Downstream from Eden

I spent Sunday's steamy afternoon in a cool church by a muddy creek in historic Annapolis.

The Chesapeake Covenant Community, a new-ish interfaith organization dedicated to "engaging, encouraging and supporting people of faith in caring for Earth in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed," was holding its coming out party, of sorts.

Roughly thirty people gathered to learn about the organization's make-over, our dreams, and how together we can make a difference. I have the honor of serving on the founding board.

They had asked me to prepare a closing ritual for the day. They wanted to do something by the creek, they said. Something that would send them forth inspired, connected and charged up.

Uh huh. Sure. No problem.

So after shvitzing and mulling and perseverating a bit, I found what I wanted.

I turned, as always, to our texts.

I spoke about the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve and our banishment from paradise, and wondered: why were we thrown out? Why was banishment the chosen punishment for eating the fruit of knowledge and not some other biblical favorite, like boils or leprosy?

Perhaps, I suggested, the humans were banished from the Garden not as a punishment depriving them of paradise but as a precaution protecting paradise from their human indiscretions. After all, while their eyes were now open to the possibilities of this fresh, new world, Adam and Eve had no experience in exercising their newly-found knowledge. They were naive, and knowledge and naivete make a dangerous couple. Who knows what mischief, or damage, they might have caused had they been left on their own in the Garden?

Sadly, we know. We are the generation of Adam and Eve let loose in the Garden. We are the generation that ate the apple, whose eyes were opened and who saw great possibilities. Like Adam and Eve, we too were naive, drunk with the nectar of discovery and knowledge, reckless about how we used it. We failed to see the price our advances would demand. We failed to believe the world had limits.

If the 20th century was our Garden of Eden, the 21st century is our banishment.

Adam and Eve were thrust out, and the Garden was sealed with a fiery, swirling sword protecting the Garden against our return.

But if we were cast out Eden, Eden was not totally cast out of the world. There is one remnant of the Garden that is with us still. One bit of Paradise that calls us to hope. It is the waters.

"A river issues from Eden to water the garden," chapter 2 of Genesis tells us, "and it then divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; the second is Gihon; the third Hidekel and the fourth Prat." The rivers of the garden flowed out from it, watering all the lands of the earth.

Our rivers comes from Paradise. We all live downstream from the Garden of Eden. So what does this mean? It means we must never lose hope in our ability to save the earth and the Bay, the Gulf and the oceans, the rivers and the wildlife, the fishermen, whole communities and the land that depend upon them.

It means that earth possesses the wherewithal to heal itself and become paradise again if we but get out of its way.

It means that the vision of paradise has not abandoned us, and we must not abandon it. Through advocacy, green industry, personal behavior, consumer choices, education, and a renewed sense of awe toward our natural world, we can nurse earth back to health, perhaps even back to an echo of paradise.

If you wish to join CCC in our sacred work, please check out our website, www.chesapeakecovenant.org or be in touch with our Executive Director, Bill Breakey at breakeys@comcast.net