The Place of Identity

In a book which births and develops an understanding of Celtic spirituality, J. Phillip Newell takes his readers into what is unchartered territory for most as he writes about the Garden of Eden.  "In the Biblical tradition, the Garden of Eden is our place of deepest identity.  It represents our genesis in God and the essential goodness of our origins.  It is not a place from which we are separated in space and time.  Rather, it is dimension within us from which we have become divorced....Our place of profoundest identity has not been destroyed.  Rather, we have become fugitives from it.  ("Echo of the Soul") 

 

What Newell writes is a long way from where I started.  When I first started reading the Word, the Garden was a place on the map.  After some time I realized that there would not be an archeological find called Eden because Eden was not about humankind building monuments to itself, or shrines for God.  God was instead present and revealing Himself in the midst of the cathedral of His creation.  With the unfolding of the years came thinking that Eden spoke of a time of perfection, but then there was the lurking and tempting serpent. 

The images that Newell's book draws forth from within us speak to the search of our soul for home.  There is ground to which I feel rooted.  When I stand in that place where my DNA has been shed into the soil through sweat and blood, where ancestors have lived, created new life, and died, and where those who belong to me go to be home, there is a strange sense of being where I am defined.  If such is true in this physical realm of life, how much more true it must be for a soul that yearns and longs to be where there is an overpowering sense of having arrived at the place of its identity.