Sin Isn't Very Mindful or Very Demure

In Which I Read The Chapter On The Fall In The Book Of Belonging

File: Icon last supper.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Our Holy Week services this year are an hour later than we’re used to because Easter is so late, and a lot of daylight is busily being saved. So instead of getting to bed after Tennebrae around 10:30, it was more like 11:30. My cataclismic noise was pretty good, but Matt said it would have been improved if we could have thrown GK Chesterton down on a sheet of tin. I had had this vague idea that I would be writing super spiritual, deep meditations upon the scriptures all week, not frittering away my time on Katy Perry. But, as you know, the internet waits for no person, and so I kept tripping over that strange blue origin capsule, in between the amazing news that the UK decided that women don’t have to share their female-only spaces with biological men. It is so shocking that the world had even “progressed” to a point where anyone thought they could.

Anyway, I also made the mistake of reading a little bit more of The Book of Belonging, an effort to make the Bible appealing to children. It’s so awful, but also so pertinent to the week, that I’m going to take apart the chapter on The Fall. The author, Mariko Clark, writes that:

Eve and Adam were faced with a choice, one we all make over and over again as we grow older and wiser: Will I trust who God says God is and who God says I am, or will I trust other names? What did God say over and over again during the wondrous Creation song? It’s good! They’re very good! Good, good, good. They’re just as they should be! But you are not as you should be, the snake had suggested. You’re not smart enough! God is keeping things from you. You’re not good. You don’t have what you need for life and flourishing. The fruit will make you smart like God.

The business of “trusting names” also appeared in the last chapter, heavy laden with soupy emotionalism. Clark appears to have accepted the popular version of sin that says, in effect, the only reason you do bad things is that you haven’t fully embraced how much God loves you. If you only understood how much he loves you, you would live up to your higher, better, created self. God gives you names like “Beloved,” and you just don’t want to accept them, and so you take other bad names, like, probably, “Mediocre At Best,” which cause you to act poorly.