To fill these hearts full we reach and grab for more
But I’ve found we’ve been reaching for the killing floor
—MIKE MANGIONE & THE UNION1
The desire for infinity that haunts our humanity makes us all beggars. No creature can satisfy his own desires. No creature can provide himself with the “living water” for which he thirsts. This places us all in a position of radical dependence upon the infinite One to grant us the gift of his own infinity. Will he? This is the “test of faith” that God placed before us when, according to the symbolism of biblical language, he asked our first parents not to eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
What’s going on here? Does God really have our best interests in mind, or is he holding out on us? As we will explore more closely in this chapter, this original commandment is an invitation to trust in God’s designs: he wants to feed us; he wants to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts. Do we believe he will?
It is certainly no coincidence that the symbolism surrounding original sin is that of eating. Eve’s attraction to the fruit implies that she was hungry. As we’ve been exploring throughout this book, hunger is the basic human condition. According to the biblical story, Eve saw that the fruit of the tree “was good for food” and “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6). She was not mistaken in finding the fruit good and desirable. God had made this tree and placed it in the garden, and everything he made was “very good.” Why, then, were they not to eat of it?
The serpent’s incriminating insinuation enters right here: “Did God really say not to eat from that tree? Aren’t you hungry? And doesn’t that fruit look good? What kinda killjoy is this God of yours anyway? What kind of God would give you this gnawing hunger inside, dangle this delicious fruit right in front of your face, but forbid you to eat it?” In the disturbingly insightful movie The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Al Pacino gives voice to Satan’s proverbial pronouncement on God as follows:
Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift and then, what does he do? I swear, for his own amusement, his own private, cosmic gag-reel, he sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time: look, but don’t touch; touch, but don’t taste; taste, but don’t swallow … He’s a sadist! He’s an absent-tee landlord! Worship that? NEVER!2
But are we to conclude that God didn’t ever want us to eat of this tree? God certainly wants us to have a “knowledge of good and evil.” But he doesn’t want us to grasp at that knowledge on our own terms, apart from him; that is, he doesn’t want us to invent good and evil for ourselves. Thus, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: “The ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust.”3 Trust. That’s the operative word here. With the first sin, man “let his trust in his Creator die in his heart.”4
By asking us not to take the fruit, God was inviting us into a relationship of trust—trust that he would grant us as a gift from his hands the food we craved. In other words, he was inviting us to keep our hunger “open” before him, believing that he would grant us the desires of our hearts. If we had remained in that position of dependence before God, we could have fed “without fear of death on the delicious fruit of … the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” as Saint Louis de Montfort put it.5 As we read in Psalm 81: “I, the Lord, am your God … Open wide your mouth and I will fill it … But my people did not heed my voice … So I left them in their hardness of heart to follow their own designs” (Ps. 81:10–12). That’s pride at its root: we don’t trust in God’s designs, so we choose to follow our own.
“There is only one temptation,” writes Lorenzo Albacete. “All particular temptations are expressions of this one original or ‘primordial’ temptation. It is the temptation to believe that the fulfillment of the desires of the human heart depends entirely on us.”6 This is the deception that humanity came to believe because of the cunning of the serpent: God has no intention of providing for the satisfaction of our hunger. Believing that, we have only two choices: starve, or take satisfaction into our own hands. And if those are the only two choices, I’m gonna take whatever I can get.
But what if you’re doing the same and it ends up that you’re taking what I want or I’m taking what you want. When we live within the deception that there is no divine “gift” in which we all participate, that there is no satisfaction for our desires apart from what we take for ourselves, then it’s a dog-eat-dog world and only conflict and chaos can reign. As I often say to myself when I see my kids fighting over a toy they both want: There, right before my eyes, are the seeds of world war.
Sin always testifies to our yearning for satisfaction, but not accepting the way to that satisfaction: the way of complete dependence on God as our Father. Looking at the world with all its bitter sorrows and sufferings, it’s easy to wonder if God really has a loving plan for our happiness and fulfillment. To call God “Father” with a sincere heart is to recognize him as the ultimate origin of every good gift and to rest in his benevolent providence, trusting unflinchingly—despite life’s many sorrows and sufferings—that God does indeed have a perfect plan for our satisfaction. To call God “Father” is to believe wholeheartedly that, in due time, he will provide precisely that for which we ache. As the psalmist writes, “You give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing” (Ps. 145:15–16).
It’s that “due time” part that makes us particularly nervous. As Tom Petty put it, “The waiting is the hardest part.”7 Precisely in that waiting, we must “suffer the ache,” continue to trust, and refuse to grasp at satisfaction. In other words, we must stay in our poverty. We must remain in the posture of the “open Bride” who awaits the coming of the Bridegroom with joyful expectation, and plenty of oil (faith) to keep her lamp afire. “Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord” (Ps. 27:14).
Let us recall that faith in its deepest essence is the openness of the human heart to God’s gift.8 Sin, in its deepest essence, is the opposite of faith. It is the closing of the heart to God’s Fatherhood and a grasping at the gift of divine life he wishes to grant us. “This is truly the key for interpreting reality,” wrote John Paul II. “Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command of God … Original sin attempts, then, to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship.” In turn, “man feels goaded to do battle against God [and] driven to take sides against the master who kept him enslaved.”9
When we come to see God as a tyrant, the last thing we want to do is remain “receptive” before him. That makes us too vulnerable. We still want divine life (happiness, satisfaction), but not in such a way that we have to be dependent on God to give it to us.10 We want it on our terms. We want to be “like God,” but without God.11 It’s called “pride.” Quoting lyrics once again from Mike Mangione & the Union:
Wrapped deep in pride we take what’s never been denied
And with each step we bandage our sides to the killing floor12
With this dark image of pride leading to death, the song then lets light break through in a ray of hope: “But we can sing Hallelujah.” What enables us to sing hallelujah when we are wrapped deep in pride and strapped down to “the killing floor”? As we’ll see in the next chapter, God’s response to our pride is not what we might expect.