Tag Archives: Adam and Eve

My Name is Mud…And I’m Kinda “Proud” of It

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One of the earliest stories I heard in my life was that God created us by digging into the earth and creating our progenitor, Adam.  I later learned that the name “Adam” meant “earth.”  And increasingly I realize just how much we are but “dust of the earth” and are destined to return to that dust. Shakespeare in “Hamlet” so pithily noted that we will ultimately become “food for worms.”

But from this humble origin we can become what Shakespeare described as “the quintessence of dust.”  However, achieving any degree of this quintessential…requires a lot of work, a lot of soul work, and there our dusty origins fights us tooth-and-toenail.  For one of the fundamental dimensions of our earthy, dusty origins is the constellation of the ego and that “beastly little treasure” has an intrinsic desire to never relinquish its “beastly” dimension.  Mine certainly does not! This ego is the “will of the species” and its willfulness if not mitigated by a concern for the “species” at-large will become self-destructive and that destructive energy will seek to wreak havoc on the species.  This is relevant to the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” He knew the grandiosity of his spirituality…among other things!  I just visited our present day “holy ghost” (Google) and learned that 1 Corinthians 15:46-48 is very relevant to this vein of thought, Paul noting that “the first man” (i.e. “the ego”) is of the dust of the earth but the “second man” is spiritual, “of heaven.”

I want to close with a poem by the man I shared from yesterday, Samuel Menashe, who daunted my ego with the notion that my, even my name, “is mud.”  Humility is good.  It takes all the pressure off!

 

 

ADAM MEANS EARTH

 

I am the man

Whose name is mud

But what’s in a name

To shame one who knows

Mud does not stain

Clay he’s made of

Dust Adam became—

The dust he was—

Was he his name

Samuel Menashe

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.