Word to the Wise
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - Wednesday in the 5th Week in Ordinary Time
[Gen 2:4b-9, 15-17 and Mark 7:14-23]The Lord God formed man outof the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man beame a living being... The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. The Lord God gave man this order: "You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die." [Genesis]
One of the surest ways to create a desire for something is to tell someone they can't have it! They may not have even been thinking of it or desiring it before. Once they know they can't have it, the desire to have it arises. Any parent knows it and we know this from experience, and the Book of Genesis, composed so many centuries ago, knew it too. It is fundamental human psychology.
The first chapter of Genesis provides a majestic account of creation. The second chapter has its own account of creation, but this account includes the subject of the origin of evil - what St. Augustine entitled "Original Sin." The human person, for all the riches and wonder of the Garden of Eden, could not resist going after the one thing that was off limits. We'll hear more of this in a couple of days. For today, we might ask ourselves about the tendency to want what we cannot or should not have simply because we can't have it! The tendency has been in us since the first humans had enough brain power to think. AMEN
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