Spiritual Formation

– therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. 

Genesis 3:23-24

For years this verse and an image of it haunted my memory.    As an adult I began to question where this image in my mind had come from.  Why was it so clear?  I could see an angel with a flaming sword driving Adam and Eve, cowering in shame and guilt, from the garden.  Was it a famous painting that I had viewed somewhere in a museum?   Was it a plate that I remembered from an art book that I had read?  Whenever I remembered the verse, I always felt the pain of loss that Adam and Eve must have felt as they were being driven from their home, the garden, where they had walked with God. 

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees. 

Genesis 3:8

Although there was no definitive proof that God was in a habit of visiting Adam and Eve to share an evening walk with them, I could not accept that the Lord God, who had created them in his own image and loved them, would have first come to them after they had sinned.  So I could feel their loss.  The pain – as the consequences of their sin crashed down around them.  How desolate they must have felt as they looked over their shoulders to see the gates to the garden close behind them.  My view of sin and all its ramifications were formed around these verses and this image in my mind.  To have God seek us out to take an evening walk suggests closeness, and fellowship.  I always liked to imagine that this happened often, perhaps daily at the time of the evening breeze.  But this time, this time, they hid themselves.  Oh the pain, the shame, the terrible loss they felt.  The terrible loss of intimacy with God.  Sinner that I am, I know that feeling.  I know it all too well. 

But, thanks be to God, we know the rest of the story.  

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, 

so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, 

but in order that the world might be saved through him.  

John 3:16-17  

And may I add, walk with God once more in the cool of the evening.  Indeed, thanks be to God.

How central this image has been for my faith formation, and yet I could not place it.  Then in 1998, I walked into my home church following my father’s casket for his memorial service.  It had been a long time since I had walked through those doors.  I had come here almost daily with my parents to worship God, until after eighth grade when I left to begin my seminary training in a Franciscan monastery.  As the procession stopped just inside the doors to the nave, and the priest encircled my father’s casket with incense, my eyes followed the rising smoke and I looked out into the church of my youth, past all the people who had come to say good by to my father and there I gazed at the pew on the right side aisle, two rows from the front, where I had worshiped so many times with my family.  It was our place to encounter God.  As these memories came flooding back, my tear filled eyes looked up above that pew where I had knelt so many times, and there in the wall was a glorious stained glass window – the image that I knew so well.  How could I have forgotten where I had seen it.  

As a young boy I must have sat there for hours gazing at it.  It is no wonder I knew that verse so well.  I knew at a young age what the cost of sin was -- that it alienated us from God.  A God that desires to be in a loving relationship with me.  A God that comes again and again looking for me.  A God that in the end sent His Son to live and die for me.  To live and show me how to live.  And to die to open once more the gates to the garden so that I can once more walk with an all merciful, forgiving and loving God in the cool of the evening for all eternity.