Chapter 6: Jellyfish and Pride
JELLYFISH AND PRIDE
WHEN you were very small you used at times to say “some people” when you were really referring to yourself. One night when we were on board ship, you were tucked into the upper berth and had just finished your evening prayers.
“God made everything in the world,” you then said to me, “but some people don’t know why He made jellyfish and tigers.” You had been stung once by a jellyfish, and “tigers” were what you called the ocelots and jaguars that lived in the jungle where we were living. Indians were afraid of them and so, of course, were you. But you were not asking specifically why God made them. You did not understand it, but you were not admitting that you did not understand it. You were only observing philosophically that there were those who did not, and, tactfully, you were not suggesting that your mother might be among them. Your three-year-old mind could hardly have grasped the implications of the mystery you had touched on. For the answer would have to include, from a human standpoint, an explanation of human suffering. Yet the jellyfish and the tiger “know” what they were made for. They, with all sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, mountains and hills, beasts and all cattle, praise the Lord. By being a jellyfish the jellyfish glorifies its Creator, for by being a jellyfish it fulfills its Creator’s command.
All creatures, with two exceptions that we know of, have willingly taken the places appointed to them. The Bible speaks of angels who rebelled and therefore were cast down out of heaven, and of the fall of man. Adam and Eve were not satisfied with the place assigned. They refused the single limitation set them in the Garden of Eden and thus brought sin and death to the whole world. It was, in fact, the woman, Eve, who saw the opportunity to be something other than she was meant to be —the Serpent convinced her that she could easily be “like God” —and she took the initiative. We have no way of knowing whether a consultation with her husband first might have led to an entirely different conclusion. Perhaps it might. Perhaps if she had put the question to him and he had had to ponder the matter he would have seen the deadly implications and have refused the fruit. But Eve had already tried it. She had not been struck dead. She offered it to her husband. How could he refuse? Eve was undoubtedly a beautiful woman. She was the woman God had given him. She was only testing out what seemed an unnecessary and trivial restriction, and her boldness had been rewarded. She had gotten away with it, and now why shouldn’t Adam do the same?
What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpent’s offer and had said to him instead, “Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be —let me be a woman”?
But the sin was fatal beyond their worst imaginings. It was hubris, a lifting up of the soul in defiance of God, the pride that usurps another’s place. It is a damnable kind of pride.