If I Were Eve

Had I been chosen to be Eve would I have eaten the fruit? Sadly, and most emphatically, yes. I sin. I cannot go through my life—nay, even a day--without sinning. So, yes, I would have sinned and disobeyed God, whether I were Adam or Eve.

I am broken. I am human. I am not my most Blessed Mother, Mary. Nor am I remotely as perfectly saintly as she. So, yes, I would have eaten the fig or given in to whatever temptation satan’s trickery would have conjured. I would have ruined humanity with original sin.

The shame of our first parents. Their regret at having taken one tiny bite of the fruit from the forbidden tree. At having pridefully defied their Creator Who had given them paradise. Who had given them everything good and holy. Oh, the regret as they were ejected from the idyllic garden forever, never to be allowed to return. Now to face a life of hardship and a constant battle between living in virtue and living with sin. Never again in their earthly existence to live their utopian life in the garden, in total love and continual union with God.

Yet God must eject Adam and Eve. Had they initially eaten of the fruit from the Tree of Life, they and humanity would have always lived without sin, in union with God. After having eaten from the Tree of Good and Evil, having grossly sinned, God could not have allowed them to eat from the Tree of Life. Had they, after having disobeyed and sinned, eaten from the Tree of Life, they and all of humanity would have lived in the state of their now sinful souls, in an eternal state of sin, eternally separated from God. It was God’s infinite mercy that required that He permanently eject them from the Garden so that they could not, then, eat from the Tree of Life and pass on eternal sin, eternal separation from God.

But this is not the entire ramification of their single bites of fruit. The consequences were not simply personal to them, as our sins are never entirely personal to us.

“All men are Adam’s descendants and are implicated with his sin.” (CCC 404)

“Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants a human nature wounded by their own first sin.” (CCC 417)

“Original sin proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generations, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.” Pope Pius XII

“Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.” (CCC 390)

What a heavy burden Adam and Eve, the first parents of all of humanity, bore. A burden that they carried all throughout the Old Testament until Christ reopened the Gates of Heaven.

As human creatures, we all sin. Yet Adam and Eve, not we, have continually incurred sole blame for the sins, disasters, and miseries that humanity experiences. We don’t claim our part in that sin, though we all share their guilt. We are all flawed. God created each of us with free will to choose Him or not. Still, we all freely choose sin. Adam and Eve, however, suffer the blame for our sins, for my sins.

I cannot even begin to imagine the guilt that accompanied the burden of our first parents, knowing what they lost and caused by giving into the temptations of satan’s deception, that they committed original sin and passed the inclination to sin through spiritual inheritance throughout the entire generations of the human race. How devastating must have been their grief over this fatal decision to disobey their benevolent Creator—their grief at having lost the paradise of the Garden of Eden, to realize that they and we their descendants—all of humanity--had now to live with suffering, evil, and toil.

Yet, except for the Blessed Virgin (and obviously Jesus, the God-Man) no matter who our first humans were, each of us would have sinned. Maybe the temptation would have been different, but we each would have sinned. I would have sinned. We are given free will, and we frequently use that will, of our own volition, to choose to go against God’s will, to choose to disobey His guidelines of love.

Perhaps I would have obeyed and not eaten from the fig tree. But if the temptation were to be selfish at the expense of my “Adam”, I would have caved. If the temptation were to lie, I would have caved. If the temptation were to be angry, I would have caved.

The devastation and gravity of Adam’s and Eve’s sin is that they gave into the temptation to desire to know more than God knows, to be greater than their Creator. Satan is so very cunning and, might I say sadly, extremely smart. He enticed Adam and Eve to commit the same sin that he did, the sin of ultimate pride, the sin of trying to be greater than God. This sin eternally separated him and the fallen angels who did likewise from Heaven, from Love. This decision, because of their nature to fully comprehend their decision and its consequences, banished them to hell forever, with no reprieve, as they would never choose to realize and repent of their sin.

How fortunate are we humans to be created with imperfect knowledge and understanding of our sins, of the gravity of their consequences. For God, out of infinite Love, chose to redeem us, to allow our imperfect nature the opportunity to repent and join, again, in His Love. Even though the original sin of Adam, and our sins, separate us and cause misery and chaos, I say again, as weird as it sounds, that it is a total blessing that we were created imperfect, created without the ability to know the full ramifications of our sins, as were the angels so created. How infinitely Good and Loving is Our God.

Though I feel so sorry for the sin of my first parents, Adam and Eve, I forgive them. Ironically, I am thankful that their sin allowed us to be redeemed and that God created us with the nature to freely choose Him. That allows us the freedom to choose Him over and over again. The angels were, likewise, created with total freedom to choose. However, due to their nature, their one decision, whether to choose God or to choose to go against God, was final. Our nature and the Sacrament of Reconciliation allow us to return to union with God’s love.

I am human, created with a free, yet flawed, will and nature. If I were Eve, yes, I would have sinned as I do now. But I choose over and over again to repent and choose Him once again.

My Father God, please forgive me. My Father God, thank You for Your infinite Love and Mercy.