Faith, Glory and The American Dream

She sat on the curb as the crowd of tourists flowed around her. Normally, such a sight would not affect me in any way, just a woman in a crowd, but I know just enough about this woman to surmise that the expression on her face is a reflection of a feeling of alienation. Of course, the expression may be just the manifestation of a bad case of gas, but I think not. This woman lives alone with two boys, ages 12 and 8. The youngest was recently hospitalized as the result of a car accident while with his estranged father. She works as a clerk in a convenience store and lives in a small apartment in a converted business building. Surely, the life she is living is not the life she dreamed of as a child.

Her image and associated history, for me, illustrates the dark side of the so-called American Dream and the truth of the Fall from Eden.

An odd connection? Not really. America was Europe’s new Eden in the beginning. The newly discovered continent seemed to offer Europeans the chance to regain God’s Edenic grace and European Christianity the chance to redeem its failure to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth in Europe. In the new world, America, Christians could achieve a harmonic dominance over the wild, which was thought the fulfillment of Adam’s original task in the Garden. God’s bounty would fall into the hands of those created in his image, and Christians could establish a Christian “City on the Hill” worthy of Christ’s return, a society clearly established on Christ’s commandments and worthy of God’s bounty. An exaggeration of how America’s promise was conceived by emigrant Europeans? Perhaps, but the mythic principles informing such ideals are clearly evidenced in the many royal charters granted the early emigrants, and the influence of those principles on modern American thought is clearly evident in the Depression-era political slogan, “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”

The error in such thinking is that the Fall as reported in Genesis makes quite clear that the bounty and harmony Adam and Eve enjoyed in Eden flowed from God’s grace, and their naively intelligent awareness of his grace was his special gift to humanity. Animals exist and live according to the natures God created within them but without the intelligent awareness of the spring of Grace their nature flowed from and the potential of wonder and love that accompanied that awareness. When God banished Adam and Eve from the garden he allowed them to keep the intelligence that gave them the ability to sense and understand God’s gift of grace. The ability to know and understand the loss of the immanent and immediately evident connection to that Grace is the curse of the Fall. Christian and Jewish theology teaches us that human society and human ingenuity can never replace the peace and wonder of the experience of the constant presence of God’s grace that was the true bounty of Eden.

But, dear God, we do try. The experience of glory must hold a psychological shadow of the experience of God’s grace since we, as a species, do love to pursue it. The seeking of glory is at the root of our most venal dreams. For example, when a young child dreams of being a pop music star, she dreams of basking in the glory of evident affection. The adulation of millions demonstrated by the purchase of the musician’s music, the roar of human adulation at massive concerts and the millions of dollars earned seem proof of the granting of special favor and everlasting love to the misguided, uninformed and ignorant. In the obverse, the denial or absence of that adulation is de facto proof of an individual’s unworthiness of favor and love.

So, the young woman sits in the crowd celebrating the moment of ease their money can buy them. She is within the crowd but not part of it, denied access because of her financial obligations and inability to fully meet them successfully. The dreams and ideals presented to her in her childhood mock her in her “failure” to achieve social glory and inclusion. She withdraws emotionally and appears as a living ghost, lost to a lie she did not create but is forced to live. Her only hope is faith, which I do not know she has. I pray she does.