Stories of Eden: Bodies
Specially-commissioned reflections by Pádraig Ó Tuama for the Final Week of Easter
God liked the evening, even then. God walked among the garden in the cool.
In the writer’s telling of Genesis, God must have had a body, or a body like a body.
A body that had limits, skin, a body that had starts and ends, and bits to point and bits to hold a branch back when you’re searching for your friends.
“Who told you you were naked?” God asked and the man said that it was the woman who God made.
Oh how the world unfolds. These people are barely people up till now. But now, in Adam’s words, whole worlds are made: of Blame; of Sexism; of Blaming Parents; of Blaming Anyone But Him . The Thing You Made Me Do is the Thing That Made Me Do it.
Who told you you were naked?
What was God dressed in if not the sun and moon and stars?
God has limits in this story. God needs us to ask the question about the knowledge that set them free. And, in this story, God has skin, or something like it. In the same way, this story of God has limits too. What language could approximate a semblance of a God? For Eden, God slips into skin inside the story in order that we’ll see the skin. Once we’ve seen the skin, we must recognise that God will slip outside the skin, and slip outside the story. God is a story always bigger than the story we tell.
God slips into limits to show us God beyond the limits of the limits God slipped into.
That’s not a tongue twister for a serpent in a garden, it’s a truth. In order to say something about God, we must put words around a God. That’s a limit, and a limit God steps into and God steps out of.
In a certain way, we only know God by knowing what God’s not. And here in Eden, we see the edges of that God; God’s finger clippings, the skin cells that fell from God’s body. It’s limited, but that’s the point. This story points beyond the story. This story says no story’s big enough to hold a thing that we cannot contain. But the story holds a little.
Someone knew that right from the earth we came from, we can fall into stories of blame that can make a river shrivel up. And they wrote it into Eden. And they wrote it into us.
Eden always asked us to go beyond. To move beyond the stories we tell. Even the stories of God need a different skin. What new stories of God can you tell?
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and a theologian. As well as writing books of poetry and prose, he is the host of Poetry Unbound, a podcast from On Being Studios. He lives in Ireland.http://www.padraigotuama.com/.