps things have shifted. Perhaps I'm standing on the cusp of a more settled phase. My prayer is that over the course of advent I'll re-engage with God and together we'll see where things go...