Thursday of the First Week in Lent
While driving in the car yesterday my 5 year old son Owen, who was still pondering Sunday's readings (he's a thinker!), asked me "But Mommy, why did God put the tree of knowledge in the garden if Adam and Eve couldn't eat the fruit?" While my immediate reaction was to stall with something like, "uhh, good question" while I prayed to God for Him to give me the right words, I eventually was able to talk through free will and the ability we have to choose to love God and listen to Him or to not (as best I could in preschool terms).
A little later I sat down to read these readings and as I tried to reflect on them I kept coming back to Owen's question about the tree - about free will. God did not create us and then force us to love Him and follow Him. God created us and loved us enough to allow us to choose to love Him and follow Him. If we were all automatons who were programmed to always follow God and do as He says we would not be human. We would not be fully alive. And yet, this gift of free will, this ability to choose, is what allows us to choose sin. It's a hard concept to wrestle with for adults, so I understand why this question is still weighing on Owen's mind.
As a parent I am trying to teach my children how to live as followers of Christ and as loving human beings. I hope to teach them that, as the gospel says, when they ask for a loaf they will receive a loaf and not a snake. I want them to see that we have their best interest in mind. We are here to protect them, teach them and love them. And so is God. God, with his parental love, wants us to trust in Him and to rely on Him, with the knowledge that He will respond to us, will protect us and will love us. But we need to choose to do those things - we can ignore the love of God or we can respond to His love.
In today's gospel we hear Jesus teach his disciples to ask, seek and knock and God will respond. And I think this is directly related to free will. We each have the ability to seek the Lord, but we are not forced to. We each can choose to ask God for help and support but we are not forced to. And here in lies the beauty and the hope of this message. We can survive and live and continue to function without ever seeking God, but our lives will be so much richer and our experiences much deeper when we do seek the Lord. When we open ourselves up to experiences of the divine we are allowing our lives a deep richness they would otherwise be lacking.
I know the heartbreak I feel when I see my children choose sinful actions - actions that are hurtful to others or are purposefully disobedient. But they, just like all of us, are human and therefore there are times when they will choose to sin. These actions will happen. From this, I have found the true beauty and growth takes place when my husband or I connect with our children after these moments and we talk about what happened, discuss why they were punished, offer forgiveness and then move forward in love. And I think the same is true with God. Yes, God gave us the gift of free will - he put the tree in the garden - and sometimes, like Eve, we will choose to eat that fruit. But God also gave us Jesus - loving redemption. When we choose to seek the Lord and ask for forgiveness we can find Him, learn from our actions and move forward in love.
- AJ Grimm