lessons on being human: love, pt. 1

Whenever I think about grace, I always think about a shirtless friend of mine.

The story goes like this: An hour before service was going to start at my college ministry, a few of us were lounging around the sanctuary, chatting about our plans in the near future. I was planning to go back to college at Santa Cruz, and I was sharing this while my friend Big Joe was playing the keyboard. He was playing in his undershirt, his buttoned shirt hanging nearby on a chair, when an older woman wandered into our sanctuary.

It should be noted that Big Joe has the mammary glands of a pregnant walrus, and he, for obvious reasons, refuses to go anywhere in public with anything less than an over shirt unless he's comfortable. Until that woman walked in, he was completely comfortable.

Big Joe, with an uncharacteristic shriek, scampered back to his shirt and hurriedly buttoned it up with special care given to his modesty. It took a few minutes and by the time he had finished, the woman had disappeared, probably frightened by the feral scream emitted by my friend.

This image always comes to mind when I think about God and the grace He bestows unto us, the human race. I don't know why, but when I think of how our sinfulness has stained our souls, we can't help but run from fear of shame that we have done. The human spirit has an overwhelming sense of pride, and sometimes I feel that it will go at any cost to preserve it.

I have ambiguous feelings towards Adam and Eve. On one hand, you have to think they must have been pretty bored, being naked and living in a garden all day. There's really only so much you can do in that situation. And, if you're not a firm believer in Darwinism, they're essentially the ancestors of everybody who has ever existed, so I feel like a bit of an ingrate when I resent them.

On the other hand, you have to hate them, just a little bit, for exposing humanity to the concept of sin. Just think: you've never had to want for food or companionship, and your soul is completely at ease knowing that you're perfectly connected to the One who created you, and suddenly, with one bite, your world comes crumbling down. You then realize that you've been naked for most of your mortal life and must make clothes out of leaves to cover yourself, introducing the human race to Abercrombie and Fitch and, worst of all, shame.

There's a basic essential truth that as humans, Adam and Eve (and, by extension, the human race itself) took a cosmic love for granted. And that's something we tend to do with anything in abundance, really, whether it be with friendships or money, that regardless of how we behave it'll always be there.

However, God created us with that very intention in mind – to create us as beings who run exclusively on love, as entities who crave one of the purest emotions; on top of that, He created us to function only with one cosmic love: Himself.

The funny thing is that when we're missing a vital part of ourselves, we tend to fill it up with other things that don't do so well as a replacement for a cosmic love – sex, money, coffee, you name it. C.S. Lewis wrote a particularly poignant passage, where he described a car engine that was designed to run on gasoline, but when given water as a substitute, it never seems to work in the way that it's intended; in the same way, humanity was a machine designed to run on God, and by replacing God with something else incapable of filling our souls, we inevitably fall victim to sin.

Some people see Adam and Eve as a cautionary tale, but I really see something more there – I see it as a portrayal of the human race, who, despite itself, is constantly yearning for something that overwhelms our sense of loneliness.