Who Told You…?
When did you come of age? Let me put that question in a more realistic context. When, in looking back over your years, did you realize you had crossed that divide separating your childhood from your life as an adult? Did it occur when you were a small child or during the years of your adolescence? How about when you reached your 18th year with its many attendant rights of passage? Did it dawn on you when you cashed your first paycheck, drove solo in a car, entered the military, graduated from college or got married? Or are you still wondering, as I sometimes do in jest among friends, what you’d like to be when you grow up?
Coming of age: it is an experience shared by most of us who live into our adulthood, although when and how this happens seems to depend on circumstances as varied and unique as fingerprints and DNA. We’ve all met children who seemed hardened by life and wizened beyond their years, appearing to have been born old. And who doesn’t know at least one adult whose high risk, devil-may-care conduct or silly attitude reminds us of a juvenile somehow trapped in a grown up body, unable or unwilling to mature. When coming of age is under consideration, neither one size nor one time fits all.
Novelists and filmmakers have understood the fascination we have with characters working through one coming of age dilemma or another. Many of them occupy places of honor on one or more lists of our must see movies and must read novels. A few that come to mind are dramatic tales like Stand By Me and The Outsiders, to spoofs such as Ferris Buehler’s Day Off and Porky’s. There are classic treatments from other times and places, such as Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, Anne of Green Gables, Life of Pi, and The Kite Runner. Sometimes they are set in schools (The Blackboard Jungle and The Breakfast Club), or take us on hot rod romps over small-town streets (Rebel Without a Cause, and American Graffiti). Given youths’ expressive energy, it is not surprising that some include choreography (Dirty Dancing and Footloose), animated singing (Grease and The Lion King) or some combination of both in an artistic tour de force (West Side Story and Bye Bye Birdie).
There is something about a good coming of age story that hits close to home, either in the existential moment of our present, or in some deeply felt recollection or unresolved feeling we can’t, or don’t want, to let go. And why should we? If coming of age marks that long, giant step we take from childhood into adulthood, then its hold on us is never a past-tense, over and done, experience. It stays with us, even as our childlike hopes, humor, creativity, trust and fear continue to express themselves in ways both obvious and subtle, conscious and unconscious, for as long as we live. In other words, coming of age is not a singular crossing of some rite of passage bridge, but the process by which we awaken to life and our place in it, accelerating and deepening as we become more self-aware.
But just when does or should it happen? I suspect for most of us it occurs over a long period of time. No sudden bolt of lightening, no “eureka” voiced by a ten-year-old in hearing something for the first time at school. Coming of age usually connotes waking up to who we may really be, and becoming aware of how others see us. As such it is less a moment than a progression, one that begins in our youth and stalks us, if we are lucky, until the last day in which we draw a breath.
In decades of teaching high school students I had the opportunity to expose them to perhaps the most enduring of all the coming of age stories in Western cultural history. Much to their surprise, it was a story they had heard many times, but by then had consigned to that cerebral dustbin where we keep things that seem of little or no account to our everyday preoccupations. So to jolt them from their “heard this, know that” mindset—so typical of students in the upper grades—I shared my own pictorial rendering of the story in question, a product of my earlier life as a renowned stick figure artist. If you’re not buying that, you’re in good company. They didn’t either. Here it is nevertheless:
While I do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of Genesis 2-3, I did my best to render it literally in my sketch. The “before” sequence includes a male and a female, both anatomically correct but for my unexplainable creativity with one of their feet. The third character is a serpent with legs. The smiles on the human faces suggest their contentment living in this garden existence of all-you-can eat buffet with no cover charge or tip expected. But “after” reveals the several changes that have occurred after their most original mistake: they are clothed, the female appears to be pregnant, the male has an implement in hand to work the soil, and they both are wearing frowns. For accuracy sake, the female should be kneeling to the man, but even great artists must have some license in covering their own inadequacies. The serpent is now sans legs, making him a true snake where before he seems to have been a lizard not unlike the gecko tempting us with his insurance pitches. And don’t overlook his cartoon cough, illustrating how he has become an eater of the dust kicked up by his human adversaries.
With no apparent concern for my artistic sensitivities, my students invariably laughed out loud in first seeing this masterpiece. Relieved that my deliberate ruse got their attention, I would then try to refocus their gaze on the compelling question permeating this story: what was it that turned the bliss of their before into the anguish of their after? The answer was pretty obvious, both in the story and in the front and center position I gave it in my drawing: the tree of knowledge. My portrayal was intended to provoke them to see the irony between this ancient story and their own lives as teenage students. For here they were, students in this required class, backpacks overloaded with textbooks and high-tech tablets, engaged 7 days each week writing papers and studying for tests. Why? So they could acquire the knowledge they would need to live as independent and successful grown ups. That being their reality, how then could knowledge be forbidden fruit? That just couldn’t be true. Knowledge is good. Knowledge is necessary. Knowledge empowers. The fact remains, however, that the Bible writer was clearly implying that knowledge somehow threatened God who, nonetheless, put it in front of them as an attractive nuisance that they couldn’t resist.
While I love the story, I’ve never considered it an apt or flattering picture of God. That may be why many choose to see it as an obedience test that the first humans failed. While this may try to absolve God of his short-sighted understanding of human curiosity, it calls into question either the deity’s omniscience or suggests a certain sadistic malevolence in His setting before them an impossible test. In either case the theology of the writer does not accord well with my own. The lasting impression left by this saga of “The Fall” is one that has off-colored much in the way people have looked upon God, the creation, human beings and their eternally doomed and damned condition of sinfulness.
But here is the key that, to me, unlocks the parabolic intent of the writer. It can be seen in the realization that came over both the man and woman after taking that first bite of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: they suddenly knew that they were naked. In other words, their eyes were opened to their own sexuality, after which they would never see themselves, or each other, in the same way. So while many view this as a scientifically credible account of our origins (aside from the problems of talking serpents and a host of other people—supposedly not yet born—laying in wait to kill their surviving son who, inexplicably finds a wife from among them), I see it as a genuine coming of age story, symbolic of what each of us must experience when we grow up. Before eating from the tree they were like little kids—happy, innocent, and carefree—just as we were, once, when we were children. But after, they resembled the majority of us who struggle each day to survive, enduring the burdens of labor, inequality, and pain, while the prospect of death overshadows our every thought and action.
What makes the coming of age story in Genesis so compelling to me is its linkage of knowledge and sexuality. As we acquire knowledge we come to realize many things about life and about ourselves, including how alike and how different we are from each other. The knowledge we gain, over time, expands our abilities to think, reason, create, organize, build and destroy. It also helps us begin to understand, contend with, express and manage our sexual energies and attractions for others. While artists and filmmakers normally portray Eden’s co-stars as young, virile, attractive and fully developed adults, in truth they more closely resemble sexually ambivalent, pre-adolescent children whose eye-opening experience made them feel embarrassed and ashamed, not aroused by or enamored with their own physicality. Something quite similar seems to have been in the mind of J. M. Barrie and L. Frank Baum whose coming of age masterpieces continue to speak to us more than a century after their composition. The pre-adolescent adventures of Wendy Darling and Dorothy Gale that convey them to Never, Never Land and Oz are both delightful and harrowing. Yet both discover that they are not quite ready to eat from that tree that would forever change their lives.
If the knowledge we have of ourselves is linked to our grasp of our own sexuality, then the question put by God in the Genesis account is one we cannot ignore: “Who told you were naked?”(Genesis 3:11). Who imparted that knowledge to us, that understanding of who we really are, in which the emotional, spiritual, psychological, social and biological essences of our individuality are so intertwined? Did it come from a kid like us, a sibling, or a friend we ran with in the neighborhood? Did one or both of our parents, a grandparent or relative help us grow in that understanding? Or did we learn of our nakedness (i.e., gender identity) in school from a teacher, coach, or counselor via curricula, videos and class discussions? I suspect most of our kids today bite into that knowing apple while absorbing the subtle and often gratuitous messages that bombard them on nearly every media platform which they can access anywhere and at any time?
Who told you...you were naked? Someone did, perhaps by accident or design. Just as relevant today, however, is the question of when—when were we told—and for what purpose. When we were old enough to have tasted life sufficient to make up our minds on our own? Or when the tenderness of years left us ripe for exploitation from those confusing our need for attention, acceptance and belonging with a confession of maturity that we did not yet own? Childhood is a blessed time in which innocence and naivete must be guarded by those committed to the child’s nurture and protection. It is incumbent on us who are older to honor the “before” moments of childhood life and not force-feed our children with knowledge for which they are not ready to receive or ultimately embrace.
If Psalm 90 is correct in allotting us 70 or 80 years to work out our coming of age, then those 10 or 12 years of our childhood should neither be rushed nor shortened. For what happens to us and inside us during this time will largely determine who we will become and how we will fare during the decades of life that lay in the aftermath of our having eaten from the tree of knowledge. The impact of involved, caring, and consistent parents cannot be underestimated in charting the course of any human life. They hold the greatest responsibility in ensuring that their children take their first bites of the fruit of knowledge when most ready and most supported in doing so. For once we know what it really means to be naked, our childhood becomes but a memory and idealized dream. No longer do we enjoy direct passage to destinations like Never Never Land, Oz and Eden. And while they remain nice places to visit in our memory, we will never be able to go home to them and live there—at least not on this side of paradise.
