Adam and Eve, after the Fall, panic and hide. Let’s look at these two verbs in sequence:
They realize their nakedness and are ashamed. Of what are they ashamed? Of everything. It’s not merely the sight of the naked body (something they were probably used to) but of its new nakedness when exposed as sinful, separate from God, and fallen. Their nakedness now stands as witness to their existence against God, as does all of the creation. If all of creation points back to the Creator, then all of the voices of the created world are aflame with the reminder of the One they’ve left. They have made the Lord their enemy. And they are in a garden where everything sings the name of the Lord.
Panic here indicates all of the things psychology refers to as “inhibitory emotions” —anxiety writ large. In his lectures at Theopolis this past week, David Field explains that “[t]he threat constituted by life/God and by the rumbles and whispers from below (our awareness that there’s “stuff” down there) generates inhibitory emotions, especially anxiety.” These are “substitute feelings” that prevent us from turning and facing the terror of God, our sin, and our real person. Depression, false guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-pity, etc. —these are all anxiety. That sinking feeling in the pit of your gut when you watch an old video of yourself doing something you now think stupid is a kind of inhibitory emotion.
Adam and Eve knew that feeling in its most raw form. But they don’t just panic, they don’t just exhibit inhibitory emotions. They also hide.
On the other side of our response to sin and shame is the hiding, the stitching of fig leaves, the blaming and scapegoating of others, the classic schadenfreude. These are the things we put in place so we do not have to deal with either the anxiety above or the deeper realities of life, God, death, sin, and our own person.
David Field refers to this class of verb in the human person, as our defense mechanisms, “our ways of staying absent, incongruent, emotionally numb or immature, hidden from others.”
But God, the good Lord of Genesis 3, doesn’t leave us stuck between these two poles of brokenness. He calls us back to the real and the deep with him. “Adam where are you?” He cries-out in Gen 3.9. He calls us away from our inhibitory emotions and our defense mechanisms to an encounter with what David Field calls “the deep/Real”.
Mary and Joseph, coming to the Temple on that first Candlemas, offer us a picture of wholeness and life with God. They have every reason for both inhibitory emotions and defense mechanisms: Joseph, the heir of some once-great royal house, brings the woman that all the gossips claim he impregnated out of wedlock, and their little squab to observe the customs, though they cannot afford the normative sacrifices, being so poor. So they give the poppers’ offering: two doves or two pigeons. In all the sound and sight of the happy business and glad glamour of Herod’s temple, this lowly couple walks in. But they, unlike that first couple in the first Temple (for Eden was a temple), neither panic nor hide.
They stand with unveiled faces in the brightness of the light of Christ, bold in the drawing deep with God.
Mary and Joseph on Candlemas, unashamed, having gone to the deep/real, having laid aside both anxiety and defense mechanism to respond to God, stand as models for us today. Candlemas is about refusing the hurry, the despair, the noise, and anxiousness where we so often live so as to avoid having to draw near to the fire of the loving God. Candlemas is about slowing down, giving-up our plans, being interrupted twice, once by Anna, and once by Simeon. Candlemas is the celebration that being exposed for the frightened, mortal, needy persons that we are, is the path to life.