A client recently gave me a piece of art that I really liked. When he offered to make another one and asked what I might want, I found myself saying, almost without thinking, “Maybe Adam and Eve.”
I can imagine why that might seem like a strange choice. For many people, Adam and Eve immediately bring to mind original sin and the beginning of everything that went wrong.
But that wasn’t where my mind was headed.
We are tempted every day, usually not in dramatic ways, but in very ordinary ones. We get tired and procrastinate. We get impatient and give up. We avoid conversations we know we should probably have. We take another cookie from the cookie jar. We choose what is easier instead of what is wiser. In that sense, Adam and Eve are not just two people from a story long, long ago.
They are us.
But that’s actually not why I wanted the image.
When I think of Adam and Eve, I think of what once was….
Adam is in the garden. Life is good. And yet something is still missing (How many of us can relate to that feeling… despite reaching our career goals, the house, the wealth, something is still missing in our lives). And it is important to know it isn’t Adam who names it. Adam is clueless. It’s God who realizes it. God says that it is not good for man to be alone.
I’ve often thought that maybe God realized this after asking Adam to name all the animals and seeing just how alone he was. Perhaps Adam was even a bit worn out by the whole task. He had a good life, but something still wasn’t quite settled.
So God puts Adam into a deep sleep and creates a woman, Eve, from his side.
And Adam is thrilled. He says, “At last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
This is something he somehow knew was missing, even if he couldn’t have explained it before. Even in the Garden of Eden, even in a perfect place, there was a kind of quiet loneliness that only another person could answer.
Adam doesn’t analyze Eve. He doesn’t seem uncertain about what this means. He knows that he is no longer meant to be alone.
When you work with couples, you see how important this is. Most couples don’t come to therapy because they never loved each other. They usually come because, over time,e they have lost their way with each other. Life happens. People get tired. They get hurt. They stop saying certain things out loud. And slowly, without really meaning to, they begin to live more alongside each other than with each other.
So when I think about Adam and Eve, I don’t only think about temptation and failure. I also think about this straightforward, very human truth: we were not meant to live life by ourselves, and when the bond between two people weakens, something in us suffers.
This is also true regarding our relationship with God. We can’t do life without His help.
Maybe that is why I wanted this image, not as a reminder of how people fail, but as a reminder of what was there at the beginning, and what many couples are, in their own way, trying to find again.