December 9th, 2024
“I heard you in the garden,” said Adam to God, “but I was afraid.”
This verse gave birth to one of the first poems I ever wrote, this verse and the one immediately preceding it: “[Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in the garden” (Genesis 3:8). I was an anxious teenager with a fragile newborn piety, and like Adam, I was terrified by the idea of that sound. I wondered if it marked the moment when creation, not man alone, fell. If that sound was the first-ever bad weather, the first natural disaster, the first mark our brokenness made on the wind and breeze. If that sound was why we have hurricanes now. If it was an angry, punishing sound.
That poem has vanished with the long-lost Tumblr on which it once lived, and with it, blessedly, the fear. I am now blessed to know the sound of someone I love walking. When a sister walks into the chapel behind me, I know who it is without having to turn around. We live in intimate silence, and we know the sound of each other’s shoes, the pace, the quirks. I know the sound of someone I love walking, and it isn’t a fearsome sound at all.
It breaks my heart that Adam and Eve should have fled the sound of one they loved walking. What a beautiful sound it must have been. It is hard not to love the Lord God just thinking about it. The God who made wind and sea, galaxy and cosmos, just wanted to take a walk in the garden. This tender God, who when he takes the form of one who can walk about in a garden, looks very much like a son of man, like a son of Mary.
That is our whole calling in life, to give the Lord God that little joy of walking among us again. To be, like Mary, one who tends the life of Christ within her and makes haste to walk beyond the garden, through the mountains and villages, to share him with others. Mary may have been troubled at what was said to her, but not at the sound of God’s messenger walking up to her in the garden. I think she, like all women in love, knew and welcomed that sound of the Lord’s approach. I do too.
Today I give thanks for the Lord God who “called to the man and asked him, Where are you?” Not for the last time, God’s Word reached out across our fear and found us in our hiding place. Do not be afraid when he approaches. It is the sound of one you love walking.
Catherine Addington is a novice with the Daughters of St. Paul, a religious congregation devoted to communicating Christ through modern media. She writes from Boston, MA.