Wes Howard-Brook Retells Eden for One Earth Living

My assertions about those who first told the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden, come from scholars whose writings I have sought out to answer my own questions about why so many people feel more attracted to Multi Earth living rather than One Earth living. One such scholar, Wes Howard-Brook, distinguishes between empire religion and creation religion, rough equivalents of Multi Earth and One Earth worldviews.

One day, when I opened the Catholic Agitator, the newsletter of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, I read a highly affirming review by Frank Cordero of Howard-Brook’s book, “Come Out, My People!” God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. I recognized quickly that this book was important to my quest. 

Howard-Brook teaches theology and scripture at Seattle University. He gives a long, well-researched answer to the question, “Just who were these storytellers who told the tales of Eden, Cain, and Abel?” I wanted to know who, when, and why they were told. Were they living in the cities that adherents to Cain’s worldview built or were they back-to-the-land peasants?

The short answer is they were Jews living in the grand city of Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. when Babylon was the center of the dominating Babylonian Empire. These stories were their protest stories, protesting what was for them the highly offensive stories they heard in Babylon to justify the Babylonian empire of conquest and domination.

I’ll unpack this short answer in blogs over the next days. 

Let's Take Back the Great Eden Myth so It Can Help Us Shape One Earth Living

The Eden myth has been told and taught for centuries in ways that play completely into the hands of Multi Earth thinking. That’s what happens when we make it a story of how we humans individually “fell” from innocence into sin. But that’s NOT what the original storytellers were talking about.

When the Eden story was first being told it was by tellers who anguished as they observed a phenomenon in which fellow humans continued to chose out of the One Earth paradigm. As they watched so many around them put their faith in Multi Earth ways, and believed that doing so meant progress, they shook their heads in dissent.

Many of them had even tried Multi Earth ways for themselves, but had come to see those ways for what they are: highly seductive illusions. They turned from them. They wanted once again to arrange their lives economically and politically in step with One Earth living. They preferred One Earth ways, not because they did not know better or because they didn’t care about being “modern” and up to date, but because they had seen and tasted where Multi Earth thinking goes. They no longer believed it could finally deliver on its promises. It was a forbidden fruit for good reason. Despite its delicious appearance and the first juicy bite, successive bites turn gradually into an unpleasant taste, a bitterness. Today, more than ever, we know the bitterness of having bitten into Multi Earth ways.

Much more about Eden will follow on this blog, but all of us who are inclined to, can start immediately correcting how this story gets told. It’s proven across centuries that it has great mythic power to shape life. It still does. But instead of playing into the worldview of Multi Earthism, we need to tell Eden as its first storytellers did, as the story about the paradigm of One Earth ways and the negative logical consequences of believing Multi Earthism will improve on them.

Are you on board?

Multi Earthers Continue 12,000 Years of Secession from Earth's Community of Life

But Ishmael taught his student a different story. He told about a great separation that had happened in the storyline. Some of our human species became so sure that there was a better way than what had sustained us in Earth’s community of life for a couple hundred thousand years or longer, that we seceded from our union with that community. We began a different storyline. But that did not, therefore, end the lineage of all who continued to creatively live in the succession of Earth’s community.

What happened was that now two macro-stories were underway, each shaping differently what would follow. A more accurate diagram, Ishmael said, looks like this, with the Multi-Earth secession happening in the centuries as the Holocene Era began, around 10,000 B.C.E., ushering in a relatively stable, post-glacial age. It’s the only age that the story of western civilization has known.

 One-Earth Story _________________________________________________

                                                    \__Multi-Earths Story__________

According to Ishmael’s correction, what has been called prehistory in the schools of civilization, and commonly treated as inferior, is actually a long period when One Earth living was working for all species. It was Eden. 

Because of Ishmael and other teachers, what Eden means has changed for me. As I’ve come to see how healthy bioregions are the organic units comprising larger, life sustaining ecosystems, Eden has come to represent for me a planet that is a massive interplay of healthy ecosystems. The garden story of Genesis 3 portrays Eden, not as a perfect utopia, but as an evolved creational order of interdependence. Multi Earth living is hellbent on making the secession from it as complete as possible.

Please comment: Isn’t it stunning that Multi Earth living insists we can’t get away from our greed and selfishness so we need The Market to managae it? Yet, such thinking is a recent mutation of thought about our species given that we lived as One Earthers for nearly 200,000 years.

Steinbeck Makes Us Aware of Our Multi Earth Ways

Just thinking about his book title, East of Eden, it strikes me that Steinbeck grasped the contrast between the worldview that is Eden and the one that is not. The one that is outside of Eden. Each worldview has stories to tell and Steinbeck took on the task of telling a story of life when we live in the worldview of non-Eden — or, in the parlance of this blog, when we live in the world as Multi Earthers. He recognized that we, like Cain, live in non-Eden. That may not surprise us given that most of have learned the Eden story as something ancient anyway. But this blog takes a different view. On up the road I’ll say how, I believe, we can live in Eden today.

As is true for us all in general, my life lives out of a complex of stories I’ve identified with. Some I’m conscious of, some I’m not. The stories I’m least conscious of likely impact me all the more for my lack of awareness of them. For example, being born in the U.S., I had been shaped by the Multi Earth story for many years before becoming conscious of it. That story continues to shape Multi Earth living so successfully because many Multi Earthers remain unconscious of the plot being played out through their lifestyle choices. But Steinbeck was deeply aware of it and recognized that the story of Cain told briefly the macro-story we are living. His novel expresses the depth of meaning he saw in both the biblical story and the contemporary expression of it in the U.S.

What comments can you add to how John Steinbeck shows Multi Earth ways that ain’t pretty? But also how he pushes and prods the edges of human capacities to believe we could live a completely different, life-giving paradigm?