Most historians of religion know that, the world over, most cultures have entertained the legitimacy of a story that seeks to explain why human beings, amazing and magnificent as they are, persist in doing harm to themselves, each other, and the world.  The most well known is likely Christianity's account of the Fall, the moment in time when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

     In reflecting on this story many centuries after it was written down, the American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that, "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist.  That discovery is called the Fall of Man."  In his own way, Emerson has reworked a line from seventeenth century British writer John Milton who, talking about the aftermath of the Fall in his Paradise Lost, notes that Adam and Eve now "possess a paradise" within themselves for the life ahead.  In other words, yes, Adam and Eve have discovered their "dark side."  On the other hand, in so doing, per Milton, they have come into and engendered a more profound knowledge of who they are.

     Each and every day we moderns wrestle with who we are.  We daily balance the light of our created glory with darkness of our folly.  We learn much about ourselves, only to discover that we do not always like what we see.  But we keep trying to learn more.  It's like Pandora's box:  we continue to unleash the terrors of existence, but we also continue to render ourselves ever more capable of learning from them.

     Like it or not, in the story of Adam and Eve we see the path for us to find out, guided and undergirded in natural and supernatural ways, who we most are.