Expulsion: A Meditation on Marc Chagall’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

When I first heard the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, it seemed like just that: a story, distant, old, strange. Up until the past year I thought of the Fall as a mistake somehow we inherited and were admonished not to repeat. I was never sure what on earth the fruit was supposed to be about, nor the Tree of Good and Evil (why not just evil?). It wasn't my story, only an explanation of sin which I honestly barely knew on a philosophical level. But I came to realize on a September afternoon after a couple years of personal unraveling that the story of Adam and Eve is my own story, not only theirs.

I was wandering on the fifth floor of a building on my college campus and came across a painting by the twentieth-century artist Marc Chagall, who is known for his fantastic renderings of the Old Testament patriarchs and ancient narratives. This painting, at first glance, portrays the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden at the hand of a terrifying angel, dictating them away with an outstretched arm. Not many people know about this piece of art. I’d never seen it before. But its simplicity of stroke and the countenance of the faces told me that Chagall was depicting the very emotional and spiritual spread I found myself absorbed in. The painting reveals self-consciousness and shame. I looked at the piece for a while, emotionally distanced from it, then bit by bit allowed my own life to rest in the failing forms of Adam and Eve. It wasn’t hard to develop this kind of relationship with Chagall’s piece. It came pretty easy.

We’re often warned against reading an artist into his or her art. We shouldn’t assume the art is a direct expression of personality or experience. But when I heard about Marc Chagall and his many expulsions in his lifetime, from Russia, from France to the States, an ongoing nomad in a wartime world not designed for homes, I couldn’t help but see Chagall in the art. And once I saw Chagall in the forms of Adam and Eve leaving their home under the sword of the angel, I saw myself too. Walking out of the painting into who knows what.

The painting depicts the couple painted red, Eve’s head bowed in shame and Adam’s figure twisted backward in hypervigilance. They are on their way off the page. Adam’s arm is already out like he yearns for invisibility and yet dreads it at the same time. And Eve, hand feeling for him as if she has no other choice but to cling and follow.

The pigments of this painting speak shame. They are naked and exposed, looking to anything for hiding even if it means going invisible.  The couple has to walk out of Presence and into a wilderness of absence. A life of “living” apart from the God they were designed to be in intimate communion with. It’s a life of the flesh, a malignant condition, an accident, a tragic rewrite of the cosmic plan.

Since college, the greatest sense of expulsion I’d encountered, and frankly still do, came when I found myself wandering about thirteen hours away from my native Oklahoma town, wounded with heartbreak and suddenly stripped of my family, friends, and the wooded copse of land I’d called home for eighteen years. East of Eden, no doubt.

The way my personality destabilized those two semesters of school is sobering, to say the least, but it reminds me how easy it is to feel alone in a world defined by absence. The internet became my best friend. The internet, to give you a definition, is an alternate universe complete with community, knowledge, god, and sex. It’s a digital cranium holding illusions of fulfilled need. I don’t need friends, I just need facebook. I don’t need “love,” I’ll just become a voyeur and look at people making “love” online. I don’t need God, I have Google. In theory, I knew that dependence on these things would subvert my desires for real companionship and connection, but it was so easy to nestle in these grooves and pretend I wouldn’t experience even deeper expulsion than before.

It’s a dangerous enterprise mixing the forms of a perfect image on a screen with the person you miss. Social media does a major disservice to memory, and to the real world.

At this point, I didn’t turn to Genesis to make sense of my experience. As I mentioned, I turned to covering: to the internet, to distractions of something even so subliminal as coffee and the melancholy tones of Coldplay and Beach House, the narcotics most of us would call tame but which have druglike effects nonetheless. I insisted on trying to process this particular expulsion on my own, which implies that I tried to process it apart from God and other people and thus further implying that I was excluding the things in my life which might bring about real healing. I didn’t deal honestly when my own issues. I covered them. Nor did I take up responsibility for the faults and weaknesses which had led me to such a place of chaos and confusion. Which means that I fell deeply into the vortex of shame. This is the shame of being someone you regret. It’s clinging to the backside of Adam. It’s being Adam.

I walked around campus as a social isolate and a mere wraith of my former personality of joy, energy, and humor remained intact. I had used to love writing. I wrote for five minutes and then dried up and scrolled Instagram for an hour. I used to love to play basketball but found myself fumbling with the ball and throwing up keyed up shots. I drank four cups of coffee for lack of sleep and as a result, could sleep even less. I found it impossible to truly laugh. I was not myself.

The shame and expulsion I encountered, of course, was based on a lie. That’s why it says in Romans that we traded the truth of God for a lie, crafting images of animals and humans to serve as a substitute for the God we’re expelled from. In physical form, it looked like hunched shoulders and downcast eyes. It looked like Adam. I saw nothing and no one except the disease of my own self reflected even in the kindest of faces and the happiest of tunes.  Although it may not be a cherub marching back and forth, or a woman, or a parent, guarding the tree of life, each of us may at one time or another feel blocked from the thing we desire the most. Each of us, in regards to some person, some career, some ambition, will probably to some degree experience the posture of expulsion and the shame shared by our ancient parents. And then there are others who have achieved romance and success and are more miserable than before. Capturing the ideal doesn’t satiate the inner lack. (We all fall short of the Glory of God. Some folks think it should say “lack” the Glory of God)

So, somebody else got the promotion. You got the red card in math. Neglect and abuse characterized your childhood. You couldn’t play basketball and no one appreciated your poetry. Hanging out in the game room is for the big kids, kiddo. You stumbled into pornography at age fifteen and haven’t stopped looking since. She says she’s done with you and yet you still have a desire to please her, to be the man you failed to be for her. Expulsion. Shame. I’m on my way out of the picture. And it can be difficult when there’s only the picture. Chagall gives us no redemptive landscape, no Christ crucified a few feet down the parchment, no cloud of witnesses exulting in a finished glory. The couple doesn’t carry on to be received by the Father as the prodigal son returned. All we have is Adam’s cut off arm as they’re headed into nothingness, for the moment contained in rejection, conducted away by an angel who won’t welcome them back.

But there’s a detail in the painting, or the lack of a detail, that stirred some hope in me as I studied the painting. It encouraged a glimpse of joy and the glimpse grew into a reality which had been there waiting all along. This detail is the lack, strangely enough, of any loincloths on Adam and Eve. Go and read the creation story and you’ll discover that God sewed animal skins for his humans, clothing them to save them the distress of being naked and ashamed. God’s meeting them in their need. It’s in this one gesture of love that most likely sustained Adam and Eve for the rest of their lives as they toiled and begot life through labor and pain, the fact of God’s provision which spurred their own efforts for provision. An act of friendship hinting at a good rumor. That God has us covered.

The covering is missing in Chagall’s painting, and there’s, of course, no way that the loincloths solve Adam and Eve’s dilemma. They are still expelled from the naked delight original to their human DNA, still aliens to their own selves, and at war with nature they were once mandated to culture. But without the covering, an important element of the expulsion is omitted. We are not driven out by judgment alone, but by judgment clarified and carried on through mercy, through covering. If a human being or an impulse or an institution drove us out of Eden, then there’s no mercy in the mix. But the way God seems to work is through providing and saving before commanding and cursing. And recall that it is the serpent and the ground that God curses, not the human beings. This, I think, provides real clarity into our situation. We are, in a sense, wanderers in an unfamiliar land with memories reappearing and recalling us to God. But at the same time, covering is offered. More than that, communion is offered. And it’s the kind of covering which ironically lets us be, in a sense, naked and unashamed before God and neighbor. This has begun to surprise and encourage me these past few months as I’ve personally been seeking to rebuild my life from the disconnections and dissociations of shame. It’s a solution against solution. It rejects the quick fix of pornography and social media, our digital visions of Eden which are in fact cruel perversions of both sex and community. (Not that Facebook doesn’t have a use, it’s just not a communal thing, let’s face it!)

The real answer, the truth, hates lies.

How is it offered? It sounds like advertising a trope or motif to say God stooped down and covered us like he did Adam and Eve, but there it is, and it’s good. According to the Bible, the Man Jesus atoned for the sins of the world through his death on the cross; atonement means covering, plainly, a protection. We are covered from the guilt of rebellion, offered a re-entrance into God’s Presence, and invited to leave behind the life of the flesh, to be healed of the malignant disease of sin that wants to wreck, isolate, and disassociate the human being from the good and the true. No more absence, whether in the arms of a lover or not. But the killing blow against shame is not just in the covering, but by invitation into the newness of life, demonstrated by Jesus’s resurrection. Forgiveness isn’t enough to heal shame. You have to be re-created, born again. So, shame really was put to death when God saved me, and I really am a new creation in Him who calls forth what is not into being.

Chagall’s artistry taught me that I had to go through this. Chagall’s artistry depicts a tough reality. But two or more long years of expulsion landed me at the foot of this painting, a mirror image of my experience. I realized that expulsion was essential in understanding the sweet acceptance of God. It was a necessary precursor to growth, joy, and Meaning. I had to learn that the seeming cruelty of the divine is kinder than the tenderness of woman, and man. I had to be shaped out of a formless void. I had to be brought out of a matrix of sin, shame, expulsion, and lust. I had to go through the bloody birth canal and be received on the other end in all manner of joy and delight by He who holds the Son even closer than a mother does. God ordered these circumstances for the profit, delight, and order of my soul. Now I want to re-walk in the Presence of God. It's clear that there's nothing sweeter, nothing better, nothing more truly human, than walking with God in the cool of the evening.
This is a Presence which has expelled shame from its perimeters. It means I’m no longer under the sword of expulsion but instead protected by it.

I could wrap up the essay here and put a bow on its end, claiming how I’m unashamed and unabashed and “on fire for God.” But the trick is, the second I assume that I’m good and secure by my own vain wirings and stitchings, I’ve already walked out of the picture again. I’ve already told myself God’s not there. The key is in realizing that a Presence more ancient than the stars walks shoulder to shoulder with us, and through us will issue blessing with every step taken, always hinting at the truth that He has us covered. Not only covered but remade. Once we know it's all about being made into a new person, and the past is a dead ghost with no more claim on us, then victory is ours.