An Adventure, Great Lent, the Desert and the Heart

How many of you like to travel?  How many of you find the thought of a great voyage or adventure to be exciting?

How many of you find that however wonderful travel can be it is always great to be back home?

Whether you like to travel, like an adventure, or whether you like getting home, Great Lent is for you.  Great Lent is a great spiritual sojourn, a great adventure to the kingdom of heaven, and as it turns out, this heaven to which we are sojourning is also our home!

The Christian sojourn is not traveling to a far-off foreign country, but instead it is a journey to the home God created for us from the beginning.  Today in the Church we also remember the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.  Paradise was the place God created to be our home, but we no longer live in Paradise.   This is reality.  The Scriptures tell us of why Adam and Eve had to leave their home in Paradise, they were expelled from the home God made for them and us because of their own rebellious sin.

At Vespers on the eve of Forgiveness Sunday one of the hymns says:

Adam ate the forbidden fruit and was driven from Paradise.

He sat outside, weeping bitterly:

“Woe to me! What will become of me, a worthless man?

I disobeyed one command of my Master and lost every good thing!

O holy Paradise, planted for me by God, and closed by the weakness of

Eve,

grant that I may once again gaze on the flowers of your gardens!”

The Savior said to him:

“I do not wish the death of my creation!

I desire that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth,

for him who comes to me I shall never cast out!”

Adam and Eve lost not only their home but also lost their way home.  And in them, so did we all.   They couldn’t get back to that home they had lost.  But Christianity says there is a way home.  So in another hymn from Vespers we sing:

O Paradise, garden of delight and beauty,

dwelling-place made perfect by God,

unending gladness and eternal joy,

the hope of the prophets and the home of the saints,

by the music of your rustling leaves beseech the Creator of all

to open the gates which my sins have closed,

that I may partake of the Tree of Life and Grace

which was given to me in the beginning!

Even the leaves in paradise when they rustle create music which calls to us to return.   And when we think about this beautiful paradise we should feel homesick because this world is full of problems – violence, disease, war, pain, sorrow, addiction, emotional illness, shattered marriages, dysfunctional families.  Something is wrong in this world and with this world.  Sin has shattered our lives.  We have lost touch with God.

Yet, the fact that we can recognize there is a problem gives us hope.  We don’t find ultimate purpose of life in this world, but it is available to us in the life in the world to come.  We can believe there is purpose and meaning to life despite the  sorrows and problems of this world because we understand this world is only a small part of the totality of creation, and life here is a tiny portion of the big history or creation.  We can believe that there is a better way, and trust that there is a God to help us.  Thus we can be full of hope.

Many years ago I read a book called Emotions Anonymous In which a physician wrote these words:

“As a doctor it took me a long time to find that actually relieving pain is not my goal.  I found that behind all the suffering, pain, diseases, and all the conditions that cause dis-ease, lie the thirst and the hunger of the human being for spirituality.

This hunger and thirst is the aspiration of a human being to be a whole again.”  (p 18)

This physician was describing what we Orthodox have known for centuries.  He went on to say about this world:

“I believe

We want to have no conflict, but we still have conflict.

We want life to be perfect here and now but it is far from perfect.

We want to have constant pleasure but we have pain.

We so want to succeed in every effort we make that when we fail in one area we reject not only our actions but ourselves as well.

We become very fearful.

We try to impress other people by being something we are not, by being phony.

We find ourselves being resentful toward people and life.

We become experts as manipulating people.

We become very self-centered.”  (Emotions Anonymous, p 29)

In so many ways he is describing the same things we read in the Scriptures about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and why we struggle on earth with pain and sorrow.  He is describing the descent into sin and a world which is broken.

And when we allow ourselves to truly look at this world, we realize all of the things of this earth not only are intermixed with pain and sorrow but they also are transient, all is passing away.

And so we can think about Christ’s words:  “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”   Our treasure should be our true home that Kingdom of God which is  true, permanent and eternal, rather than being the things of this world which are intermixed with grief and pain.  We should prefer the eternal and everlasting Kingdom to the temporary and transient things of this world which in any case will all pass away.

Great Lent calls us to look for the eternal even though we live in the temporal world.   Great Lent reminds us that we really do love these temporary things of this world – our favorite foods, the comforts of home, being entertained, the abundance of the earth.  But all we need to do is look around and realize we continue to age, we really are sojourners on this planet and are here only a short time.  Not only are our lives on earth temporary, but everything we so love on earth will pass away as well.

And as we think about all of this we come to the words of the Prophet Hosea in which God himself musing about his own love for Israel  says:  “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.”  (Hosea 2:14)

God in His love for His people calls us into the wilderness, into the desert to find Him and to find our way home.  Great Lent is a sojourn, it is the journey into the desert where we find God’s love and  our way home to God.    We experience in Lent some discomfort, some self-denial, to awaken in ourselves the knowledge that we are not in our permanent home but are just passing through this life on the way to our home.  Fasting is a spiritual discipline to help us put this world and our lives into a proper framework so that we can seek that which is eternal as well as that which is our true home.

When we think about fasting, we also have to consider that before teaching us about fasting, Jesus spoke first about forgiveness as we see in today’s Gospel.

 For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  (Matthew 6:14-21)

In the Gospel, Christ teaches us first about forgiving and then fasting.  Before we begin the fast we are to forgive.  We cannot pursue the heights of spirituality without first ridding ourselves of the depth of anger and resentment by forgiving one another.

St Gregory the Great said even sinners and demons can perform spectacular miracles (Pharaoh’s magicians for example did).  St Gregory says forgiving is an even a greater miracle than healing the sick, and every Christian is capable of performing the miracle of forgiveness.   Demons and sinners are not able to perform the miracle of forgiveness.  Perform a miracle today, forgive someone who has offended you or who owes you or against whom you have a grudge.

You are God’s servant, does it serve God for you to hold on to a grudge, a hurt, the anger, the resentment?

The journey we are about to undertake is a spiritual sojourn, and the desert through which we must traverse turns out to be our own hearts which have become hardened, barren and arid by our experiences in this world.  But now we are being called by God to turn away from the world and to come into the desert to meet Him, to turn our hearts into the very place where we will meet God face to face.  The experience of God awaits us if we will undertake the journey.

We are preparing ourselves to commemorate the Resurrection of our Lord, not as past history, but as our own experience, our history, Christ is risen from the dead, not Christ was risen.  We celebrate this yearly because it is our personal experience, and our community’s experience, not just something that happened to people long ago.  We are to enter into that experience and make it our own.  I do this because of what the Lord has done for me.  God has blessed us in this world and invites us into that blessed life in the world to come.  Are you ready to make this sojourn home?

I Am the Prodigal Child

“God, be merciful to me the sinner.” (Luke 18:13)

“I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? Why do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of my Father? I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me – my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts – and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards, instead of developing them for the glory of God. Yes, I often carry them off to a “distant country” and put them in the service of an exploiting world that does not know their true value.

The expulsion of Adam & Eve from Paradise.

It’s almost as if I want to prove to myself and to my world that I do not need God’s love, that I can make a life on my own, that I want to be fully independent. Beneath it all is the great rebellion, the radical “No” to the Father’s love, the unspoken curse: “I wish you were dead.” The prodigal son’s “No” reflects Adam’s original rebellion: his rejection of the God in whose love we are created and by whose love we are sustained. It is the rebellion that places me outside the garden, out of reach of the tree of life. It is the rebellion that makes me dissipate myself in a ‘distant country.’”

(Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 43)

 

Returning to the Beautiful Paradise Lost

St. Ephrem the Syrian used poetry as the venue for expressing theology. He wrote many brilliant, beautiful poems.  Since today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, it is good for us to consider what was lost by humanity when we exited Paradise in order to pursue our own way to divinity.  St. Ephrem writes:

Paradise surrounds the limbs

with its many delights:

the eyes, with its handiwork,

the hearing, with its sounds,

the mouth and the nostrils,

with its tastes and scents.

Blessed is that person who has gathered for himself

the company of all

who have kept vigil and fasted;

they, in return for their fasts,

shall delight to graze

upon its luxurious pastures.

At least in the words above, Ephrem gives Paradise a very physical dimension.   Humans used all their senses to delight in the ecstasy of the Garden of Eden.  Or perhaps, he is telling us that spiritual joy is not without a physical dimension.  God gave us our bodies to enjoy His creation and as the means by which we can know Him and communicate with Him.  We don’t escape the body to encounter God.  We are the Church of the Incarnation – God took on human flesh!

We also are reminded that this world is not Paradise.  What perhaps is more challenging for many of us is to think that in Paradise humans did not enjoy gourmet foods, steaks, lobster, spices, sauces, deserts, cuisines, chefs and restaurants.  They ate plants which is the only food God gave them in Paradise!

Ephrem uses an unusual phrase claiming those who keep the fast on earth will enter Paradise and  “shall delight to graze upon its luxurious pastures”.  Most of us might imagine a paschal banquet with roast lamb, or glazed ham or steak or fine cheeses and cheesecakes.  Will we delight to graze on its pastures?  Or do we really love this earth without God more than Paradise with God?

Paradise raised me up as I perceived it,

it enriched me as I meditated upon it;

I forgot my poor estate,

for it had made me drunk with its fragrance.

I became as though no longer my old self,

for it renewed me with all its varied nature.

I swam around

in its magnificent waves;

and in the place that, burning like a furnace,

had made Adam naked,

I became so inebriated

that I forgot all my sins there

St. Ephrem in totally enthralled by Paradise.  He is swept up into its glorious beauty and just thinking about it changes his life.  Adam and Eve through sin lost their place in the Garden of Delight, and became stripped of all its beauty and mystery.  Ephrem is made drunk by its magnificent waves.  He is made giddy and was able to forget his sins because of what God made Paradise to be.

Although I was not sufficient

for all the waves of its beauty,

Paradise took me up and cast me

into a sea still greater;

in its fair beauty I beheld those who are far more beautiful than it,

and I reflected:

if Paradise be so glorious,

how much more glorious should Adam be,

who is in the image [ Gen 1:27 ] of its Planter,

and how much fairer the Cross,

upon which the Son of its Lord rode.

Paradise it turns out is not a destination, but rather a bridge to even greater glory.  Our growth in Paradise is not limited, we never peak, we never plateau, but ever grow in glory, from one degree to another says St. Paul (2 Corinthians 3:18).   However wonderful Paradise is, humans were created for even greater glory!  Thus when we sing of the Theotokos that she is more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim, we are acknowledging that she does attain to the level of glory that God intended for all humans.  God intended humans to be more glorious than Paradise.

It was not Paradise

that gave rise to the creation of mankind;

rather, it was for Adam alone

that Paradise had been planted,

for to its buds Adam’s heart is superior,

to its fruits his words,

because rational speech has more savor

than the produce of Paradise;

truth in mankind

surpasses its plants,

and love is likewise more comely

than its sweet scents.

(Hymns on Paradise, “Hymn VI,” pp.109-111)

Paradise was created by God to serve humans.  Humans were not created to serve the glories of the Garden.  In what ways are humans superior to the wonders of Paradise?  The human heart is more glorious than the blessed buds of the trees in Paradise, human rational speech exceeds in splendor the produce of Paradise, human capacity for truth surpasses all the God given plants of the Garden.  Finally, human love is more beautiful than the sweetest scents of the Garden.  Humanity is the glory of God, not Paradise.  We may marvel over what Paradise was and is to be, but humanity is more glorious in the eyes of God than Paradise will ever be.

Humanities expulsion from Paradise is an epic tragedy.  Not because we lost our place there, but because we dehumanized ourselves!  We became less than human, we became inhuman, and this was the greatest loss the universe ever experienced.

The incarnation – God taking flesh from the Theotokos is the beginning of the restoration not only of humanity but of the universe itself.

 

Picturing Paradise Lost

Blessed meadow,

trees

and flowers

planted by God,

O sweetness of Paradise:

Let your leaves, like eyes, shed tears on my behalf,

For I am naked and a stranger to God’s glory.

(Hymn from Lenten Matins)

“Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”  (Revelations 21:3-4)

Adam Laments His Exile

Adam

In the previous blog, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, we read the words of Archimandrite Aimilianos reflecting on what Adam might have thought and said to God when God questioned him as to why he was trying to hide from His Creator.   In the meditation below, St Silouan puts in Adam’s mouth words lamenting what he lost in being exiled from Paradise.  Though the earth has beautiful landscapes, he cannot find joy in them knowing what exists in Paradise, yet which is no longer attainable for him.

“Adam wept:

‘The desert cannot pleasure me;

nor the high mountains,

nor meadow nor forest,

nor the singing of birds.

I have no pleasure in any thing.

My soul sorrows with a great sorrow: I have grieved God. And were the Lord to set me down in paradise again, there, too, would I sorrow and weep – ‘O, why did I grieve my beloved God?’”

(St Silouan in Remember Thy First Love by Archimandrite Zacharias, p 200)

Adam & Eve worship at the heavenly altar

Adam sees the magnificent beauty in God’s created world, and yet he agonizes over what he lost in being exiled from Paradise.  The pleasures of this world are nothing compared to Paradise Adam tells us.  The entire world was his – a vacation paradise.   Yet, he finds nothing on earth comparable to the Paradise lost.

Great Lent is trying to help us believe Adam’s lament – what we humans have lost is far greater than anything we might experience on earth.   We may be quite attached to this world, yet Great Lent calls  us to yearn for something greater, something we’ve never known.   Can we feel Adam’s exile and believe there is something even more glorious awaiting us, if only we will let go of the things we value so highly on earth?

The Expulsion of Adam from Paradise

In the long history of Christianity, many insightful meditations have been offered giving Adam voice to explain his free choice and to lament the loss of Paradise after sinning against God and being expelled from God’s hand-planted Garden of Eden.  Below is a modern meditation from Archimandrite Aimilianos who has Adam fearfully explaining himself, ignoring the merciful nature of the God whom Adam knew from the beginning.

“And so it was with Adam: ‘I’m over here, hiding, because I was afraid to see you, because I have sinned. I’m afraid that you wouldn’t accept my excuses; that You’d say it was all my fault. I was afraid that you would no longer acknowledge me as Your child.’

To be sure, Adam’s desire to justify himself, the various excuses he contemplated, were the signs of certain death. And this is why St. Makarios says: ‘When Adam fell away from God, he died spirtually,’ Seeking to justify himself, Adam condemned himself to life without God. Until then, the damage wasn’t fully done; the blow could have been blunted, the tradgedy averted. This was the critical moment which we all must face, when it becomes clear whether we’ll choose God or our self. As a general rule, we choose our self. Every day we repeat the sin of Adam. He fell when he opened his soul to the poison of the serpent, but there was still hope that he might turn and embrace God.

He could have raised his arms to God and cried: ‘God, I am your voice, your self-expression; I am your creation, your child, and I have sinned. Bend down and hold me; save me before I perish completely!’ Instead, he said, in effect: ‘What do You want, God? Have you come here to judge me?’” (Archimandrite Aimilianos, The Way of the Spirit, p 239)

Interestingly in the Gospels, it is the demons who have nothing but fear for Christ; they are terrified that He is there to judge them, yet they do not repent.  For example in Mark 1:24, the demons possessing the man cry out:

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

Adam feared God and God’s judgment, yet it did not bring him to repentance, to seek reconciliation with God.  Instead, Adam blames Eve and God for his sin and fails to ask the merciful God for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Also in the various versions of the Gospel lesson of the Gadarene swine and the demoniacs (Mt 8:28-34; Mk 5:1-20; Lk 8:26-39), the demons squeal in fear that Christ is there to torment them before the Judgment Day, yet they do not seek to be reconciled to God.  So too in Archimandrite Aimilianos’ meditation, Adam fears God’s judgment, yet fails to seek reconciliation with the merciful Lord.

So often many want a just God who punishes sinners, yet so seldom do we willingly seek God in confession.   We believe sinners should fear God like the demons, yet what we should be doing is offering all an example by our own repentance.

In the next post we will consider words from St Silouan as he too gives Adam a voice of lament for sinning against his Creator:  Adam Laments His Exile.

The Expulsion of Eve and Adam from Paradise

The Sunday before we enter into Great Lent has the theme of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.   Early church writers imagined that Paradise was a temple which God had built so that we could worship Him.  God’s expelling Eve and Adam from the Edenic temple was not done for punishment but rather to make us long for God and our lost relationship with Him.  On earth, we experience the absence of God and so seek for Him.  Liturgy and the church sanctuary are where we look to find God.

So repentance and the prayer life are natural ways which God provided for us on earth to seek Him and to work to re-establish the proper relationship with Him.   Priest and Professor Baby Varghese writes about the wisdom of St. Ephrem the Syrian regarding the Fall:

“When Adam and Eve trusted the word of Satan instead of God’s commandment, God ceased to be the center of their life. Thus man ceased to be a liturgical being and priest of the creation. He was incapacitated to offer worship pleasing to God. God expelled Adam precisely to give him an opportunity to repent and to make him aware of his former glory. God wanted that we should supplicate to regain our lost inheritance and dignity:

The Good One in His love wished to discipline us for doing wrong,

and so we had to leave Paradise with its bridal chamber of glory;

He made us live with the wild beast which caused sorrow,

So that we might see how little our honor had become,

and so would supplicate Him and beg to return to our inheritance.

In fact the goal of prayer is to return to our former inheritance:

We should learn from Daniel, who prayed

that he might come up from Babylon to the land of promise;

Babylon is the likeness of this earth, full of curse.

God gave us this type which He depicted so that we too

might pray that we return to our dwelling in Eden.

Blessed is He who brings forth through grace to our goal.

[…]For Ephrem, Adam’s fall means estrangement from God and consequently the cessation of the worship of true God. The very goal of incarnation was to bring man back to God and to restore the worship of true God:

The All-Knowing saw that we worshipped creatures.

He put on a created body to catch us by our habit,

To draw us by a created body toward the Creator.”

( St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly Vol. 56, Number 1, 2012, pp 22 & 24)

Paradise Lost: Planted by God

The Sunday before Great  Lent begins commemorates (among other things) the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.   One of the Matins hymns for the day gives us nice imagery of Paradise, Planted by God but lost by the first humans.   Here is the hymn pictured:

Blessed meadow,

Trees and

flowers planted by God,

O sweetness of Paradise:

let your leaves, like eyes, shed tears on my behalf,

for I am naked and a stranger to God’s glory.

The fasting of Great Lent is supposed to help us experience that sense of loss – Paradise lost.  The fasting may only make us miss the foods of this world, but that sense of something missing can be turned into the spiritual desire for something more than this world has to offer.  We may love the foods of the Paschal Banquet, but the Lenten Fast helps create in us the desire for such blessings, which in turn can remind us that it is not the world we are to miss but the Paradise which God has prepared for us.

Expelled from Paradise: I’m Adam

The day before Great Lent begins is variously called in current Orthodox parlance: Cheesefare (though in my parish they refer to it as cheesecake Sunday since that is the fellowship hour theme for the day), Forgiveness Sunday, and the Commemoration of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.   Cheesefare refers to the fact that those keeping a strict fast will not eat dairy products once Lent begins until Pascha.  Forgiveness Sunday is the theme as we each in the parish ask forgiveness of one another before entering Great Lent and seeking God’s forgiveness for our sins.  The Expulsion of Adam from Paradise is the main theme of the hymns of Matins for this day. 

In this blog I will draw attention to several of the hymns from the Matins Canon commemorating the expulsion of Adam from Paradise.

Many of the hymns from the canon are spoken in the first person, “I”.  The hymns are Adam’s lamentation over what he had done and what he had lost through disobedience.    There also is some ambiguity in the canon hymns as to whether the “I” is Adam speaking or whether it is  each of us (who are reading or hearing the text) recognizing the effects of the Fall on our lives.  The hymn suggests that the importance of the narrative of Adam is not so much as a historical account of the first human as it is a prototypical story – the story of each of us.  Adam’s story is the story of each human being – Adam’s story is my story.  I’m in the world I’m in and I’m in the relationship to God that I’m in because I have lived and behaved exactly as Adam lived and behaved.  I stand in  the shoes of Adam or Eve (so to speak – if they had any) and I come to realize I’m him or her and they are me.  Adam’s lamentation over his loss and his exile needs to become my lamentation in this world, if I’m ever to learn what it is to be truly and fully human.

The trouble is, of course, that having been born in this world, I may not have that sense of loss and of being in exile because I’ve not known any world accept this one.   However, to truly appreciate Christ and salvation and to embrace a spiritual life, I need to have that sense that I am not home here but am a sojourner.  Certainly I cannot understand Christ and His sacrifice if I don’t realize that I am Adam in this world and as a result of my own sin, I’m exiled from the presence of God.   Great Lent and the fast are to teach me how to experience this exile and to realize what a true human should experience in his or her daily life.  Which is why the fast – practicing self-denial and abstinence is said to be joyous rather than a burden – I’m learning about my true nature, my true history, and my true home.

Great Lent works in a certain reverse way to teach me the sense of exile and loss.  For by keeping the fast, and denying myself the things of this world, I come to feel the sense of loss for this world, and I begin to feel exile from the life I love.   Only when I feel the loss of the comfort of this world and am indeed feeling exiled, do I come to realize the reality is this world which I love and cling to so much is the exile.  Here on earth I’m not blessed with the life in Paradise – that Garden of Delight from which Adam, and I, are really exiled.  This world which I’m so reluctant to give up during Lent – its foods, comforts, entertainment, pleasures – are in fact part of the exile from the true existence which God created us for!   I’ve fallen in love with and become addicted to the world of exile!   Great Lent is trying to remind me of that spiritual reality which I have lost.  Great Lent is trying to help me become Adam and Eve lamenting over their great loss, so that I can learn not to live for this world alone, but to long for that Paradise in which I will be with God as Eve and Adam once were.

Long ago the crafty serpent envied my honor and whispered deceit in the ear of Eve.  Woe is me!  I was led astray and banished by her from the dance of life.

I was fashioned out of the earth by the hand of God and told in my wretchedness that to the earth I should return again.  Who would not weep for me!  I am cast out from God’s presence, exchanging Eden for hell.

I weep, groan and lament as I look upon the cherubim with the sword of flame set to guard the gate of Eden against all transgressors.  Woe is me!  I cannot enter, unless You grant me freedom to approach, O Savior.  I boldly put my trust in the abundance of Your mercies, Christ my Savior, and in the Blood that flowed from Your divine side; for through Your Blood, loving Lord, You have sanctified the nature of mortal man, and have opened to those who worship You, the gates of Paradise that were closed of old to Adam.

Adam is presented in the hymns of having the awareness to lament over his loss – this is repentance, his changing his heart and mind to embrace the goodness that God gave him in the beginning.  We are being called to recognize Adam’s loss as our own.    If we are ever to love Christ and follow Him, we have to embrace the notion of our exile in this world, rather than embracing the pleasures of this world and rejecting Paradise!

Now all of creation, including Paradise itself weep over our loss – all of creation groans awaiting our restoration and return (Romans 8:19-23).  It is we who have to learn what it is we have lost through sin and how sin keeps us far from the beauty of that spiritual Garden of Delight.

Ranks of angels,

beauty of Paradise

and all the glory of the garden:

weep for me,

for I was led astray in my misery

and rebelled against God.

Blessed meadow, trees and flowers planted by God,

O sweetness of Paradise:

let your leaves, like eyes, shed tears on my behalf,

for I am naked and a stranger to God’s glory.

Genesis 3:21-4:7

And the LORD God

made for Adam and for his wife

garments of skins,

and clothed them.

Then the LORD God said,

“Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil;

and now, lest he put forth his hand

and take also of the tree of life,

and eat, and live for ever” —

therefore the LORD God

sent him forth from the garden of Eden,

to till the ground from which he was taken.

He drove out the man;

and at the east of the garden of Eden

he placed the cherubim,

and a flaming sword

which turned every way,

to guard the way to the tree of life.

Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD.”  And again, she bore his brother Abel.

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground.

In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.

And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.

The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

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