Thinking Christian

Quick...tell me what you think the Garden of Eden looks like. Chances are, if you were a kid who went to Sunday School like me, you have a picture in your mind of a lush tropical jungle (with an apple tree in the centre!) inhabited by a naked white man and woman (artfully covered by foliage) and a snake. Certainly that's a common image in many of the Sunday School curricula that I've encountered, on the receiving and delivering end. Think about other Bible stories, the Exodus or Palm Sunday for example...many of us Sunday School graduates have idealized and stylized pictures in our heads from the felt boards and Sunday School papers of our youth. And for anyone who has ever watched "The 10 Commandments" on an Easter weekend has those cinematic Biblical images in their brain as well.

I had never thought much before about how a person moves from understanding Bible stories at a Sunday School level to understanding them at a more sophisticated level. As I moved through church life I took the images stored in my head for granted. But I tended to personalize and internalize the stories. For example, I gave birth to my second son, Isaac, on December 24. As I went through that Advent season during my pregnancy I began to have a lot of empathy for Mary, and to appreciate the vulnerability of her situation. But I didn't make any changes to the images in my head about the people and times of the Bible...I still had all those Sunday School pictures in my head.

It wasn't until the other night at my youth group that I realized how important it is that our images and understanding of Bible stories "grow up" with us. I was showing my teen group a great PBS series called "Walking the Bible". The presenter, Bruce Feiler, is taking a journey through the Middle East so he can see the land where the Bible stories take place. In the area of modern Turkey that was once known as Mesopotamia he shows off a marshy river land that he explains probably more accurately represents what the Garden of Eden would have looked like. After watching this first episode, I asked my group if they had found anything interesting in the program. Immediately one girl said, "I find it fascinating that Eden didn't look like it did in Sunday School." She was so amazed that none of the places in the show looked like what she had seen in Sunday School.
She said that the show was really bringing the Bible stories to life for her.

I realized in that moment that I was witnessing someone coming to a more mature understanding of the Bible and the people in it, and making a new connection to familiar stories. It's the same one that I experienced the first time I watched this program. I saw how desolate the desert landscapes were, I couldn't imagine trying to scratch out a living in the "promised land", and it made me feel a deeper connection to the people and stories of the Bible.

It doesn't really matter whether or not the story of the Garden of Eden is factually true, for example, but seeing the places that the Biblical authors wrote about gave me a clearer understanding of their lives and the great faith they must have had to follow their God across bleak and miserable lands, just because they were promised a better place.

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