When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies

 

In the 1980's cult classic The Breakfast Club, Ally Sheedy's character Allison Reynolds tells another character named Bender, played by Judd Nelson, "When you grow up, your heart dies." Bender responds, "Who cares?" and Allison retorts, "I care." 

There is deep truth to this statement, and I don't just mean putting aside childish endeavors for adulthood, but I think back to the fall of humanity --Adam and Eve -- and expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. 

When the serpent tempts Eve in the story, she tells him that if she eats from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil she would die. The serpent tells her that she won't die. Some may say that the serpent was correct, except for the fact that expulsion or exile from the Garden (basically where heaven and earth meet or heaven on earth) is a departure from the life sustenance of God. It is a form of death.

At the creation of mankind, Adam was formed from the material substance or dust of the ground and then placed in the Garden. Expulsion from the Garden is a return to un-creation -- a world of entropy and decay. The physical body will die, even as the spirit is dying apart from God.

Many people will read this as a pissed-off God kicking his kids out of paradise for making a minor mistake. But that's not it. The thing is, they were indeed kids. The tree they ate from was likely to be used by Adam and Eve as they matured. They jumped the gun, like kids do. They were not ready for what was intended by God to be for mature audiences only. Having received this gift too early, they were consumed with it... To possess such knowledge in paradise would have ruined them in God's perfect presence. They were exiled less as a punishment and more as a grace, so that they can grow up, learn, and repent. This could not be done in the Garden, because the lessons of exile would be lost on Adam and Eve. It's much like when you tell a child not to repeat a bad behavior. The kid will test you and if you don't follow through with the punishment, the kid will not take you seriously and will abuse their liberties. Boundaries must be set so kids grow up with the right disposition. 

So expulsion from the Garden is meant to be an opportunity to redress what went wrong. It's a time out, if you will. The kids grew up too fast and their hearts died. They needed to become as children again. While Adam and Eve had to contend with harder work to get ahead in the wilderness, theirs was not so much a curse as the serpent received. The serpent was said to crawl and eat dust, but not litterally. Dust is the return of material to chaos and un-creation. The serpent becomes the death eater and that is his only authority. In Christ, death is defeated so that when people repent they cooperate with God and re-enter Eden. 

Angels, which we understand the serpent to be a fallen angel per Scripture and extra-biblical literature, were created with a specific telos or inherent capacity to serve God, but not progress in divine participation. The fallen angels rejected the narrow scope of their portfolios. Because they are incorporeal, they cannot die physically but only eternally (being a permanent displacement from God's graces). They have no chance of real repentance; their hearts are hardened in jealousy and covetousness. They want what humans have been endowed with -- a dual nature of material and spirit by which people can advance in godliness and even repent whilst in exile. Because the fallen angels cannot die like humans, they (the demons) wage war on humanity with the aims of dragging people into death in hell. This shows that human teleology is to become participants with God in his nature, but not by our nature, but rather through God's grace in Christ (2 Peter 1:4). 

To return to God, we must realize our immaturity while in time out. We must want to seek out of eternal Father with sincerity and yield to his wisdom. We must become children. We must all become as the little children, which reminds me of a prayer said by one of the teen soldiers -- Danny -- in the movie Red Dawn and this is my closing prayer here:

"And as we remember... please let them forget, O Lord... so they can be little again"