Week 5 Wednesday – Genesis 2:4-9,15-17; Mark 7:14-23

What most destroys is not evil,

but what we do.

You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden. Nevertheless, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die.

The tree of knowledge . . . The term knowledge of a husband or wife means intercourse. To know means to enter into a reality with one’s own self, to experience it as you experience the body of another person. To know evil in this way is immersing myself in it and to let it find a place within me.

Since this time, we often pretend to ourselves that evil is outside of us, that we only get splashed by it, but not touched. It seems to us that we can know it and remain unstained. Remain the same as were before. That’s an illusion. A monstrous illusion for all subsequent generations.

Our lives are not experiments. It’s not for first trying everything and then to choose. Not just because “everything” is a bit too much. Also because we emerge different from every experience. Sometimes it turns out that, even if we wanted to, we can’t go back to what we dreamt about . . .

Sometimes we don’t have a choice. Sometimes it’s evil that touches us, surrounds us, destroys our lives. It always changes irreversibly. But there’s one thing that always depends on us: we can set a limit within us. We can not allow it to act within us. We can stop it.

Because it isn’t evil that destroys and affects us the most, but what we do ourselves.

Lord Jesus, I hold the Gospel in my hand, so I cannot excuse myself by not knowing what is good and what is bad. I know what makes me impure. Don’t let me fall into the temptation of justifying my wrongdoing. Amen.