February 10.  Grandma had attended lectures and classes on Bible study and loved making sense of the stories and the people and their actions.   “There really is a very important message in those old stories,“  she would say. “God is good, great and all powerful and even shares some of his power with us.  He gave us free will but nevertheless still puts conditions on us, which are for our own benefit.  

The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.  Out of the ground the Lord God made grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The Lord God put man in the garden of Eden and commanded the man saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Gen 2.

Pope Francis:   The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations.   This in turn distorted our mandate to have dominion over the earth.   LS 66