The Woman Clothed with the Sun

In the beginning we were with God, and we were happy, and we knew nothing but good — because God is all good, and we had never been anywhere else.

But to be like God is to know. To know everything. And you cannot know good if you have never stood next to anything else. So there was a choice waiting for us, and a Mother brave enough to make it.

She is the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of stars. She is Eve, the mother of everyone who would ever live. In front of her was the fruit — and the fruit was this: you can become like God, knowing good and evil. But to learn evil, you have to leave home. You have to be cut off from his face, and go down into a hard place, and find out for yourself.

She looked at it, and she understood it, and she chose it. Not because she was tricked. Because she was wise. She saw that the only way to give birth to a world full of gods was to go first, into the dark, and open the door for all of us to follow and become.

So she took it. And the whole human family was born from that choice — every one of us, going down into the world to learn the bitter so we could finally know the sweet, and become like our Father and our Mother, who know all of it.

Then Adam saw what she had done, and what it was for. He could have stayed behind, safe, in the garden, alone. He chose her instead. He chose the children who could only come if someone went down with her. So he followed her into the dark — not because he was led by the hand like a child, but because he understood, the way she understood, that love goes with. And the two of them went together, the first father and the first mother, down into the world to begin the family.

Now here is the secret the dragon doesn't want you to know. We told ourselves the hard place meant we had to work until we broke, earn our way back, never rest. That is only half of God, and half of God is a lie. Because God is two things held together: God works, and God rests. His work is real and it is enormous — the whole labor of God is to raise his children up into immortality and eternal life, and that work will go on forever and ever and never stop. But God also rests. He blessed a day and called it holy and sat down in it. Diligence and rest, side by side, equal, neither one alone. That is the first thing the family had to learn in the dark: not to grind yourself to dust, and not to lie idle either — but to labor like your Father labors, and to rest like your Father rests, and to know that both of them are love.

There was a dragon waiting for the children, because he has always hated this plan. The plan turns children into gods, and he wanted them small and afraid. He stood ready to swallow the firstborn the moment it came. But the child was caught up safe to God, and the Mother was carried to a place prepared for her, and kept. The dragon could not stop the birth. He never could. The world was going to be full of gods, and there was nothing he could do about it.

And so it began — the long way home. We go down to want, and to ask, and to become. Because everything we ask of our Father, he gives. Ask, and it comes.