Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Pandora opened the box.
Whether you consult the Bible or dig into Greek mythology, the defining story about the first God-created woman reveals the nature of human curiosity. She is hungry for knowledge. She yearns to experience the fullness of life. She risks certain punishment for the opportunity to awaken to a new and broader understanding of who she is. Eat the fruit and die. Open the box and release all the evils of the world. But the promise of more seemed somehow worth it. That’s what makes the Eve and Pandora archetypes both exhilarating and dangerous.
Eve exhibits intense leading-character energy in the story of God’s creation. But how we perceive her may reveal more about us than about her. Is Eve a fascinating partner or a devious temptress? The gateway to knowledge or the cause of the fall? Does she awaken humankind to sentience or expel us from the garden in shame? Suppose we are meant, through these stories, to understand curiosity as something innate, a gift bestowed upon us from the very beginning of human awareness. In that case, we need to quit gaslighting ourselves with the idea that Eve was the curse of all things feminine. And we owe our thanks to Pandora for the promise of hope she released from the bottom of the box.
So one might ask, Why have these tales become cautionary? Why are these women scandalized for acting on their curiosity?
I suspect it’s because curiosity raises questions. Specifically, when we start asking questions about what constitutes good or evil, we might accidentally (or on purpose) raise doubts about who is truly culpable for perpetuating evil in this world. A feminine archetype is easier to blame when we want to blur the lines or bury the truth. Point a finger toward Eve’s naughtiness, and all other women become guilty by proxy. Make her the reason why we need a dominant authority figure to quelch curiosity and exert control over the masses — these authorities being historically and typically, but not exclusively, male rulers, priests and patriarchs. We need that figurehead of church or state to help us tell right from wrong, don’t we?
But what if, instead, Eve’s story gives us the permission we need to tap into our own curiosity? Because of her, we understand the difference between good and evil. We, too, have ingested it and digested it through the wisdom of our bodies. That, my friends, feels like power. That wisdom confers so much power that God tells the garden-dwellers that it will be deadly. Perhaps we are given that moral to ponder because the power to know right from wrong, if located in the hands of “just anybody,” feels dangerous to those who want superior power that is concentrated at the top of the hierarchy to be used for manipulative purposes. Those who wish to suppress individual curiosity in favor of blind obedience have successfully made this spiritual gift feel like a dangerous burden.
Those who wish to suppress individual curiosity in favor of blind obedience have successfully made this spiritual gift feel like a dangerous burden.
Curiosity as a spiritual gift
To understand curiosity’s role as a spiritual gift, we first must notice just how often others try to cut us off from our own embrace of curiosity as a pathway to spiritual transformation.
Want to know exactly how easy it is to cut off curiosity?
You will recognize the effort in such prolific statements as:
- “We’ve always done it that way.”
- “They are always like that.”
- “The Bible says … ” (followed by a Scripture
verse or belief about what the Bible says, as a discussion ender).
“Always” and “never” statements are meant not to be questioned. They are meant to stand as the truth, but they are actually stand-ins for the truth. The presumptive moral of Eve’s story tells us that a high price will be paid for evolving and seeking knowledge and clarity about who we are meant to be in this world. When we appear to seek the knowledge only a god should have, then a jealous god (or representative thereof) could strike us dead. Those who would shut us up or shame us into submission want us to remember that part. This kind of backlash against the rise of a curious mind fosters both shame and insecurity. It causes us to fear for our own mortality. Nevertheless, Eve’s origin story also serves a purpose as a mythological explanation of our induction into the cognitive capacity of humanity. It explains the highs and lows brought about by human inquisitiveness!
Guess what, you large-brained, storytelling humans? Thanks to Eve’s hunger for knowledge, you now know both your amazing capacity for goodness and the depth of your capacity for depravity. That knowledge button cannot be unpressed, whether we live in a time when curiosity is encouraged and permitted to flourish or a time when curiosity is discouraged by shaming those who are intelligent, creative or imaginative. Curiosity is a gift, one that is passed on to us through the astounding biology of cognitive capacity. But especially in times when questioning institutional power is frowned upon, fostering that curiosity throughout our life requires our intention to increase spiritual mastery. As Eve might remind us, curiosity is not a particularly good fit for the timid. Staying curious requires an open heart for seeking the good, and an open mind for questioning every ossified assumption.
Curiosity and discernment
When it comes to curiosity as a spiritual gift, we often describe the spiritual part as discernment. Curious seekers want to know … Can we recognize good from evil in our increasingly complex world? How will we gather the right information to make good choices? Do we accept things as they are, or do we seek to co-create with God the world as it should be? We ask questions about our lives: who we want to be, how we should love our neighbor and how our decisions might please God.
Curious seekers want to know … Can we recognize good from evil in our increasingly complex world?
Ignatius of Loyola, the saint who became known for encouraging a daily practice of self-examination, taught what people might now see as a peculiar method of discernment. With time and practice, I’ve come to love it. Ignatius led devoted Christian practitioners to hold every choice lightly, bringing a healthy dose of indifference to any outcome.
The Ignatian approach sounds silly and counterintuitive in today’s “the future is what you make it” culture. It may even sound disturbingly easy — until one tries to do it. We have many assumptions about how much control we have over any given situation, and most of our assumptions have become hard around the edges. If I work toward my goals, I will achieve them. If I have academic degrees and mastery of multiple skills, I will be rewarded. If I market myself in just the right way, I will be successful. If I eat healthy food and exercise, I will never get old or sick.
Oh, how I have loved those assumptions! Until they didn’t work. I started to understand how little control I have over my place in the social order or my success or my health. Our story is Job’s story — unraveled. Everything you’ve ever received or foolishly thought you earned could be lost in the blink of an eye, and you can do nothing about such an unexpected loss.
Therefore, Ignatius taught lightness of being, inquisitiveness, spiritual surrender, holy indifference. That right there offers a lifetime spiritual practice — to care far less about the things we are conditioned to care about the most.
In his 2012 book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life, James Martin, a contemporary Jesuit interpreter of Ignatian spirituality, identifies four things that most Jesuits would agree upon as characterizing Ignatius’s spiritual teaching: “finding God in all things, becoming a contemplative in action, looking at the world in an incarnational way, seeking freedom and detachment.” The Jesuits, formally called the Society of Jesus, discern this spiritual path by looking less to Christian institutions’ doctrinal assertions and political self-interests and relying more on the life of Jesus to guide the Christian follower.
Jesus loved the questions. And oddly – given how he is often represented today – when people came to him for answers, Jesus encouraged them to reach their own conclusions. He rarely gave a straight answer to anything. Instead, he opened hearts; he opened minds. He affirmed the gift of curiosity with so much of his preaching and teaching style.
Martin’s four marks of Ignatian spirituality get at what a Jesus-focused spiritual practice and lifelong pursuit of curiosity could look like.
I find them familiar enough that one can model a Reformed spirituality of curiosity along the same lines.
1. Finding God in all things. Like the Jesuits, Presbyterians are also known as a scientifically curious bunch. We believe that discovering knowledge about our natural world will simultaneously yield knowledge about the Creator of our world. When we explore nature – looking through microscopes and telescopes, seeking understanding about everything from the tiniest detail to the vastest parts of the universe – we wonder, and we become awestruck by the knowledge we discover from the earth to the stars.
When we study animals, we tend to learn that they are smarter than we give them credit for. When we study plants and fungi, we encounter communities of interdependence that remind us of our own interconnectedness. The priestly account of Genesis, Chapter 1, poetically describes an orderly vision of creation — but it’s also fruitful to get out of those pages and look around. Encourage your spiritual intuition! Know that God can be found in all things. Staying curious allows us to grow. Old information is replaced by the new. Our understanding of the world doesn’t match the world as humans conceptualized it 6,000 years ago, or 2,000 years ago, or even 20 years ago. Nearly all the wisdom we possess comes from knowledge of God and ourselves. (Thanks, Calvin, for that spectacular intro!)
2. Becoming a contemplative in action. Find time for prayer, but don’t quit your day job! The Reformers were known as such precisely because they led the charge for change.
Change is hard. We’d like to think we were done with that change already – we’ve reached the end, we’ve done enough – but there is never an “enough” when it comes to compassion and justice. We must stay diligently curious about what could be, about how the world could be even just 1% better. Our thoughts and prayers are meant to lead us to plans and actions. Nothing changes if we keep saying, “We’ve never done it that way,” or “That’s the way it’s always been.” Here those hardened assumptions need to get unstuck and more pliable for us to try things differently. May we be blessed with just enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this old world, so we will do those things others say cannot be done!
We must stay diligently curious about what could be, about how the world could be even just 1% better. Our thoughts and prayers are meant to lead us to plans and actions.
3. Looking at the world in an incarnational way. As Martin explains, holding an incarnational spirituality means that God is not just “out there” but also “right here.” God is fundamentally in everything we are experiencing in this moment. This presence means that each of our unique lives is known and loved in the heart of the Divine. God gives us not only permission but encouragement to seek understanding of ourselves. Questions that might look selfish to some are fundamentally the curious questions we are invited to ask ourselves daily through self-examination. Who am I? Where can I make the most difference? How do I bring my best self into all my relationships?
Whether you do this work through conversation with a trusted friend, spiritual counsel or life partner, or through your own practice of journaling or meditation, getting to know your best self takes a curious spirit of self-assessment that can lead you toward growth and spiritual maturity. It takes a lot of curiosity and courage to redirect our path when you know you have acted wrongly, and it takes a lot of curiosity and humility to be proud of who you are becoming — knowing that the path toward spiritual transformation is a never-ending journey.
4. Seeking freedom and detachment. Previously I mentioned the practice of indifference, which frees us to know what is within our control even when we disconcertingly discover how much is outside of our control.
When you know that you cannot make the world’s powers and principalities behave the way you want them to, you are free to claim the absolute sovereignty of the Divine over it all, and I mean all. You don’t have to like it, and I’m not offering you permission to claim that God likes how it’s going. But the Reformed concept of God’s providence helps us live in the reality that is — even when the current time period is not our favorite, and we wish we’d been born in another time period, thank you very much. We worship the God who is and was and ever shall be, right? So breathe a little, and let the outcomes fall where they may. Such indifference is hard to cultivate; but those who embrace holy detachment toward what’s coming next may have a strong advantage when it comes to hope.
The gift of hope
Yes, hope: the last thing to show up in Pandora’s unboxing video. Hope is the blessed gift we receive for cultivating our curiosity. When we become less attached to things and outcomes and especially certainty about our own correctness, then we can be surprised, delighted or inspired by what the Spirit is doing next. She is rather unpredictable!
When we follow Jesus, we throw our lot in with curiosity. How can you love your enemy until you’ve become curious about their life? How can you pray for those who persecute you unless you wonder what hurt them so deeply that they choose to hurt others?
For our innate human curiosity to serve us well, it must become a lifelong endeavor of caring enough about our world, our neighbor and ourselves to pursue the interesting questions and be genuinely surprised by the answers that the Spirit continues to reveal.
To love without condition means that we must open our hearts and minds more and more. To differentiate between good and evil requires great understanding about complex social, economic and relational situations. We cannot get there on assumptions alone. The spiritual insights of Ignatius are not new. They come from Jesus and from the prophets before Jesus and from the stories of human inquisitiveness that were told long before the prophets. For our innate human curiosity to serve us well, it must become a lifelong endeavor of caring enough about our world, our neighbor and ourselves to pursue the interesting questions and be genuinely surprised by the answers that the Spirit continues to reveal. Our conscious engagement with the questions is the garden’s gateway to spiritual transformation and renewal.
