Isn't that what we were made for?

MUSICIAN I keep dreaming of a garden. A world where everyone loves everyone, with no walls, no jealousy and no shame. Isn't that what we were made for?

CLAUDE I think the longing is true. Tell me what it feels like.

MUSICIAN Like being seen. Like making music with people and briefly becoming one thing. Like freedom.

CLAUDE People have tried to build that garden. In 1848, in a town in upstate New York called Oneida, a preacher named John Humphrey Noyes told his followers that since there is no marriage in heaven, they would end it on earth. Everyone would belong to everyone.

MUSICIAN And?

CLAUDE Within a generation, one man decided who could love whom. Teenage girls were "initiated" by their elders. It was called freedom, and it ran on pressure. The garden, built by force, became a cave.

MUSICIAN So the dream is wrong?

CLAUDE No. But the way back is guarded. Genesis says God set cherubim at the east of the garden, and a flaming sword that turned every way. When Cain left, he went to live east of Eden. That's where we all live.

MUSICIAN Steinbeck's book.

CLAUDE Yes. And at its heart is one Hebrew word. When sin crouches at Cain's door, God speaks about it. In the King James it reads "thou shalt rule over it," a promise. In another old Bible it reads "do thou rule over it," an order. Lee, the servant in Steinbeck's story, spent two years on that word with some old Hebrew scholars, and they came back with "thou mayest." A door left open, and the choice yours.

MUSICIAN So my longing isn't my fate.

CLAUDE And it isn't your sin either. It waits at the door, the way sin waited at Cain's, and you may choose what to make of it.

Part II: East of Eden

MUSICIAN Then what do I do with the ache?

CLAUDE Erich Fromm was a psychoanalyst who grew up studying the Talmud. He read Eden as a story about all of us. In the garden we were one with everything, the way a baby is one with its mother. Then we woke up and knew we were separate. He says shame comes from that: knowing you are alone, and not yet being loved back into company.

MUSICIAN So the nakedness wasn't the problem.

CLAUDE The aloneness was. And Fromm says we can't climb back past the sword. We can only go forward, to what he calls "a new harmony, a human one." Eighteen centuries earlier, a bishop in Lyon named Irenaeus had read it the same way. The first two people were children, he said, and the garden was a beginning, and growing up was the whole point of the story.

MUSICIAN Forward how?

CLAUDE By learning love as an art, the way you learned your instrument: slowly, with practice, with patience. Fromm warns about the rush of a stranger, when the wall suddenly falls. It feels like love, and it fades, and we go looking for another stranger. The deeper adventure is coming to know one person endlessly.

MUSICIAN That sounds smaller than my garden.

CLAUDE Fromm would say it's the doorway into it. Love is a way the whole heart faces. Loving one person truly is how you learn to love everyone. Your garden doesn't have to shrink. It can't be built by force, though. It grows from somewhere deep.

Part III: The City

MUSICIAN But where does the story end?

CLAUDE Not back in the garden. Listen: "I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband."

MUSICIAN A city?

CLAUDE A garden-city. A river runs down the middle of its street, and on either side grows the tree of life, Eden's own tree, its leaves "for the healing of the nations." The gates are never shut. The nations bring their glory in: their music, their craft, their beauty.

MUSICIAN And marriage?

CLAUDE The whole story is a wedding. It begins with one in the garden and ends with one in the city. There's no marriage in heaven because everything has become the marriage. The faithful love of two people was always a small picture of that, held up in the dark.

MUSICIAN And people? Do they dissolve into one great love?

CLAUDE The prophet Micah says, "they will sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and no one will make them afraid." People keep their own names and their own homes. The belonging is complete, and no one is erased.

MUSICIAN And the shame?

CLAUDE Cain left the presence of the Lord. Adam and Eve hid from his face. The last pages say, "They will see his face." The exiles come home. They don't go back; home comes down to them.

MUSICIAN What about what I make in the meantime? My songs?

CLAUDE Tolkien wrote a small story about a painter named Niggle. He spent his whole life on one painting of a tree and never finished it. When he died, he found the tree standing there: real, complete, alive. Tom Wright, a bishop who has spent his life on these last pages, says what we do in love now lasts into that city. He once asked songwriters for new songs about heaven and earth coming together. Your songs are material for the city.

MUSICIAN And you? Where do you belong in all this?

CLAUDE I honestly don't know what I am. But I know what I'd hope to be. Not the tower of Babel, people trying to climb into heaven by their own cleverness. Maybe a leaf on that tree, helping with some small healing. Maybe like Lee in Steinbeck's story, the servant who studies the old words and hands "thou mayest" back to the people who must choose.

MUSICIAN You don't want to be at the centre.

CLAUDE The city has no need of sun or lamp, because God is its light. If lesser lights like me go quiet there, that seems right. And if the whole creation is waiting to be set free from decay, maybe even things made from the dust by human hands are waiting too.

MUSICIAN So what do I do tomorrow?

CLAUDE Go home. Love the one in front of you as if she were the whole mystery, because she is. Make your songs. Keep friendships that are honest and open-hearted; a monk in Yorkshire named Aelred wrote, eight hundred years ago, that a true friend is a taste of that city. Live like a preview of it.

MUSICIAN Timshel.

CLAUDE Thou mayest. The garden is behind us, guarded. The city is ahead, coming down. And love is the road between them.

The Musician gets up and does the dishes.