When did Adam first feel the full weight of what he’d done? Did it come to him in small steps and stages, a little at a time much like the sick man who slowly recovers, each day almost imperceptibly gaining new strength until he finally wakes up one morning to realize he is as healthy as he ever was? Or did the revelation, the weight of it all, come to Adam in one sudden and frightful glimpse into the heart of God, like the drunkard who suddenly becomes aware, in one single, blinding moment of clarity, that he cannot remember the last time he woke up and did not crave wine or exactly when that craving first began but who knows now that he is totally and completely a different man from that one he vaguely recalls as if in a dream? How his heart must have shuddered with fear the day the dread of what he’d done settled fully onto his small and mortal frame!
And here I bear the weight of my own.
How must David have trembled on that fateful day when his secrets were revealed. How he must have wished he were but a cockroach to scurry away into the dark corners, hidden in the safety and the anonymity of the dark. How he must have watched, as if it were a vision or a painting or a great tapestry strewn across his sight, the very power of his kingdom crumble and perish, the power, the respect, the prestige, the honor. He would have seen it all vanish as if his entire kingdom were a cloud of smoke or the corpse of a dead man left to burn in the pagan burial rites, turning to nothing but ash, wasted and useless ash.
Or what of Esau, when his eyes became aware of all he had lost – through treachery, through deceit, through his own foolishness – to his very own brother. How he must have wept at the realization! How he must have counted it all as sand slipping from his fingers. The family name gone to Jacob! The blessing gone to Jacob! The inheritance gone to Jacob! The dignity and respect gone to Jacob!
When did Esau realize his foolishness? What jar could contain the tears he must have cried that day?
How did he bear the guilt? How could he stand the misery, the loss?
How can I?
What thoughts go through a man’s mind when he realizes that what he had thought was wine poured into his cup is, in fact, vinegar of the bitterest kind? What of the man who, after he has bitten into an apple, nearly chokes on the putrid taste and, looking at what is in his hand, realizes with disgust that he has bitten into a rotting piece of fruit? For that man, there is no amount of water or wine that will remove from him the flavor, the thought, the feel of that rotting flesh in his mouth.
Like a dream, almost, I suppose. Or a nightmare, more rightly.
I remember as a child dreaming of my mother. I would cry out, in the dream, from some fear or another, and, in my dream, my mother would rush to my side, covered in a dark and hooded cloak. The comfort I felt in her presence would suddenly turn to horror as the wind lifted the hood to reveal beneath, where my mother’s beautiful face should have been, the face of death, flesh bitten by flies and maggots, gray and oozing.
I suppose I had seen a dead body once as a young child. The impression had never left me.
I know what these things mean now.
To feel the weight of it on my soul is like a great and heavy millstone hung about my neck. When shall I be tossed into the sea? Who will push me?
Oh, no, if only God would be so kind as to send another to push me. But, no, none knows my sin. None but I. And God. God knows what I’ve done.
When will God toss me into the sea, then?
I can imagine him now, as a great and terrible avenger, smoke, the smoke of Mount Sinai, pouring from his nostrils in anger and fury. Lightning, I suppose, must crackle, and earthquakes must shake the earth as a man shakes the body of a dead child in desperation and in anger. I am sure my heart would stop from the shear terror of it all but for the Divine Presence himself who would not let me die. No, not yet.
The millstone would drag me down. The salt would sting my eyes as I struggled, in vanity and in some frenzied and bestial reversion to that human desire to live, to simply live. I would claw at the ropes about my neck, but, of course, to no avail. The stone would drag me deeper, further from light, further from life. My ears and my lungs would now be exploding with pain. I would close my eyes, dreading the thought of letting go, but knowing, knowing I cannot hold much longer. And then, in that last desperate instant, like a cornered dog, mad with rabies and starvation, I would twist and scream all my anger, all my hatred at my death, at my punisher, and at myself. And then, my lungs, emptied now, must surely breathe in that breath of watery death. Just as Adam’s own lungs had first received that divine breath of life, so now would I accept a different kind of breath…
I am doomed, surely doomed!
I who sold him for thirty God-forsaken pieces of silver. I who have murdered the one man who never did anything wrong, the one hope for all of us hopeless peasants, all of us mangy dogs ravaged by disease and fleas, fighting with each other over rotting scraps from our master’s filthy table, biting one another, attacking one another, lusting after one another.
I sold him!
Cursed of God, my Eden is gone, my kingdom perishing at the hands of my uncontrollable lust, my birthright sold for a pot of filthy stew!
God yet loved Adam, though he cast him from Paradise; David faced death and humiliation but to him the kingdom was once again restored; Esau redeemed his great foolishness and became a wealthy man in his own right.
Yet for myself there is no such redemption.
