A Lot Like Eve Read online

  Imagine it: all you have ever been is breathed into being by Love, fully seen and fully known and fully delighted in. Imagine how it would be to realize, too late, the devastating mistake of stepping out of that flow and seeing yourself for the first time without Love. Recoiling with dismay, you see what you are reduced to without Love’s life-giving gaze.

  The ruptures don’t stop there though, they crack on rumbling beyond your naked bewilderment, and you look across and see your beloved now strange and altered. You look into their eyes but all you see is judgement. The space between you, which you had shared and explored and in which you had made love, is now warped. And then you realize that they too now see you differently, that without the cover of Love they will look into your eyes and be reminded of their shame.

  This is how the story goes and this is how the story still goes, because it turns out that we are a lot like them. We are like the woman and the man in that poem; uneasy with ourselves, often unreachable to each other and striving relentlessly to find our way Home. We are like them in the way we hear accusation bellowing through the undercurrents of our many interactions. In the way that fear suffocates the hope from our desires. In the way our inadequacy tempts us to blame something or, usually, someone else. We share with them our unease at the thought of not finding a place to belong, or thinking we have nothing to offer to the flourishing of the world.

  In the wrestle with fear, shame and blame, Eve lives on, because it turns out that I am a lot like Eve. I too have reached for the cover of leaves that are close to hand. I have spent my energy gathering them, arranging them into the kind of protection that a girl looks for in this exile from Eden. Like Eve, I can’t bear all that has gone wrong and no longer fits, especially when it’s me that is wrong and doesn’t fit. Like Eve, with her decorative attempt to cover shame and mistakes, I have tried to put my world right, tried to cover the gaps and gloss over my faults.

  The truth is that I have tried to find a way back to Eden. We all have in our brave and deluded way. Wearing many different leafy disguises I have tried to claw and clamber my way back, believing that somehow, if I could just be good enough, I would make it. This is a story about those torn leaves and what they have now become as they lie mulching into compost beneath my feet. This is the story of how my own efforts to control and uphold the images I wanted to believe about myself tripped me up. And it is a rediscovery of a small, often overlooked line in that poem: that after we fall and lose our leaves there is something else; there is Love.

  ‘And so God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them.’

  But first they had to lose the leaves.

  1

  The Insiders

  There was a time when I thought that in order to be a real Christian you had to have had a bad start in life. It seemed that people who got up to tell their stories at church or at youth rallies or summer camp had always had a rocky childhood, probably taking up a spot on the social services’ At Risk register, before degenerating into the dark world of drugs and crime where, as a gang member, they were on the verge of an early death when a Christian turned up and shared God’s love with them. After going cold-turkey and being born again, these former addicts turned their lives around for God, left their gangs and became youth workers or travelling evangelists, sharing their exciting conversion stories with impressionable young people like me.

  In actual fact I probably wasn’t exposed to very many people like this. The likelihood is that the two most gripping contemporary Christian stories in the 1980s were repeated so often that they became conflated in my mind. One was about a violent New York gang leader’s conversion, the other about a young woman missionary from England helping members of the Hong Kong triad gangs to get off heroin through prayer. The take-home message was kind of confusing. Since gang warfare was not a feature of life on the streets of Cheltenham we guessed this meant we were being ushered towards a life on the mission field, making up for the lack of grave sin in our pre-Jesus lives by reaching out to those unfortunates who had it in spades.

  Together with a few other couples, my parents had started up a church congregation in one of the grittier neighbourhoods of our town which, when you discover the leafy and affluent place that is Cheltenham Spa, cannot lay claim to the desolations of a true inner-city urban priority area. Nevertheless church families moved into the area, and around the corner from our house stood our little meeting hall with its sign outside: Emmanuel Church – God is with us. That’s what we were about: showing that God was here among these streets where children roamed, instructed by parents not to come home until 10 p.m., where cars sat burnt out, having sated for a little while the boredom of kids looking for a thrill. Here we were hoping to make good on the sign outside our church, showing that God definitely was here for the woman heartbroken by her husband now in prison for abusing their children; for the children in Sunday school whose parents had died of alcoholism and cancer and who were about to be taken into care; and for the mentally ill woman who would call our house and leave menacing messages, provoking a spate of nightmares after I once inadvertently answered the phone to her. Referred to by Mum and Dad as an “open home”, our house was a place of rest and kindness and listening for anyone troubled or in difficulty.

  So we saw such troubles because our church was a place where people were welcomed with all their messiness and loneliness. From our little corrugated-roofed hall on this council estate the church family absorbed those who were shaken, broken, tired or hopeless. And to us children church was just a group of families and grownups who were good and wise and kind and stable; people who mopped up the problems instead of creating them. These situations being discussed, these strange people sitting at our dinner table, the man for whom Mum was making up the camp bed in the sitting room while Dad made coffee to sober him up, they all appeared with regularity in our home but they remained Other. There was us and there was them. We were born into this goodness and belonged to it, we kids were on the inside and could only see the needy and the tormented as outsiders finding their way Home. The only time it became a disappointment was when Outsiders got up to tell their story about how God had saved them from drugs and self-destruction. We couldn’t compete with that kind of repentance.

  ***

  I had a conversation with a priest once about Adam and Eve and what they were really trying to get when they decided to take a bite of the forbidden fruit. Because, seriously, why? What did they want that they didn’t have already? The priest suggested that they wanted power, they desired the kind of knowledge that would give them greater power.

  But I wonder if it really was that, because that sounds like a post-Eden response. That’s the sort of thing we do now because we are trying to feel better about not being in Eden. But back then, when Eve took the fruit, all she knew, lived and breathed was beauty and harmony. She didn’t need power because there were no chore wars, no surreptitious point-scoring, no clocking up how often she was the first to apologize. Just a blissful mutuality that the rest of us can only try to imagine.

  None of the games, the fear, or manipulation: just enjoyment in each other.

  In that kind of idyll of peace and love what need would you have for power? When you are an insider, your face reflecting the glory of God and your name spoken into being by that same Creator. When you are whole and known – why do you need to grab power?

  When your heart is uncluttered by regrets because you’ve never acted out of deceit or withheld yourself out of fear or laziness … When your future is unclouded by doubts because you’ve not learned to be afraid, why do you need strong defences? When nothing drains the life from you or makes you feel distant and disconnected from your beloved, why would it even cross your mind to look for something else to bolster your sense of self?

  Of course, you don’t see that you were never meant to be the Source of Life. You don’t yet know, as you reach for that fruit, that once your eyes are opened and you see the choice between good an
d bad, you won’t have the strength always to choose the good. That integrity and completeness will be eroded by the constant possibility of choosing things that will please you alone; things that will divide you from your partner and undo the harmony of your life together. You can’t yet know that the knowledge of good and evil will inevitably lead to death because you will choose ways that do not bring life.

  And so it is only as you step onto that pedestal in imitation of God that the ground beneath you begins to give way and you realize you’re no longer secure. That now you are fractured, exposed and lost in a garden that was once yours and now no longer feels like home. You feel unable to navigate a way through the possibilities and opportunities and desires rushing at you.

  You thought that the fruit of this tree would bear you up, fuelling you as you took your godlike place over everything. But now you look at yourself with a different kind of sight. Now you see yourself outside of the knowing love with which God had always covered you. The garden that you had grown and tended, and over which you thought you could reign, is now just a good hiding-place to buy you some time till you figure out how to feel like an insider once again.

  2

  Baptism

  The little mission church that we had moved to set up stood a few hundred yards from our house. It was a 30-second walk but that stroll each Sunday morning carried with it the purpose and vision of the mission field all the same. Before we were born, Mum had lived in Africa working alongside a nun and a Dutch monk, Brother Tarcisius, caring for polio victims across Ghana. Together they worked with a multitude of children whose limbs were missing; rehabilitating them, teaching them to walk and study and doing what they could to throw off the superstition that disability is a curse from the gods.

  Dad had also been working in Africa, at an outpost called Gulu in Uganda, just as Idi Amin was making his bid for power. Dad stayed there, dispensing his medicines in some backwater hospital, dodging a misplaced attempt on his life, before returning to England and training to be a teacher. But the heartbeat of his faith never dwindled in its missionary vision.

  Returning from Africa, both of them chose to settle in the south west of England and, at a Christmas party of mutual friends, this tall beauty in a floor-length blue dress captured Dad’s eye, and apparently also the gaze of every other man present. She, having recently featured in the pages of Tatler Magazine, looked every bit as unreachable as women like that seem to be – until he heard her speaking about life working with Voluntary Services Overseas in Africa. Their friendship crossed the breadth of class division and the two of them discovered love, faith and a mutual desire to live life’s adventures to the full.

  Of course, we all have our own idea of how those visions will look. And when they actually unfold they tend not to be the picture we dreamed up. So I am sure that, when they began talking about the far-off places in the world to which they could go and make a contribution, they had no clue that the exciting pull of non-government organizations (NGO) job opportunities would give way to the needs of their own son and his particular disabilities.

  I was the eldest child; four years later my sister, Rosalind, arrived. Between us was Alastair, the crumpled, five-pound bundle that my father held in the palm of his hand, before the doctors realized something was wrong and rushed him away for tests. I was too young to remember it but along the way I absorbed the two stories my parents tell of that time. Mum, lying in her hospital bed with an inexplicable lack of feeling or love for the baby she’d just born, until the doctors brought Alastair back to her along with the news that they had diagnosed Down’s syndrome, at which point she reached for this tiny baby and love came rushing in.

  Dad’s story is of the following Sunday at church, where he was playing the organ, with me standing knee-high next to him, while the tears streamed down his face as he began to take in this news and the new future that this child would bring. After the service was over and the news had been announced to the rest of the congregation, Dad found himself being the one to comfort shocked friends who gathered around him. The friendship and support offered by this congregation meant that church was not so much a building but our wider family.

  When Mum became pregnant again the medical monitoring kicked in much earlier, a close eye being kept on both baby and mother. When this little one threatened to make a dangerously early entry into the world Mum was prescribed an old-fashioned confinement and spent several months in hospital. It was during this time that doctors suspected the baby had spina bifida and, given the family situation (which was a delicate way of referring to Alastair), pressed Mum to consider further tests.

  And, once they had drawn long breaths, Mum and Dad did just that. They chose to consider the future and this child and, once again letting go of their imagined plans, chose to see the future together as a gift. Whoever this baby was it would be a gift to them and, ruling out more tests, they prepared to welcome it and be the family it would need.

  I have a scar on my leg where I fell off a swing at a party one August day when I was four. I can still remember that tumble, the gash on my thigh, and the bloody mess on my party dress. I remember wanting my Mum and searching for her through all the grown-ups who seemed to be running to pick me up. But Mum was in a bloody mess all of her own back at the hospital, where my sister was making her way into the world. Rosalind arrived plump, hungry and prepared to shout about it. The anxieties that had hung over her existence all the months she had been growing, unknown in the womb, dissipated: there was no evidence of spina bifida nor any other disability.

  And so we were three. Three Jepson children welcomed into the warm embrace of two go-getter parents who had once had plans to live far away and make their small change for good in the world. In the cocoon of the Emmanuel Church family we grew and listened and duly took on the assurances that there was an even bigger love than that of our parents. We added our little voices to the song, making our theological assent that, “Jesus loves us this we know, for the Bible tells us so”.

  We listened to the story of Jesus’ baptism in a river and how the skies were torn open and a dove descended upon him while a voice was heard from the heavens declaring that Jesus was God’s beloved and pleasing son. We listened to the story and imagined what it looked like to see the skies ripped apart and wondered whether you could see God’s face as he held the clouds back and boomed his affirmation and love. We looked at the photos of our baptisms and saw the water dripping off our tiny heads, and we listened as we were told that we too are loved by God and called His children. I nodded and wondered why the church roof was not ripped in two where God was supposed to have leaned in to make His baptismal declaration of love and delight over us.

  We accepted the news that we were loved ultimately by God, but there was no way to compute how it could be bigger than Mum and Dad’s because there was just love.

  Until, each in our own time, we discovered there wasn’t.

  There wasn’t just love, there was judgement and, as we walked home from school one day, there was the cruelty of a boy whose face contorted and mouth opened, hurling its disgust upon Alastair, the spit shattering on the pavement as it landed by his feet.

  Feeling sick and furious I walked Ali home and recounted what had happened to Mum who listened quietly, all the time making our afternoon snack, as if she’d been preparing for this conversation for a long time. Without any grief or indignation she calmly explained that Alastair would get reactions like this from people; that, despite my incredulity, other people would fear him because he’s different. The only indication for this so far was that he went to a different school from Rosalind and me. And so she patiently explained that his face, his features, those tiny ears and eyes uplifted at the corners would provoke name-calling, taunts and teasing from people who didn’t know how to respond to him in any other way.

  I don’t realize yet that the sound of God’s love breaking through the skies and the holy water running over his brow like the tender touch of a father�
�s hand will be drowned out by the burden of labels like “Down syndrome” and “mongoloid” and “handicapped”.

  And so we begin our exile from the Eden of our parents’ unconditional love, ushered out by the sounds of unheavenly judgements. It will be years before we rediscover those words spoken over Jesus at his baptism and come to realize once more that they are for us too, and that they cannot be unsaid by any accusations or embellished by our attempts to be good.

  3

  Exile

  The cataclysmic fall-out from those nibbles of the forbidden fruit, the realization that we are naked and exiled from the Garden, sends tremors through every aspect of our life, from uncomprehending spouses to fear about the future, from Seasonal Affective Disorder to a disappointing glance in the mirror. It assaults us in whopping collisions of our will with that of another’s; it drenches us in downpours of disappointment from which we find no cover; or disorients us with the news that we are not as safe in life as we first thought we were. It announces itself in the spit of an angry boy who needs to launch his misplaced disgust upon a child with differently slanted features. And I remember when news of my own exile was delivered to me in a very particular way.

  It was our final term at junior school when Rachel Humsley, a girl in my class, approached my desk and leaned in to enquire whether I was going to have braces. I’d assumed everyone had braces. As far as I knew it was a rite of passage once you reached secondary school. We all read books where teenagers have braces and hate it, and we figured out that those characters were created to make all of those real teenagers with a mouthful of metal feel less sad and lonely. So yes, I suppose I would have braces.

  “Because you would be pretty if it wasn’t for your teeth.”

  This was disquieting news. Like I had just been entered into a category of a contest I hadn’t realized I was meant to be practising for. I hadn’t realized that being pretty was something that would have to matter to me. But now I was being told, matter of factly and without spite, that I was in the race and I wondered what this would mean for me. Within months I discovered.