If Things Had Gone As They Should Have

What would have been tells us a lot about what we should be doing now.

Sunday at Mass the choir sung “Adam Lay Ybounden" a thought-provoking bit of theological speculation about what would (and would not) have been, were it not for original sin.

Pause to note: I like the song (a couple versions linked at bottom), and I’m all for Oh Happy Fault!, given that the alternative is no longer available, but I don’t actually agree with the poet that Mary would have been deprived of her queenship. I speculate it would have been a different, perhaps even more glorious reign — but this is not the place to ramble on about my personal conjectures concerning the unknowable.

Rather, two points for us to take to heart that are purely pragmatic:

Everyone longs for the before. The problem of suffering, the quest for constant upgrades in life to make things a little less fallen, the shocking desolation of death, the tendency to romanticize the past . . . all of these are reactions to a deep-seated knowledge that something is very wrong. Our world is not supposed to be like this.

In every other area of life, we take it for granted that our wrong-detector works. We accept that hunger and thirst tell us humans that we are meant to eat and drink; loneliness tells us we are meant for relationships; anger tells us we are meant for justice. We rightly scrutinize what the proper responses to those longings are — but we don’t doubt that those longings are proper.

We don’t tell ourselves that eating is some fictional myth devised to console us when we feel hunger. We don’t tell someone in anguish that actually, no, being friendless is the better way, the desire to love and be loved is just some fantasy thought up to pacify ourselves. We know very well that to quash the desire for true justice is a serious evil. It may not be obvious how to bring about justice, but we know with certainty that one should want justice, that feeling isn’t just some random assemblage of neurons sparking emotional illusions.

In the same way, longing for a world free of suffering and death is normal. It is what we were made for. And that tells us that this longing is not just meant to be pacified into silence — quit whining, whiner — but that this longing is meant to be fulfilled. And if so, there must be a way to fulfill it.

Which is the Good News even we moderns are tasked with proclaiming.

Secondly, to contemplate the before can give us insight into what our now and our forever-after should be like. And here we do have to take the risk of thinking speculatively, even knowing that we might get some of the precise details wrong. What are some of the facts we have to work with?

• Adam was told not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but there was no prohibition about eating from the Tree of Life.

• The before included the serpent being present in the Garden.

• We have at least one certain case (Elijah), and one probable case (Enoch) recorded explicitly in Scripture of people leaving this earthly life without dying.

You can no doubt add to the list many points of interest that offer additional insight into what might have been our earthly mission had we not fallen.

For example, the text that prompted today’s post:

But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

It is as if the ancient Jewish law was there to teach us how to act. There is the moral law that we shouldn’t have to be told, because we instinctively know it if we keep our hearts open to it, but that we did have to be told, because our hearts aren’t always opened.

I think it is reasonable, likewise, to infer that the Old Covent prescriptions that were not made universal in Christianity served one of two main purposes: Either general health and well-being in the specific time and place (God wants these people to live!), or else to set apart the Jewish people from demon-worshipping cults all around them.

So. Things to think about. I think it’s helpful to visualize your non-fallen self. What would your heart be like? What would your relationship with God be like? What would your mission be?

You aren’t yet fully healed of all the tendency to sin and do wrong, but that is your intended destiny. You are meant to be getting closer and closer with each passing day to your un-fallen humanity. Even as your body battles against what will ultimately be overpowering decay and destruction in this fallen world, your soul is meant to be growing stronger and more alive.

What does that look like?

Icon of the Harrowing of Hell, from a collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but found via a search at Wikimedia. Quite rightly the group includes St. Nicholas; click through on the Met’s link to view all four icons. (Public domain)

Here are a couple settings for “Adam Lay YBounden”, one performed at my parish this past Sunday, and the other that I happened on in trolling YouTube and just like.