Lent Week One: From the Artist (Seeking: Who will you listen to?)

Read Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

from the artist | Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman

As I was creating this piece, I was recovering from an unexpected postpartum surgery. I read the text, and then weeks of internal wrestling ensued. I felt angry, defiant, and it was all personal. Like a rebellious teenager, I poked holes in the text with hopes it would crumble; but why?

Reading Danielle Shroyer’s book, Original Blessing,2 truly helped me see why this text felt so burdensome, and I’m incredibly grateful for her work. She reminded me that this text has been forced to do things it was not written to do, and to say things it does not actually say.

In my youth, this narrative was taught as the origin story explaining human nature, sin, suffering, and death. It was the text I thought of when I had menstrual cramps. I would mutter, “Thanks, Eve,” under my breath, blaming her, but I realize I was also blaming myself for my own pain. It was the text that justified distrust in myself. While engaging with this text, the pain I was feeling in my body from childbirth complications felt like punishment. I raged against this text because I felt it raging against me.

Beware of the ways harmful theology bubbles up in your life. Ask yourself, “Who will I listen to?” In this case, I was giving power to a hermeneutic that isn’t in line with who God has revealed God’s self to be, or with the image of God in me.

In this piece, the cool tones represent the heaviness and confusion I felt with this familiar story, and the high contrast mimics the way this text has made me feel separated and isolated from God. The woman’s expression holds the weight and the pain caused by the ways this text has been used to subjugate women and to prop up destructive doctrines and a distorted gospel. In hindsight, I realize I was visualizing my emotional journey with the text.

2 Shroyer, Danielle. Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016).

Who Will You Listen To? | Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman

Digital painting

*reprinted with permission from A Sanctified Art