I don’t often feel the need to say this, but Mass was great today. A soloist was in from Chicago and she sang both Ave Maria and Panis Angelicus. It was quite the treat to have both of those sung at the same Mass, and sung well. The homily was pretty interesting too, Fr. Rocca chose to speak about dissatisfaction as the byproduct of original sin.
This made me think a bit. If you read the story of Adam and Eve as fact instead of myth then it is possible to reach some interesting conclusions within the paradigm. But first, when I refer to the creation stories, and much of Genesis as myth, I am not attacking the veracity or importance of the verses, but instead speaking about them as the product of a divine inspiration through imperfect hands, or from an anthropological perspective as seminal texts that hold the basic values of a cultural system.
Thus, to get back what I concluded from the homily- in the Adam and Eve as fact paradigm — people are always desirous of dissatisfied because we are inherently imperfect in body and soul, but we strive for perfection.
Sure that isn’t anything new — humans want to be perfect but can’t — but figuring out why this is the case, is the important part for me. Plenty of cultural/political/religious bebops and doowops are never sufficiently explained but just taken for granted. The discovery of the impetus behind an adage is what I am looking for.
Adam and Eve ate the Forbidden Fruit to become like God, that is what people apparently still strive for, but cannot reach do to our imperfection. Not achieving this goal is expected and either creates a greater desire to achieve it or a dissatisfaction that could be the cause of much of what is considered evil in the world. We cannot be as we want to be so we take it out on others.