Voice of God...

In the beginning...

She didn't speak of it.  She never spoke of it.  She couldn't...

The day that changed everything, that changed humanity forever, right from the beginning, when Eve spoke with the serpent, who convinced her to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she was shown...everything.

She felt instant shame.  That was what God had wanted her, and Adam, and humanity, to avoid.  To remain eternally...innocent.  Innocent wasn't the same as pure.  Innocent meant to be free of the burden.  The serpent had attempted to be cunning, to convince her that God had meant to coddle them, to keep them docile.  But Eve had lived in Eden.  She had seen everything there was to see.  She simply hadn't understood...

He had shown her everything.  In fact, in his pride he really had...and it had nearly overwhelmed her.  He had shown her everything possible.  He had shown her...everything.  What had so blinded the serpent was that it had seen everything, too, and it hadn't understood.  It had blinded itself, perhaps, or perhaps it had been incapable of such comprehension, such things.  She had, though.  Oh.  

She had been second.  For a very brief moment, Adam had been alone, and then God had decided there should be more, that Adam needed a companion, and so he had drawn Eve from out of him, and...Without the serpent, perhaps, even then, humanity would have run its course.  The serpent showed Eve such a potential, and perhaps, in all the possibilities, it had shown her lies, because, of course, all possibilities are lies, and the serpent didn't know that, had believed its imagination spoke truth, and that was a kind of truth, if it had imagined with wisdom, so of course it had not.  Only what happened was true, and only one course was true, and in its folly, the serpent had shown Eve not only possibilities, but the future, the one true course, and it had shown her...

A manger, and a man and a woman, somewhere down the course of history, what, in the beginning, would have seemed magic, impossible, what to God was simply another quirk of existence, what to the serpent was folly, and to Eve, capable of being grasped, at least for a moment, a fleeting glimpse, and a baby...

What child was this?  

Later, Eve very much wanted to explain all of this to Adam.  Surely not in the moment, not when Adam felt shame, not when God spoke to them, banished them from the garden, when they had lost all their innocence...

And what was that?  What was this thing they now had to fill their days attempting to contend with, to understand?  

The knowledge that they had to worry about consequences...That they could choose to ignore them, to be crippled by them, or to use them as guideposts...And who was that child?  God, as Adam never failed to remind them, was no longer a step away.  He was an eternity.  They were cut off forever.  Or, perhaps, not.  Eve, in the very back of her mind, saw the thread.  She saw her children, she saw the murder, she saw the communities of mankind, she saw the struggles forward, the denials, the betrayals, the...hope.  Not for what they would someday have again, if they were good.  What they might have, if they chose to do good, what it might mean in their everyday life.  

It wouldn't be easy.  They would certainly need guideposts.  In her moment of weakness, Eve had already proven that.  Too easy to be led astray.  But her moment of weakness had shown her, as would always be true, what strength could look like.  

The child she saw was God, and the clarity that what they'd lost...They could reclaim.  Not like before.  They would have to rely on...faith.  Not faith to make their lives better, as if through magic.  Faith, so that they could navigate the guideposts, make the right choices.  Had she made the wrong one?  God had already seen it.  He had seen everything.  The child had already been born, since He was God, and even before His birth had been in existence...And Eve had seen that, too.  She had seen Evil, and she had, surely, seen Good...Evil, the chance to use her thoughts for selfish reasons, Good the chance to...

In the days after the expulsion, she kept all these things to herself.  Adam forgave her, and they made a family, and in the years that followed, when they had understood death, she wondered about...pride.  If she would be...remembered.  If she would be condemned, if she would be understood...

She supposed it didn't matter.  She had glimpsed a new beginning, somewhere very close to the beginning, and also very much in the middle of a drop in the vast expanse of eternity...A light in the darkness.